Remember that Linden Lab job posting for a Second Life content marketer? To no one's surprise, that job went to Strawberry Singh, who over the years, has created a network of social media influence around her Second Life content that is almost as large as key official company channels:
- Strawberry has 11,000 followers on Flickr; the official SL Flickr account has just under 13,000.
- Strawberry has 14,000+ followers on YouTube; the official SL YouTube account has about 27,000.
"Hopefully I'll continue to do what I did before, in terms of tutorials and images and exploration videos," she tells me. "The only thing that will stop is the promotion of brands." (When she announced her hiring, she also published some policies distancing herself from SL brands she's formerly worked for and/or blogged.) Lucky for her, she's not relocating to be near Linden Lab's HQ in San Francisco (where rent would eat up most her salary) but working from her home office in Florida:
"I'm working completely remote from Florida. But I will visit SF some time soon to meet them all."
As I've heard from other Linden Lab employees, the hiring process was incredibly grueling:
"[I]t took around a month and 6 interviews from my initial application to my offer of employment. That was my personal experience, but I've heard that it can sometimes take longer."
But now she's officially on the official marketing team. "They are so energetic and passionate about Second Life, and I get along so great with them." And with this move, Second Life's social media ecosystem will never be the same -- and most likely, much more Strawberry flavored.
Congrats!
Posted by: Seymore | Tuesday, April 16, 2019 at 05:32 PM
I think everyone knew we need someone like Strawberry. They should have hired her a long time ago.
Posted by: Mondy Bristol | Wednesday, April 17, 2019 at 02:54 AM
A thing that the LL should reconsider is to allow the LL marketing team to provide marketplace and/or inworld shop links to the stuff that appear in the pics and vids blog posts
A big reason why content-influence blogs are popular is because of the links to where the readers can get the stuff shown. Not just in SL but in the real world as well. Some well-known person wears something and the next day the shops are full of people wanting that garment
LL do this with regions already, with Destinations, so it is not totally alien for them to do this with stuff
Some people who create/sell stuff are not going to want LL to do this, when their stuff is not included or when they are included but feel guilty at being promoted when others are not. However, the base purpose of a content influencer is to drive sales overall, to lift the economy
When the base purpose is only to provide nice pics and helpful information to the users then LL have already done that - the Torley Linden experience. Torley made lots of helpful and pics/vids/tuts which while fun, entertaining and informative had little influence on driving content sales to the point where it affected economic growth
Another thing is that when read Strawberry's blog and take out all the posts referencing stuff that we can get from the SL shops then there is not a lot left, relatively speaking. My advice to LL is to let Strawberry Linden continue to do her thing, post about stuff that she likes and where we can get it. And for LL to not think that a new strawberry-flavoured Torley-like-LL-restrained experience is going to make any more difference to sales than the Torley experience did
And to let the other Lindens link to the stuff they like on their blog posts also. For the exact same reason. Where can I, the user, buy what I am looking at?
Posted by: irihapeti | Saturday, April 20, 2019 at 07:14 PM