Linden Lab Cross-Promotes Artificial Life Ozimal Bunnies

Linden Lab is sending out promotional offers for Ozimal bunnies, a popular species of artificial life in SL which eat and reproduce. Your 2nd Place has some commentary. It's an interesting campaign, but I'd like it better if Linden got Nicolas Cage to help promote it.

Comments

[Todd Borst]

I was actually quite surprised to receive this kind of email from Linden Labs for an in-world vendor. Questionable taste aside, I was more interested in what Ozimals did to get LL to send these kind of promotional emails on their behalf.

What were the requirements for this kind of ads? How did they pick who gets to advertise through their mail campaigns? What are the costs? Lots of unanswered questions.

[Metacam Oh]

Where can I read about purchasing this type of campaign?

[Lili]

I don't appreciate being spammed by Linden Lab for a product that has forced me to move three times! These pretend animals should have a strict limit on use, maybe three animals per region. I am fed up with stupid people making rabbit and chicken ranches, thinking they are going to get rich. All they do is lag me.

Isn't one of the Lindens or ex-Lindens the maker of this abomination? I find this all in very poor taste.

[Nexus Burbclave]

Radio Stations aren't allowed to use the EAS tone in their commercials for good reason. Nor do television stations. If Linden Lab are going to have spam, it needs to be on its own promotional mailing list. It should not be on the same list that they use for supposedly important communication. Apparently they've never read "The Boy Who Cried Wolf".

[Rin Tae]

I would not have minded promotion emails. I look them over if it is interesting or delete them if my spam filter has not done this already. However in this case it is making me think, that LL has made some special deal on the expense of every other merchant on the grid.
The only way such things should be done it to write up somewhere the requirements for what a merchant needs to do to be offered such opportunity. It does not matter if it costs so much that most of the merchants will never be ablt to get to this point but it would be there in the open listed as one of the possibilites everyone has for promotion.

Anything else is smelling of favorism and backroom deals. And as such it is very understandable that it makes people upset.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I'm in favor of favoritism.

From a hard-nosed business perspective, it makes sense to spotlight content that drives traffic, recruitment, retention and commerce.

From a soft and fuzzy community perspective, the way you motivate player communities out of cliquish stagnation is to reward those that innovate, and do so in an open, inclusive manner.

"Favoritism" is another term for an informal reward system. Since it's informal, it's resistant to gaming by people only interested in the prize.

You achieve favoritism by capturing the attention and imagination of both players and developers. You do this by taking risks, innovating, and working to draw in people rather than excluding them.

That you can get quite rich doing this is beside the point.

This isn't the Fevered Imaginary Conspiracy. This is a rare display of good sense on the part of the Lab; an understanding of the fundamental principles of online community building. Somebody's been brushing up on their Kim.

[Uccello]

Read the Ozimal "game" Terms of Service before you buy, if you can get them. The owner told met that he can't post them in the store and that because a note card giver would use a script, he can't distribute the ToS in that fashion or his sim would crash. Part of the ToS is they can take your bunnies and nests then ban you from their system without recourse. Tons of blogs and press about this in the last few months. I don't give them my money any more.