• "Want to lose one million more jobs?  Just keep talking."

The ad is by the U.S. Travel Association and promotes the website Meetings Mean Business.

This ad really resonates with me.  Business is best achieved by in-person conversations, not email, not web meetings, and definitely not Second Life.  I preach this at our company often as our CEO.  In the age of BlackBerrys, iPhones, and Android, you have to struggle to remember that relationships are fostered in-person.  Most communication should occur that way, especially within a company.  Email is best for mass-distribution messages or very quick yes/no responses.  I would use IM over email any day of the week for a real-time conversation.  Even Facebook messenger is better than email, for the simple reason of having my face and the recipient's face IN the message, making it more personal.  The problem with many executive teams and CEOs is a lack of humility, and it is simply harder to be a jerk in person.  Email masks many cultural problems.

I remember watching Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, on CNBC while he was at the World Economic Forum in Davos.  I remember him ranting about his fellow CEOs of financial services companies not being there.  Being "in the bunker" instead.  Not doing their part to get their companies back on track, with the impact their CEOs could have at such an important event.  I couldn't agree with him more.  Don't be in the bunker. Business gets done in person. As Andy Grove wrote in one of my favorites, High-Output Management, meetings are the medium of management.

I understand how tough the economy is, but those that didn't show at Shop.org's Strategy & Innovation Forum, where attendance was way down as compared to last year's event, really missed out.  We had our best content ever (I serve on the Board of Directors and was very proud of how educational the content was this year).  At least you can read the blog entries.

I hope to see you at our Summit this April in Austin.  It is our single best training event of the year.  You will make far more impact in your company as a result of attending it, and the little money you spend on travel to attend will be an afterthought as a result.  Executives last year told me that it was the most actionable conference they attended all year.

And here's Jamie Dimon on the economy.  I think he's the real deal, and I'm listening to his interviews carefully:

Click here to view the embedded video.

But recently Second Life is taking a beating.  Check out these recent articles in Time and Wired.  Even though many corporations have rushed in to grab their own virtual real estate, it turns out that not that many people are there to shop.  They are primarily there to gamble and have sex, and this shouldn't be surprising.  Many of the first businesses on the Internet were about gambling and sex.  It's the early-adopter syndrome in a medium that let's you hide your real identity and pretend to be someone else.

To be clear, I am bullish on the 3D-Web long-term.  There is no doubt that as virtual reality becomes more real and accessible to the masses, as opposed to the clunky and odd experience of Second Life today, virtual shopping will take off.  When Internet Explorer and Firefox embed 3D-Web browsers into their 2D-browsers, that may mark the tipping point.  I am also confident that this is going to take many years – at least as counted in "Internet time".  In other words, I'm talking about 3-5 years.

The 3D-Web will provide a more tactile experience than today's Web, and online shopping will blossom.  Our company has shown the potential of a more tactile experience – customer reviews allow peers to "touch and feel" a product sold online, and sales significantly increase with a corresponding reduction in returns (as customers expectations are set by each other, the element of negative surprise is reduced).  Feel free to ask us about our over 20 case studies to learn more.

Until then, I'll be watching Second Life to see how it evolves.  But I don't expect much in the near-term, to be frank.  Once a medium is hyped to the extreme and then has a counterbalancing crash in popularity, it takes years to recover.  I'm not sure that Second Life will get a second life – the word of mouth is already too negative and the community is tainted.  But there will be many 3D-Web efforts to follow…

Update 9/8:
TechCrunch reports that ICANN's CEO, Paul Twomey, keynotes at a conference with the message that virtual worlds are the future of global commerce.  William Gibson, one of my favorite authors and the inventor of the word and concept of "cyberspace", would be proud.

It is always dangerous to make any conclusions based on only your own behavior.  You need to look no further than the failure of Webvan, which raised $1 billion based on the premise that everyone in the U.S. was like San Franciscans.  But I still find it fascinating that I am more compelled to write about people than products.  Perhaps it is the nature of my job or personality type.  Or perhaps most of us talk more about people (i.e., generating more word of mouth) than products in everyday life.  Let’s not forget how many Americans voted on the last American Idol (74 million in the last round).

In a previous post, I gave the three reasons why I believe consumers write reviews: 1. ego, 2. social connection, and 3. good karma.  But these three rules may be slightly different when writing reviews on people.  The majority of reviews I have written on people have been on LinkedIn.  LinkedIn recently reached a tipping point, as you may have noticed from the increased number of "let's-connect" invitations that you have been receiving.  The network effect is kicking in (more on that subject in the brilliant book Information Rules), just as it has for eBay, Amazon.com, MySpace, Facebook, Second Life, StumbleUpon, Digg, Threadless, and many other businesses literally built on community.

I am often solicited to write these reviews (on people), not dissimilar from the way we at Bazaarvoice suggest our retail clients encourage their customers to write reviews on their purchases.  But I have a more emotional connection to people than I do to products, and therefore I am likely to act when asked.  And writing a review on a former employee or service provider on LinkedIn takes me a lot less time (5 minutes) than writing a recommendation letter for an MBA applicant (2-3 hours).

In any case, I believe that reason #1, “ego”, needs to be replaced with “emotion”.  I am compelled to thank the person publicly by writing the review – it's the reciprocity principle in action.  The other two reasons, “social connection” and “good karma”, fit fine.  I’m also not sure if the "J-Curve" will hold up when reviewing people.  From my own experience, I haven’t written a single negative review on LinkedIn.  I just won’t write the review at all if I don’t feel comfortable with doing so.

But that may be different on Avvo.  One thing is for sure with their launch – it is a whole new world for lawyers.  Just wait – this is coming for doctors, dentists, teachers, consultants, and all forms of service providers in a big way (I say “big” because there are already examples of all on smaller-trafficked sites).  Imagine for a moment joining a new HMO and having access to all members’ ratings on pediatricians.  Revolutionary, yes.  Incredibly useful, yes.  Scary, for some.  But I am convinced that it is just a matter of time before every person, place, product, service, or thing becomes reviewable – and very easily accessible to all.  And I am optimistic about this future, ultimately believing that it will lead to more accountability and better service overall.

But like I said at the beginning, let’s not make any conclusions from my own behavior.  As the founder of Coremetrics, spending seven years immersed in Web analytics, I learned that data tells the real story over time.  We’ll analyze Avvo and other clients as they build people-review volume and report back on the trends once they become clear.  For now, I would love to hear from you.  Do you review more people than products online?  Why?

Update 6/16: What timing!  I am a little behind on my TechCrunch reading, and was alerted by one of our Sales Directors that Avvo is now being sued by lawyers that are unhappy with negative reviews!  This is pretty ironic given my post yesterday was about how skewed to the positive I am when rating people. 

I'm assuming that Avvo expected this given the nature of some lawyers.  Avvo's CEO, Mark Britton, responds to the lawsuit on Avvo's blog.  There is a heated debate between readers of each blog post that is worth reading (although the reactions are as you would expect).  I applaud Avvo for providing a controversial, and highly useful, service.  And I hope that ultimately this press helps Avvo establish a well-known brand early in their history (remember that they just launched in beta).  My prediction is that the lawsuit gets dismissed and Avvo gets a ton of free press out of it.

The simple fact of the matter is that not every strategy for user-generated content is going to be successful.  Partnering with a company that specializes in user-generated content is going to help you significantly because most companies don't have the needed experience in-house.  This is a very new field, after all.

However, I believe that Heinz is doing the right thing by at least trying.  The online dialogue has begun – starting with ratings and reviews, then blogging, then social networking, and now user-generated advertising.  Heinz is smart to dip their toe in the water, just as many (even earlier pioneers) are dipping their toe into the upcoming 3D Web, popularized by Second Life.  There is an opportunity cost to being too much of a laggard, just as there is an opportunity cost for being too early of a pioneer.  The balance is difficult to strike but great companies did not get great by being timid.

Perhaps instead of user-generated advertising, Heinz should have started with crowdsourcing.  Another consumer food company, Kettle Chips, selected several new user-generated flavors with their "People's Choice" campaign, as I wrote about last year around this time.

The NY Times article also reminds me of the "contrarian" (i.e., informed by decades of marketing experience) views of Dr. Peter Fader and Dr. David Reibstein of The Wharton School, as documented in my Word-of-Mouth Wisdom interview series.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this news.

Again, Second Life may not be the 3D Web to survive – it is very early in the adoption curve and it all depends on their execution (the good, old basics of business).  But this move should be the spark needed to fuel further interest in the 3D Web as the next-generation medium for shopping, browsing, and socially connecting.  Just look at what happened with FireFox, based on the open-source Mozilla Project.  It now represents over 4.5% of all Web browsers in use.  That may seem like a small number, but remember how many people are online now (over 1 billion).  And don't count the market-share leader, Microsoft, out in adopting the 3D Web.

At last year's Shop.org Multichannel Executive Symposium, Tony Lenk said that today's 2D Web is like shopping in a store one square foot at a time.  I think that is a little extreme (site search from Endeca and Mercado, to name just one example, help you instantenously find what you are looking for as opposed to hunting for it in a store).  But he makes a good point, and his recent DHTML enhancements to Gap were designed to make online shopping more tactile (and it paid off).  Second Life and its 3D Web successors will definitely improve online shopping in a major way.  Remember that scene in The Matrix where Neo says, "guns, lots of guns", and the endless row of guns comes streaming by in real-time?  Kind of like that… but smarter.  The key is adoption (wide availability and easy installation), speed (Second Life needs a heavy-duty machine and bandwidth to run well), and a relentless focus on serving their users well (Mark Cuban says it well).

If you missed my in-depth Word-of-Mouth Wisdom interview with Giff Constable, who builds a 3D, virtual presence for businesses in Second Life, you can read that here.

There has been a ton of buzz (mainly positive) about the online 3D world, Second Life.  My two favorite magazines, BusinessWeek and Wired, write about Second Life in nearly every issue.  Wired called it the "coolest destination on the Web" and they loved it so much they set up shop there.  IBM recently built a Circuit City store in Second Life, and Dell recently opened up shop there as well.  I have my own views on why Second Life is getting so much buzz.  First, the promise of the Internet and virtual reality has been science fiction worthy for a long time.  The groundbreaking book, Neuromancer by William Gibson, invented the term "cyberspace".  The insane cult-classic movie, Brazil by Terry Giliam, showed a warped glimpse into the world of virtual reality.  Neal Stephenson's book, Snow Crash, made the virtual reality Web more tangible and exciting by painting a vision of the "Metaverse", which caught on as a new term to describe many massively multiplayer online RPGs (role-playing games, like World of Warcraft), and was adopted by Second Life to describe their virtual world.  Second, the promise of the Web on viable telecommuting and having a successful business that doesn't need to be located in a specific geography (like Silicon Valley) is a very real desire for many.  And third, it is just plain cool to imagine a world that you can live in without the rules of gravity (in Second Life, you can fly), where you can be anyone (in Second Life, many choose avatars that are quite interesting to say the least), and build anything (in Second Life, all it takes are a few pixels).

I have my own experience with "virtual worlds".  In 1990, I created Renegade Outpost, which grew into the most popular multiplayer role-playing game on the Internet by 1992.  I only had 5,000 players worldwide (as compared to World of Warcraft's 7.5 million today).  But, in comparison, Renegade Outpost was a text-based game which only supported 256 concurrent players and you could only access it via TELNET (there wasn't a whole lot of HTML in those days).  In any case, it was completely immersive.  Players could create their own worlds once they became immortals, and many people would play over 160 hours per month.  The ability to communicate with anyone in the game (players were connecting from Germany, Singapore, and many other places around the globe), go on quests together, and create your own world for other players to explore was a powerful draw.

So, from my own experience, Second Life makes a lot of sense.  And I am very bullish on the need for an immersive, 3D Internet experience, whether or not Second Life will be the forum to survive is the key question.  But, for now, it is a very exciting place, and I think we can all learn from it.

Giff Constable may be the best person to explain how businesses can tap the potential of Second Life, and he was gracious enough to be my interviewee today.  I first met Giff at Resource Interactive's iCitizen conference, where he and I were both speakers.  He is the VP of Business Development at The Electric Sheep Company, which builds a precense in Second Life for businesses.  Giff has 12 years of experience in Internet and software businesses, and a Princeton University degree.  In Second Life, Giff is known as Forseti Svarog (he told us why at the iCitizen conference, but I can't remember).

So begins our interview… (all images below are samples of Second Life portfolio work from Giff's company, click on them to get a full-size view).

1.  Giff, would you please provide an overview of your work in layman’s terms to our readers as they may not be familiar with Second Life?

The Electric Sheep Company is a 40-person company focusing entirely on virtual worlds, including Second Life.  If you want analogies to existing businesses, we can be thought of as a mix of movie production house meets Web development company meets strategic consultancy meets software company.  We really do blend everything from strategic advice to user experience design to virtual architecture and application development.  The cross-functional nature of our business makes for some interesting challenges and a really interesting team.

The second part of that question of course is what is Second Life itself, but that is not a simple thing to answer in two sentences and layman’s terms.  It is an online, immersive 3D space where people interact as customizable avatars, participate in an economy with an annual GDP run-rate of over US$100 million, and where all of the content seen and used in the world is built by its participants, whether individuals or corporations.  Say that ten times fast?  It is important to note that Second Life is closer to the Internet than a game, although like the Internet games are built on top of it.

2. What companies do you think are doing the best job of marketing themselves in Second Life?

I’m not sure anyone has totally reached their potential yet, but then I am not surprised given that for many Second Life is still viewed as experimental.  There are quite a few companies now, however, who have dipped their toe in the water, enjoyed the experience, and are now increasing their focus and effort in this space.  Reuters is one of best examples of a success both inside and outside of Second Life.  They received a huge amount of PR outside of Second Life, but they also received a great deal of respect in world.  I’ll touch a bit more on this [below].

3. I’m sure you read the article about crayon in Adrants (where Urizenus Skylar, who writes for The Second Life Herald, calls some marketers entering in Second Life a “bunch of desperate clueless &$%^*$&%#”).  We have seen this before with members of Facebook and MySpace vigorously defending their turf from marketers.  How do you navigate this new medium for your clients so they aren’t viewed as desperate or clueless? 

Well, I should first say that Uri loves to stir the pot – the SL Herald is a tabloid after all — but blunders do happen.  Effective navigation requires knowledge of water depths and shoal locations, and in this case, an awareness of history.  Virtual worlders are not sitting around waiting for a brand to come complete their life (probably less in the Second than in the First), and arguably brands need to enter a virtual world with a little humility.  You need to know what has come before, what has and has not worked, and you also need to have a sense of the community.  We try to steer our clients in the right direction, although they don’t always listen to us and sometimes singe a few hairs, but even that is an important lesson.  Frankly, mistakes will be made in this new medium and that is okay.  It is very early days here, and everyone needs to remember that.   It is better to be innovating and helping to define the conversation rather that show up at the party 2 hours after everyone has gone to bed.

4. What is your most exciting marketing success to date in Second Life?

To elaborate on Reuters for a bit more:  Reuters decided that their audience was going to be the Second Life residents, and they did a number of smart things to gain the respect of everyone.  They proved their intention to stick around (rather than be a PR stunt) by dedicating a journalist to the Second Life / virtual world beat.  They created a website to go alongside their virtual world presence.  We created an island for them, which they keep somewhat active with interesting events, speakers, and Adam Reuters’ office hours.  More importantly, we created some wall-mounted and heads-up displays which brought in their live news feeds.  This allowed people to take Reuters out into Second Life with them, rather than having to work really hard to constantly bring people back.  From the beginning, it was clear to people that this was a project with substance not hype, and the audience reacted very positively.

5. eMarketer predicts that advertising on social networking sites will grow from $280 million this year to $1.8 billion by 2010.  What do you think about their prediction, and how do you think it applies to marketing in Second Life?

I think that number is almost meaningless because social networking is starting to touch everything we do online, so the definition becomes increasingly blurred.  On e-commerce sites, social networking will become an important component of establishing reputation/trust around a product, especially once you can overlay collaborative filtering and reviewing technologies with social network information.   I think that the web and a Second Life-like technology will become increasingly interconnected and complementary.  We will use both, depending on whether we want a 2D or 3D experience for a particular purpose (they have different strengths and weaknesses), and depending on whether we want a live social interaction.  There is no question that people feel more “together” in a 3D immersive environment.

6. What would you recommend to Bazaarvoice clients like Sears, PETCO, or HP that may want to dip their toe in Second Life and start planting a marketing seed?

This may sound self-serving, but you really do want to talk to a longtime Second Life consulting group like Electric Sheep or one of our competitors.  The bar is being raised as to what it takes to capture attention, and you do not want to do a cookie cutter project. Even if you have fabulous creative ideas already, chances are they are going to have to be adjusted somewhere to deal with technology limitations or community relations, and you want a guide to help you.  But in terms of basic rules, many are not that far from marketing basics.  Here are a few of my common ones:

• stay honest with yourself about your brand and how it is perceived
• stay authentic and honest with consumers
• decide whether your product really translates into a virtual world or whether you need to focus on brand
• don’t think you can control everything about your brand in a virtual world (or put another way: do not be afraid of your consumer)
• create an opt-in experience and let people take your brand with them somehow
• keep your standards high – you are representing your brand and company
• like a blog, keep things fresh, new and interesting if you want people to come back again and again
• be prepared for technology bumps, because this space is new and evolving extremely rapidly, and rapid evolution in software means bugs

7. Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers?

When people come into Second Life, they ask two basic questions: what do I do? who do I meet? (the order depends on the person).  When planning your virtual world offering, try to answer one or both of these questions.

For further reading, I highly recommend Giff's blog.  First, he responds to Second Life skeptics.  And, second, Giff does a great job of highlighting 2006 milestones for Second Life.  You may also be interested in my March, 2005 blog post, in which I discuss closing the tactile gap between offline and online shopping (I didn't know about Second Life when I wrote it).

And for more Second Life images, see Giff's personal collection or this BusinessWeek slide show (which includes many images from Second Life's predecessors).  Or check out the Second Life media page, where you can view user-generated movies made within the virtual world.

The most insightful part of the movie, as it pertains to word of mouth as well as green products, is to watch the reaction of EV1 leasees (all EV1s were leased until GM proved the market potential) when they realize that they can not buy their EV1 under any condition.  They organize, they petition, they beg.  Big name actors like Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, and all other EV1 leasees are turned down.  The organizers get together and offer to buy all of the cars for $1.9 million – their request goes with no answer (according to the movie).  After finding out that the EV1s are being destroyed, they stand outside of the GM parking lot where EV1s are being stored to watch over the cars to make sure that GM doesn't destroy any more.  They literally do this for months on a 24×7 basis.  Talk about love for a car!  It makes iPod owners look downright disloyal.  I guess that is because a car has such a big impact on your life as opposed to an iPod, and the EV1 leasees were so passionately focused on making an impact on the environment.  These consumers were a word-of-mouth revolution waiting to be leveraged by GM.  But, GM being short-term focused like so many companies that are incentivized to think that way due to the short-term nature of making your numbers for Wall Street analysts, completely misses the boat.  [Side note: this short-term focus was really crystallized for me by my friend, Derek Woodgate, who is a corporate futurist and the founder of The Futures Lab, in a discussion we had on why the corporate world needs futurists.  He has a great job, in my opinion, but more on that perhaps later.]

One of the big critiques of the EV1, from a consumer perspective at that time, is the short distance that the car can travel on a full charge (only 55-75 miles on the first generation model, due to the early generation batteries used; but the movie states that the average American only drives 29 miles per day although it doesn't seem like the car was ever marketed to highlight that this range would be sufficient for some 90% of American drivers).  Another critique is the high production cost of $80,000 per vehicle when the lease payments would net around $34,000 to $44,000, obviously a money-losing proposition for GM.  But a former EV1 employee explains that once economies of scale kick in, from good marketing and availability in large metropolitan areas, the production costs would have fallen dramatically and battery technology would have rapidly improved.  This seems like a logical argument to me, especially considering the recent success of the Tesla, which can travel up to 250 miles on a full charge.  It also helps that the Tesla goes 0-60 in 4 seconds and looks like a well-designed sports car.  Unlike the EV1, which had a failed rollout (only leasing 800 units), the Tesla recently sold out their flagship 2007 model in just four months. 

I guess my point here is that GM could have figured it out if they stuck with it, and the consumer emotion evoked by the product was simply incredible.  And I think it is indisputable that GM missed the boat on the launch of hybrids relative to Toyota (who is projected to pass GM in 2007 as the world's largest producer of autos).  In the movie, one of GM's former Board members talks about his support of the EV1 project more from a R&D perspective, given the shift in consumer demand that he saw coming.  The success of hybrids and the launch of the Tesla prove that demand is there, if the marketing is well executed then word of mouth could have done the rest of the work.

What does all of this have to do with the title of my blog post?  Well, I predict that green products are going to be one of the hottest trends for the next decade.  They are ripe for an amazing level of positive word of mouth ("free marketing?").  Obviously coffee and universal access to global information also need little advertising when the product is great (Starbucks invested in their stores and locations, Google invested in the world's best search, and neither invested in advertising – positive word of mouth did that job for them).

There are more and more people that are accepting the consequences of global warming.  Just today, it was reported that another enormous ice shelf broke away in the Canadian Arctic.  As I first predicted in July of 2006, I wrote that the documentary An Inconvenient Truth would be marked as the most impactful documentary in modern history.  After seeing it a month ago for the first time, I have to admit that is a transformational movie.  You simply can't see it and not be emotionally moved by the implication of the evidence presented – it truly is "an inconvenient truth".  If you haven't seen it and want the quick "cheat sheet", this summary is a good place to start.  And 60 Minutes recently had a compelling report – here is an excerpt.

In August, I wrote about Wal-Mart embracing sustainability (and the rapid impact they could have given their immense scale).  And I recently learned (when having coffee with one of their heads of eCommerce) that they include a video on what they are doing about it with every copy of An Inconvenient Truth that they sell.  Here is an example of one of their recent initiatives, among many. 

From Millennials being more socially conscious consumers to Kleiner Perkins investing huge sums of money in alternative energy, there is something major under way here.  There is a shift in consumer demand that is just beginning to be felt (look at the Whole Foods stock rise that I wrote about when reporting on Wal-Mart and sustainability).  Wal-Mart, the largest company in the world, acting early on this shift is a wake-up call for smaller companies everywhere.

The bottom line is that I truly believe when we look back and assess the long-term economic impact of the events of 2006, it will be that the green movement got underway and rolled like a freight train through the economy for the next several decades.  And sparked consumer emotion and word of mouth that had never before been seen.  The stakes are simply too high and too broadly felt for it not to.

If you don't have a green strategy, I suggest you start moving now.  We'll see a lot more green (both green products and the money made off them) in 2007 and beyond.  We can help you rapidly evolve these products by tapping into word-of-mouth analytics and helping you learn what is really resonating (and what isn't) with your customers.

Update on Jan. 2:
I was just catching up on BusinessWeek while at the gym, and noticed that the "green" trend was highlighted in three different "ideas" for the "The Best Ideas of 2006", specifically:

• Super Recycling (also there is a great interview with the CEO of Interface in the good but slanted documentary The Corporation)
• Global Warming
• Green is Good

The only other trend to have as many common ideas is that of user-generated content, a topic near and dear to Bazaarvoice and our clients.  Specifically:

• Trend Mining (one of the many reasons we have invested so heavily in word-of-mouth analytics)
• Get a Second Life (stay tuned for my third Word-of-Mouth Wisdom interview for more on this)
• Free Labor (more on the crowdsourcing, which I have written about often)
• Web 2.0 Goes Corporate