Second Life Lessons

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Doing Your Homework

What sets Second Life apart is that the products offered by true-life brands can be customized by the people using them—a growing trend in the real-world marketplace. And Second Life is an interactive, social-networking zone where companies hope not only to find customers but to connect remote employees to one another and recruit new hires.

Advertising giant Leo Burnett Worldwide (PUB), for instance, is building an "ideas hub," an online meeting space where its 1,600 "creatives" around the world can attend conferences and industry social events, and where the company can attract new talents who are already Second Life experts.

For a company considering jumping into Second Life now, serious homework is needed. Competition among big brands is heating up. It's no longer enough to be the first in an industry to launch a presence in Second Life. Just as Toyota, and now Nissan and General Motors, conducted market research in the digital world before unveiling its plan to sell virtual cars next month, savvy corporations and their Second Life developers must carefully analyze the competition and differentiate their products.

Questions such as "Who are the other big brands with instant name recognition in this new market?" And "Where are the new research and development opportunities in this new space?" And "How exactly do we measure the results of this campaign?" are just as real in Second Life as they are in ours. We've collected a list of to-do's for real-world companies interested in getting a Second Life. Click here for the tip sheet.

Jana is a reporter with BusinessWeek.com in New York. McConnon is a correspondent for BusinessWeek in New York.