Why would you arrange a marketing event or site in Second Life and then make it difficult to find? Get yourself some land, set up your site or event, sneak out a press-release to the mainstream media that doesn't include enough information to find the site, and make sure it isn't in the search directory.

It gives the impression that the marketing team really doesn't want people to find out about the event. Maybe your marketing team doesn't agree with your decision to do something in Second Life. They're certainly showing less commitment and organization that you'd expect to find in the average garage sale.

It might seem that I'm a little down on marketing teams, that's more a matter of circumstance than any natural inclination. Being as I'm paid to review their efforts, I am finding the actuality of much of their work in Second Life quite substandard indeed.

It's easy to blame the MDC's, the Metaverse Development Companies who act as the virtual world equivalent of website developers, but in many cases their actual implementation is of exceedingly high quality. To be honest, like web developers, MDCs tend to be so low on the overall food chain that most or all of the decisions about concept, marketing and engagement are made long before anyone who has ever spent any time in Second Life is actually involved.

A Second Life event or site is a conversation. You are having a conversation with people. Well, okay, so most of you aren't - someone sketches a design on a napkin, people nod around the conference table, and some money is thrown at it. Maybe there's a launch event - the press release doesn't give a time or location for it, and any notice in Second Life itself is given on less than a day's notice (often less than five minutes' notice).

Then after some spotty attendance - if any - for the launch, the site is left to molder. Sometimes the place isn't even cleaned up after the opening party, leaving a litter of objects scattered around the place. It's even possible that people forget to even open up the land access to allow people to visit.

That's not a conversation. That's something else: negligence.

This isn't some "If you build it, they will come" sort of deal. In the real world not many people expect the target demographic to all cluster around your billboards all afternoon going "Ooooo!" - You know static advertising pieces don't affect people that way.

If you build a static advertising piece in Second Life (essentially, a billboard in more dimensions), you're not really going to expect people to flock in and spend their days crooning over it. Well - actually, apparently many of you do. Now that's just silly.

Then, on top of that, you don't make it easy to find. Indicative signage gets hidden, locations are not advertised, sites are left closed to the public. Your private island in Second Life goes down, and your own people don't even notice for a week.

It's like your marketing team wants it to fail. Now you've got to ask yourself just why that might be.