Virtual Worlds: Useful Tools For Book and Magazine Marketing?
A few weeks ago in my Book Sales and Marketing class, we had an interesting guest speaker named Aideen O’Leary-Chung who works in the online marketing department at Harlequin. She had a lot of fascinating things to tell us about what eHarlequin does with eReaders, exclusive content, and social networking, but I was particularly interested in their use of Second Life to engage user-readers.
On September 14, 2008, eHarlequin held an event in Second Life called International Ball. Users’ avatars, which are 3D representations, danced to live-streaming music on Harlequin Island, which was decorated with scale-model versions of famous monuments, such as the Eiffel Tower. There was also live chatting, door-crasher coupons for Harlequin books, and sample-chapter giveaways to promote Harlequin Presents books. Take a look at some screen shots of the party.
Harlequin also holds book launches through Second Life, which allows them to do things they couldn’t do in the real world, such as recreate a setting from the book itself. Here is an excerpt from a great article in Fast Company magazine with Harlequin’s Brent Lewis on eHarlequin’s work with Second Life and Web2.0:
That’s one of the big advantages for Harlequin–what I term relationships. At Harlequin, we’ve had relationships with our customers since the business began, like reader parties and book clubs, because our brand evokes strong feelings in people. Web 2.0 allows us to use technologies to have relationships with more people and, more importantly, to allow our readers to talk to one another. Harlequin readers love to talk to each other.
In Second life, we’ve been experimenting with virtual worlds. We had our first event in September, a reading by M.J. Rose, which by Second Life standards was quite successful. One of the key objectives for us was to build custom environments in Second Life to facilitate the readings. With M.J. Rose, we did a piazza, which was from a scene from the book. In the second reading, for Deanna Raybourn’s Silent in the Sanctuary, we built an abbey. The book is a mystery based in Victorian England. We had Deana doing a reading from her book. We actually had a Victorian costume party that was incredibly successful. People were lined up at the door–the virtual door–to get in.
In the world of online magazines, CosmoGIRL! has also entered the metaverse. They held their first virtual prom March 27, 2008 in CosmoGIRL! Village, a world created by There.com, in partnership with ABC Family and ACUVUE Contact Lenses. The event was a huge success and included everything you would find at a real prom and more, including dancing, a prom king and queen competition, prizes and give-aways, and avatar makeovers (with coloured contact lenses from ACUVUE, of course). CosmoGIRL!’s Associate Publisher Eric Schwarzkopf said, “Prom is a high school girl’s biggest night of the year and we wanted to find a way to celebrate in both the real world and the virtual world. A virtual prom enables us to offer cutting edge ways to engage our readers with the brands and events they love most.”
Have you ever attended any virtual events? Do you think they will become a much more common marketing strategy for brands and products in the future?
