Measuring Success In Second Life: For Profit and Non-Profit, and Those In Between

I'm on a few mailing lists related to Second Life and on many email lists related to corporate and non-profit initiatives, and I've been formally and informally advising legal entities (companies, funding agencies, non-profits) on how to use Second Life to their benefit. I'm a Second Life Consultant, its one of the things I do.

Aside from the obvious interactivity candy that often melts in the hand, there are benefits but it requires something that most people do not take into account while they're tripping over their arrow keys for the first time. Indeed, it seems many presences inworld right now don't have a clear sense of how they measure success - perhaps a symptom of the hype in the last 2 years which seems to be clearing up with more pragmatic mindsets.

Business

How does one measure success, say, of a company's presence? Is it the number of visitors to their presence, or is it instead the number of people who actually purchase products and services? For a business, it is the latter of course - anything else could be simply branding, where they simply make people aware that they are around (such as what Coca Cola did). At the end of the day, business is business. Arguably, expenditure on Second Life presences could be considered a new and improved tax write off, but it is kind of hard to justify spending sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on a few avatars investigating your presence. The internet is still much more effective than Second Life in many regards, as the silence of the former buzz related to Amazon.com implicitly demonstrates. Quite simply, their 2d website is much more useful than a 3d presence - at least for now.

Some of us said that then. We'll have the good taste not to say that we told them so now.

Non-Profits

Non-profits are where I believe much more can be done within Second Life. Rik Riel wrote Best Practices for Non-Profits in Second Life (pdf, 412kb) which is worth reading. However, it neglects measuring success.

If, for example, a non-profit is in Second Life to promote awareness - let's say it has something to do with global internet penetration (since to my knowledge no non-profit in Second Life tries to address this) - what would success be? Increasing global internet penetration might be a good metric, but then - how can one measure the effect of a Second Life presence on such a large thing? One cannot do so. Fundraising could work, though, but since non-profits in the United States have to accept donations in US dollars, donations inworld become a small problem. And what is the sense of asking people to go to a website in an external browser?

Let us take another example. Let's say that a non-profit wants to discuss the use of renewable energy sources. While Second Life itself is a bit of a hog when it comes to electricity, it can be used to promote awareness to others. How does one measure the amount of awareness? How does one justify expenditure within Second Life based on awareness alone? It is almost impossible to do so, though there are ways of doing this should the user actually commit to filling out a survey. And how does that compare to a website? And how does a website compare to other things?

How, Then?

People knowledgeable of Second Life know that the traffic system within Second Life is less than useful and easily distorted. That isn't a good metric.

An honest issue that many people do not discuss is that simply because a technology exists does not make it the best solution for a problem. Further, people do not properly look into how they wish to measure success. As a consultant, I have actually stopped people from entering Second Life for these same reasons - asking them how they expect to get a 'return on investment', be it for profit or not for profit.

Establishing a presence for a real world entity in Second Life should hinge on what determines success for that real world entity. Concrete metrics should be designed into these systems beforehand so that one can see what works and what doesn't. The concept is not too far removed from web statistics since many measurements for success within Second Life would include website statistics; these are better than the traffic ratings of land and the sensor readings of objects as avatars fly by without stopping.

These metrics are possible, but they depend on the context of what 'success' is for every venture. Hundreds, thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars later, failure is easy to define. Success, however, requires defining how one measures success from the start. The more concrete the definition of success, the more concrete measuring it becomes. The more concrete the measurements, the more agile a venture can be - reactive to what works and what does not work in specific contexts.

This has held true in every technology I have worked with in the last 20 years. I do not expect that to change, despite the words of the prophets scribbled on the bathroom walls of Starbucks.

(Apologies to Paul Simon.)