Some few physical world businesses are having a hard time in Second Life. They're getting cold feet, or pulling out, or just plain baffled. Though there are more arriving each day than leaving, hard lessons have been learned.

Chief among these is that the customers and would-be customers have learned that many of these businesses just don't give a damn about them. That's a widespread viral message that's very hard to shift out of the market.

It's not surprising. In the physical world, a big business doesn't really have to. They can afford to play percentages. Door-to-door salespeople can knock on my door three times a day from the same company, every day for a week - encouraging me to take up their product and/or service. By day two, you know their script better than they do.

When, in one day, I have three knocks on the door from representatives of company X, and four cold calls from the same company, sure, it pisses me off. Thing is, it doesn't matter to them. Playing the percentages, they can honk off a thousand people a day, if only a few of them represent conversions. In a huge market, they don't have to care about you, or understand you, or cater to your needs.

Now, imagine your market doesn't consist of a quarter billion people. Imagine it consists of about 200 people. In a big hall. That's your market. Can you afford to dismiss 99% of them to get a total of 2 conversions? Not even remotely. You've got to find out what they want, how to approach them, and act on that basis.

Second Life rides between these two extremes. There's no push or broadcast media. If you want to reach people, you need a customer-focused value proposition (and I'm not using the term ironically. I mean it).

We're not talking about interrupting someone's attention with a commercial - we're talking about making them want to put down what they are doing and come and see what you are doing, in preference to any other activity they might have planned. Are you frightened yet?

The rules for business and marketing are changing - we're not just talking about Second Life. Technology and the way it is changing society is creating challenges (or opportunities if you prefer). Your company has been having meetings about it for the last couple of years, but the odds are a lot of your people aren't really taking it seriously yet. I've been in some of those meetings lately, I know.

Second Life, and other virtual worlds are a communications platform, like snail-mail, email, the telephone, the fax, face-to-face communications. You establish a half-hearted presence on Second Life, and don't put any care into it. You don't give other people a reason to care either. Then you walk away and blame the tools, rather than your lack of interest in the target demographic.

Yes, we visited. We looked around, and we realised that you have no idea who we are, or what we want, and we didn't come back - but what we did do was talk with people we know - people in Second Life, and in the physical world. We talked about you - about your brand. We said, "Who the hell do they think we are?"; because frankly, it's obvious that you don't know - and quite possible that you don't even care.