I spoke with Ben James of Rivers Run Red again last Monday in but did not have the time to write it up - I'll sorta give the gist of that conversation here as some of my readers are asking me for more information about Rivers Run Red Web Metrics for Second Life.
Ben James made it clear that Synovate is a research group that is owned by Censyian - but I could not find anything about this company online (maybe I misspelled it).
The approach Rivers Run Red has adopted is to start at the beginning - determine where we are coming from and who we are meeting in the virtual words and what needs are people trying to gratify by going into Second Life or another 3D Virtual World.
- First Decision - what motivates the person
- Once in World - provide a Framework to understand motivational functions - why is the person in SL and what are they doing?
Rivers Run Red has a partnership with ISOBAR Communications - which some consider the biggest Digital Marketing Network - just take the 3 minute tour to get an idea of what ISOBAR is. Due to the relationship of Rivers Run Red with ISOBAR - RRR can have a lot of data to pull in to create better metrics and measure BUZZ.
- 80% of Second Life Chatter happens outside of Second Life - and via ISOBAR, RRR has the ability to measure the BUZZ that a campaign generates.
- Rivers Run Red can also calculate the NETPROMOTER Score of a campaign and of visitors to Second Life Sims - something that might be of interest to large corporations like IBM and HP.
Ben James gave me an example of the Radio One campaign they created for the BBC (this is not a published study):
- Radio One / BBC - Big Weekend Festival - measure how many people show up to the location in Second Life and why they came - which turns out to be more for the Community interaction. Due to that understanding - Rivers Run Red focused not so much on the number of avatars that showed up as the number on interactions per avatar.
Honestly, there's more that I can't read of my notes - but the essence is that River Run Red take a more holistic approach, based on motivations, as a framework to wrap the metrics around. That makes sense to me.
Later this year, I think Rivers Run Red will be releasing some kind of Metrics Package for Second Life…..but that's about as much as I can remember from the meeting with Ben James of Rivers Run Red.
