I tweeted earlier today that Tameside Council in the UK is closing their Second Life island. I can understand this, especially given the dire state of our public finances. When you consider the reality, SL is probably not the most effective way for a regional council to talk to its citizens.
This brings me to a point I’ve been pondering, it’s not just councils. Why do real life (RL) companies often fail in Second Life ( SL)?
Firstly, I think that a company can fail by not becoming part of the community. SL is not something that can be run in the same way as a corporate website, it requires an engagement with the community, especially if you plan on running a successful business presence.
Secondly, the kinds of products that are successful in SL are not the same as in RL. Yes, Coca Cola and various other companies jumped inworld. But let’s be honest, anybody who wants to drink Coke probably already does. If they don’t then a virtual world is possibly not going to convince them. A car company can offer virtual, drivable versions of its products, which may help RL sales, but whether it will be worth the trouble is questionable at best. IBM seem to be doing quite well in there, but then they are a different kind of company to Coca Cola or a large auto maker.
Thirdly, there are a lot of residents who can and will be very well positioned to compete with RL companies. These residents already have their own established brands, do the job at least as well and tick the community box already.
As a closing remark, I will observe that the companies that prosper bring something to the mix. SL is not just a billboard, not a static website. It’s a dynamic and vibrant virtual ecosystem and economy, thinking you can just walk in and posture is (in this writer’s view) a guaranteed recipe for failure.
I admire their originality of thinking, not too many councils are that creative and I wish a few more would let their imaginations loose to the benefit of their population. Why this failed will be hard to assess, for me at any rate, as I don’t have information about the kind of market research and public involvement they had prior to setting it up. I do know about the failures though which, as you’ve described, showed a naive understanding (or optimism) about what SL could do. It isn’t just a new sort of website. Nor is it exactly a game. For business, science or enterprise to make it work, there has to be a pretty clear analysis of what it will do that, uniquely, can not be done in real life. We’re finding quite a lot of potential but, as researchers, we have to justify every last detail to our funders who are well used to picking over research applications and ferreting out the flaws. If we get something to SL, it’s because there is no other way, or no other cost effective way, to do what we need to do in the interests of health benefits. Rather concentrates the mind and perhaps there just weren’t enough savvy scrutineers in Tameside council.
Spending GBP 36,000 on an SL presence that nobody used is nothing if not “original”.
Thanks for your comments, both. It would have been more beneficial, perhaps, to have turned the work over to local students rather than highly paid consultants. That way it could have counted towards their degrees.
Maybe have gotten SL residents from their county to get involved, thus bringing in the SL community, but local council services are for RL residents and I can’t help thinking that while there are certainly good uses for SL, this island wasn’t the positive example we needed.
I wish I could have seen it. I like the principle and, a while ago, had the amusing experience of navigating in real life an unfamiliar campus that I’d visited in SL. It worked!
RE: The cost.
I’m a social media expert who specializes in virtual world design. I took a look at the documents unveiled by the Freedom of Information request. Out of the 37,000 pounds, only 17,000 actually went to the “highly paid consultants”. And of that money, this included the cost of the hardware and maintenance, which for a year (given exchange rates) is around another 3000 pounds. Of the remaining money, it included yearly maintenance, web integration, and so on.
I don’t exactly know how many hours of work 14,000 pounds buys, but if this were a standard web development project, I imagine that *might* buy a couple of months of web development work.
Frankly, the consultants weren’t highly paid at all.
As to why it failed, it looks as though no one did any metrics tracking to actually see how many people came. Also, I did not see any sort of budgeting in the Freedom of Information request including public outreach or advertisement of the virtual Tameside utility. I think that’s pretty clear.
The 14k being expensive depends on the actual hours worked by said consultants. If those guys were underpaid hourly, given the track record of the UK public sector, then I’d be amazed! I still firmly believe that using SL for a job like this was using the wrong tool for the job.
That would never have got past sifting in a research application. That’s where the wastefulness comes in – the absence of metrics, PI, and marketing. Seems no one really knew what it would do or if anyone would make use of it. Sadly, it isn’t that unusual to see half baked ideas put into operation at the drop of someone else’s hat. Our local council has put in a cycle lane along a one-way street – going the opposite way to the traffic so when you turn right out of a side road, looking left to avoid the trucks, you can splatter cyclists across your bonnet as they come bowling downhill hidden from view by the parked cars! Councils, dontcha just love ‘em!
Yeah, I’ve seen cycle lanes that stop halfway along a street, crazy stuff.
Public sector IT does tend to have a bad rep. It all makes me wonder how much time they spent actually inworld before deciding to jump in with both feet, after all missing something as basic as visitor metrics?