The report compares player engagement in some of Second Life's most successful user-generated areas with some ambitious corporate-sponsored efforts in Second Life.
"Corporate vs. Amateur Efforts in Second Life"
By Jeffrey Bardzell, Ph.D., Shaowen Bardzell, Ph.D., and Tyler Pace
OTOinsights, the research arm of One to One Interactive, has released its first t=zero report, entitled ‘Serious Games for Marketing,’ available for free download .
The study set out to find how the top 10 user-generated builds in SecondLife compared with the top 10 corporate builds. In making these evaluations, attention was paid to production quality, publicity and advertising, social infrastructure, role of commerce and population density. Based on their findings, the t=zero team offers five insights for the design of future branding and marketing-oriented builds in virtual worlds.
"OTOinsight’s t=zero initiative is an industry-academic collaborative research project between One to One Interactive and Indiana University’s School of Informatics.
Their objective is to determine useful measures of user engagement and experience with digital and social media" said Jeremi Karnell, Co-Founder and President of One to One Interactive.
"Our first publication, is meant to take a step back and objectively evaluate what worked and did not work in the rush to establish early footholds in Virtual World spaces. Our hope is that these findings will help guide future efforts as we see new entrants and innovations in that space."
The team of OTOinsights researchers led by Shaowen Bardzell, Ph.D., Jeffrey Bardzell, PH.D., and Tyler Pace, specializes in cultural computing in computer-mediated social spaces such as video games, massively multiplayer virtual worlds and social networks.
Upcoming t=zero research topics will include: Engagement with In-Game Advertising, Affective Interaction with Internet Video, Making Player Engagement Visible (A Multimodal Strategy for Game Experience Research), Mobile Content Engagement and Successful Disaggregated Media Applications on Social Networking Sites.
About OTOInsights
OTOinsights is a collection of primary and secondary research offerings that is breaking new ground in neuromarketing to offer clients advanced and scientific levels of insights into how consumers engage with their brands across the landscape of new media channels. OTOinsights is comprised of t=zero and Quantemo. t=zero is OTOinsights’ secondary research offering that focuses on the emerging media platforms and trends which are changing society’s media consumption habits. Quantemo is a primary research lab that takes a scientific approach to measuring a target audience’s emotional reactions to digital media to establish measures of engagement.
About One to One Interactive
Complete One-To-One Solutions for Brands, Agencies, and Publishers
Established in 1997, One to One Interactive assembles solutions for brands, agencies, and publishers executing one-to-one marketing strategies. By bringing together a leading digital marketing agency, a most comprehensive portfolio of permission marketing platforms, unique performance based social media networks, and cutting edge neuromarketing research techniques, One to One Interactive builds informed and creative customer/constituent strategies on the belief that digital media’s ability to enable engaging one-to-one dialogues is the future of marketing.