Virtual social worlds

The second group of virtual worlds, often referred to as virtual social worlds, allows inhabitants to choose their behavior more freely and essentially live a virtual life similar to their real life. As in virtual game worlds, virtual social world users appear in the form of avatars and interact in a three-dimensional virtual environment; however, in this realm, there are no rules restricting the range of possible interactions, except for basic physical laws such as gravity. This allows for an unlimited range of self presentation strategies, and it has been shown that with increasing usage intensity and consumption experience, users of virtual social worlds—or “residents,” as they prefer to be called—show behavior that more and more closely mirrors the one observed in real life settings (Haenlein and Kaplan, 2009, Kaplan and Haenlein, 2009a and Kaplan and Haenlein, 2009b). Arguably, the most prominent example of virtual social worlds is the Second Life application, founded and managed by the San Francisco-based company Linden Research Inc. Besides doing everything that is possible in real life (e.g., speaking to other avatars, taking a walk, enjoying the virtual sunshine), Second Life also allows users to create content (e.g., to design virtual clothing or furniture items) and to sell this content to others in exchange for Linden Dollars, a virtual currency traded against the U.S. Dollar on the Second Life Exchange. Some residents are so successful in this task that the virtual money earned that way complements their real life income. Virtual social worlds offer a multitude of opportunities for companies in marketing (advertising/communication, virtual product sales/v-Commerce, marketing research), and human resource and internal process management; for a more detailed discussion, see Kaplan and Haenlein (2009c).

Ten pieces of advice for companies deciding to use Social Media

Social Media is a very active and fast-moving domain. What may be up-to-date today could have disappeared from the virtual landscape tomorrow. It is therefore crucial for firms to have a set of guidelines that can be applied to any form of Social Media, whether they are part of the aforementioned list or not. Next, we provide such a set of recommendations. Given that Social Media have both a social- and a media-component, we split our advice into two sections: five points about using media and five points about being social.

Five points about using media

Choose carefully

There are dozens—if not hundreds—of Social Media applications, and new ones are appearing on the horizon every day. If you still need time to run your core business, you simply cannot participate in them all, especially since “being active” is one key requirement of success (see below). Choosing the right medium for any given purpose depends on the target group to be reached and the message to be communicated. On the one hand, each Social Media application usually attracts a certain group of people and firms should be active wherever their customers are present. For example, if your main target audience is book lovers, a content community via which users share self-written novels or poems is likely better suited to your purpose than a virtual world which centers on fighting dragons and finding treasures. On the other hand, there may be situations whereby certain features are necessary to ensure effective communication, and these features are only offered by one specific application. For example, when the U.S. Army undertook an initiative in 2007 to reach the Hispanic community, it decided to utilize the social networking site Univision rather than the more popular Facebook. This choice was driven in part by the fact that Univision—a Spanish-language television network in the U.S. and Puerto Rico—is the social networking application with the largest Latin American audience, due to an extensive range of telenovelas and Mexican programs produced by Grupo Televisa. However, another reason Univision was chosen is because it offers a moderating service which checks comments from users for appropriateness before posting them on the site. In contrast, other applications, including Facebook, allow users to post messages without supervision.

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