Treasure Hunt!
My Second Life business had its first birthday this week. To celebrate, I organised a Treasure Hunt. I wanted the prize to be something really special, so I spent the last month or so making a Steampunk Kitty. Based on my popular lilac point balinese cat, this one has brass goggles, a winged backpack (with wings that open and close with a nifty snicker-snack sound), a flame-spouting funnel and the ability to produce a vapour trail, and a wrist-mounted compassy thing, like this:
The treasure hunt consists of 6 gear-shaped objects hidden underwater in various tricksy places in my marine park underneath the store, and when folk find the gears they send them all to me and I swap 'em for a Steampunk Kitty. What fun!
Now, I knew that the Treasure Hunt would be a hit among the store regulars. What has surprised me is how far word is spreading, and how many folk are turning up to hunt for clockwork gears. I intended this to be a "thank you" to my customers for their custom over the last year, but as I find myself drowning in found gears, I'm realising that I've stumbled into a classic example of "viral marketing", pretty much by accident. *laugh* I asked a few folk where they heard of it a couple of days ago, and the ones that hadn't found out about it through the store group notice (a sort of opt-in mailing list for folk who want to hear about store updates and new stuff) had got it through word-of-mouth. But this morning (some 4 or 5 days since it started), I google for it and find mention of it turning up on blogs and social networking sites, such as this and this and this.
Now, that last one's a real feather in my cap, because it's connected to this blog: NPIRL, or Not Possible In Real Life. This is a very influential blog in SL, particularly among the artistic/creative community. NPIRL specialise in the bleeding edge stuff, the kind of art that you could only create in a virtual environment. Stuff appearing on NPIRL is among the creme de la creme of SL creativity. Now, I passed a review copy of my steampunk kitty on to Bettina Tizzy, the writer of the NPIRL blog, and she said she'd mention it in her in-world groups (which she of course did). I was very pleased to hear this, because there are a LOT of folk who subscribe to the NPIRL groups, and they might plausibly be the sort of folk who'd find my work interesting. But I was delighted to discover this morning that in addition to that, Bettina had made a post about my kitty on the NPIRL blog. This is a blog that the movers-and-shakers of the SL art world follow, and getting a mention here is kind of like getting your work published in a leading magazine/journal/whatever - not only does it broaden your audience hugely in interesting directions, but the fact of getting your stuff in it at all is a Big Deal and a ginormous boost. So I'm just delighted to discover my kitty right there on the NPIRL blog!
If this keeps up, I won't just be famous in Russia!
The treasure hunt consists of 6 gear-shaped objects hidden underwater in various tricksy places in my marine park underneath the store, and when folk find the gears they send them all to me and I swap 'em for a Steampunk Kitty. What fun!
Now, I knew that the Treasure Hunt would be a hit among the store regulars. What has surprised me is how far word is spreading, and how many folk are turning up to hunt for clockwork gears. I intended this to be a "thank you" to my customers for their custom over the last year, but as I find myself drowning in found gears, I'm realising that I've stumbled into a classic example of "viral marketing", pretty much by accident. *laugh* I asked a few folk where they heard of it a couple of days ago, and the ones that hadn't found out about it through the store group notice (a sort of opt-in mailing list for folk who want to hear about store updates and new stuff) had got it through word-of-mouth. But this morning (some 4 or 5 days since it started), I google for it and find mention of it turning up on blogs and social networking sites, such as this and this and this.
Now, that last one's a real feather in my cap, because it's connected to this blog: NPIRL, or Not Possible In Real Life. This is a very influential blog in SL, particularly among the artistic/creative community. NPIRL specialise in the bleeding edge stuff, the kind of art that you could only create in a virtual environment. Stuff appearing on NPIRL is among the creme de la creme of SL creativity. Now, I passed a review copy of my steampunk kitty on to Bettina Tizzy, the writer of the NPIRL blog, and she said she'd mention it in her in-world groups (which she of course did). I was very pleased to hear this, because there are a LOT of folk who subscribe to the NPIRL groups, and they might plausibly be the sort of folk who'd find my work interesting. But I was delighted to discover this morning that in addition to that, Bettina had made a post about my kitty on the NPIRL blog. This is a blog that the movers-and-shakers of the SL art world follow, and getting a mention here is kind of like getting your work published in a leading magazine/journal/whatever - not only does it broaden your audience hugely in interesting directions, but the fact of getting your stuff in it at all is a Big Deal and a ginormous boost. So I'm just delighted to discover my kitty right there on the NPIRL blog!
If this keeps up, I won't just be famous in Russia!