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.

Some few physical world businesses are having a hard time in Second Life. They're getting cold feet, or pulling out, or just plain baffled. Though there are more arriving each day than leaving, hard lessons have been learned.

Chief among these is that the customers and would-be customers have learned that many of these businesses just don't give a damn about them. That's a widespread viral message that's very hard to shift out of the market.

From a Marketing and Public Relations standpoint there are a number of things that your marketing team has to be able to do to run a campaign successfully in Second Life - and it can be done - the fact that there are failures should be no deterrent. In the physical world marketing efforts fall flat all the time, but that doesn't stop people trying and succeeding.

If a few efforts don't go so well as they ought to, that's no reason to assume that the platform is a bust any more than a few failed physical world marketing campaigns are a reason to consider human life and civilization a loss (debates as to whether they are or not should wait until the end, please).

One of the big rallying cries of marketing over recent decades is to Stand Out. Stand out from the crowd. Stand out and be heard. Differentiate. Think different[ly].

In the relative mundanity of the physical world, that's not so hard. Round corners, unusual designs, and a bit of the old shiny often does the trick. If that doesn't work, well sex generally does. The keystones however are the different, the innovative, the unexpected, the unusual, dichotomies. And then you bring your brand or product to Second Life.

Face it, you can't really practically market a physical world product or physical world service in Second Life. Attempts to do so haven't really worked out all that well and end up damaging the image of the marketer or the brand. What you can do is perform image-enhancement for your container brands, and general public relations -- and that can work very well.

Let's try an example to illustrate what I'm talking about. First, I'll hypothetically pretend to be Apple corp. Just pretend I'm composed of roughly 20,000 people at least one of whom wears a mock-turtleneck.