Billing itself as the first PR company to have a presence in Second Life, Text 100 are to open an office on August 21.

Darren Barefoot has blogged about it, and posted a question on the forums about whether this is likely to be a positive or negative thing, and at present opinion seems to be divided about that. Without the obligatory pie option for an SL poll, I am not sure that the results can be accepted, however.

Darren has already identified himself as a reluctant resident, having tried SL once and rejected it, and so it is interesting to note that the media interest he identifies as hype has actually been loud enough to entice him back in. Perhaps that's why he needed to ask a forum question in order to find out what the residents think ....

The challenge for people from PR and advertising coming into SL is to understand the nature of the platform and to understand the community. It's confusing enough for an individual who arrives in SL for the first time, let alone for a corporation or company who need to get into the heads of the people who are residents on the grid. As I have said several times, it is a mistake to be in Second Life and yet not *of* Second Life. Residents can spot an alien at fifty paces.

Anyone who comes in with a prime purpose of making money or selling things to the residents is, I believe, doomed to failure, or maybe doomed to a hollow shell of the success they could achieve. The trick in SL is to turn any project into a win-win for a company and the residents; not to ask what you can sell to us, but what you can provide that adds to the environment. Quality of content, not hype.

Learning to be in the space that is SL, and orienting client groups and providing a high quality of content requires more than importing RL things into SL. I do believe that can be a win-win for agencies, clients and Second Life residents, handled with care.

Text 100 talks a lot about what they can do for clients in SL, without specifying any explicit evidence that they have experience in world. Maybe they feel that they qualify to do that by nature of their real-life business. Whether that translates into SL expertise is yet to be seen.