Shep Korvin - Blog is the new Black

Remember the true meaning of Easter...

CHOCOLATE!

OK, maybe virtual chocolate isn't quite as interesting as the real thing... sooooo, in lieu of theobromine-laced cocoa-solid goodness, what else can I offer you? How about ... Lucky Easter Eggs!

These were really popular last year (so popular, in fact, that I've spent much of the last 12 months answering enquiries from people saying "hey, why can't I find your Easter eggs on sale any more?" ... in, like, November? July? Hmmmm....)

Anyway, in the grand tradition of pimping-my-own-wares  (and since it's finally the right time of year again!) ... I thought I'd post a reminder that Lucky Easter Eggs are back on sale again at Lucky Designs.

The idea is simple... you hide an "egg generator" in your store ... every now and then, the generator rezzes an Easter egg somewhere nearby. The eggs display letters - Lucky Chair style - and if a visitor manages to spot an egg displaying the initial letter of their name, they can click it to claim a prize.

They're really quick to set-up; just insert a prize into the rezzer, position it somewhere un-obtrusive, and utter the magic word to make the rezzer turn invisible and commence the rezzing of eggs. If you're in need of a fast, off-the-shelf Easter promotion for your store/venue, then this could be exactly what you need!

You can buy the basic single-rezzer kit for L$400 at Lucky Designs... and we have discount multi-packs (useful to extend your coverage over a larger venue) on offer too.

Have a great Easter! :)

Numbers...

Just been adding some stats up. Thought I'd reproduce my findings here, for the curious...

Total number of prizes given out via 3rd generation* Lucky Chairs, grid-wide, since their release in July:

2,066,642 

(or, in other terms, an average of 9,657 "lucky letters" are claimed every day....)

Number of bid box** auctions won (since the system was launched, 1 year ago):

487,082

So.... put together, that's over 2 and a half million user interactions with Lucky Designs Content clocked up since I started measuring usage.... and that's only based on two attractions! (unfortunately, I didn't have the foresight to put user metrics into the likes of MobVend and "What's in the Box?" - doh!)

Still, pretty impressive audience figures, IMHO :)

 

*Only 3rd generation chairs are included in this total - earlier chairs didn't include a networked odometer, so I can't track those. The actual number of prizes given out by _all_ lucky chairs in SL will be significantly higher.

**Charity auctions are excluded. The "charity edition" of bidbox doesn't link into the LuckyNet advertising network, so isn't reflected in these stats.

The Golden Rule (and my biggest mistake...)

The Golden Rule for encouraging repeat customers - and growing a successful business in SL - is simple: Find a way to keep reminding people that your business exists. Nothing else is more important than this.

How many times have you visited a store in SL, and thought "hey, this place is pretty cool! ... I *must* come back here again!" ... and then, mere hours later, totally forgotten about it? If you're anything like me, that's probably a daily occurrence. My inventory is *full* of landmarks from places which - despite my best intentions at the time - I've never, ever, been back to.

Establishing some kind of communication channel to your keenest customers - the customers who think you have neat stuff, and who would actually *like* a prompt to come back to visit you from time to time - is absolutely fundamental to becoming a big player in SL. I mean ... yeah ... it's good to get a "NEW RELEASES, W00T!!" message out whenever you have new stuff for sale; but beyond that, the very act of sending out a message to people reminds them that "hey, that cool store still exists... I should really go back and check it out again!". Face it: there's a bazillion other places in SL that people could go - you *need* to keep pinging _your_ place on people's radars ... reminding them that you exist; reminding them that they thought enough of your products to consider visiting you again one day.

So, how do you do that?

Well, the most obvious approach is to set up a group. When I first set up business in SL, I also (naively, as it turns out) set up a group that my customers could join, to be notified of updates, offers etc.

Result? The thing flopped ... nobody joined. Despite my limitless self-conviction that my new clothing brand was *the* greatest thing to ever hit the SL club scene, the reality was I had about 6 products, and was selling out of the basement of some sleazy SL club. There was a much lower limit on the number of groups you could join in those days (15? something like that?...) - and nobody in their right mind was going to "waste" a group slot on a small-time operator like me. Turns out that groups can be a very hard sell, until you've become a reasonably big player on the scene. (unless you're pandering to a niche product - but that's another topic for another day)

Also, it's difficult to persuade somebody to actually go through the hassle of opening the search facility ... finding the group ... clicking the join button. Ideally, you need to dumb the process down - turn it into a one-click "impulse" decision. "Click this poster to join our update list" - that kind of thing. That wasn't really possible in days of yore; LSL has never been able to translate object clicks into group subscriptions (though the open-sourcing of the SL client has brought work-arounds - check out Cassini Creation's subscription bot services you're thinking of going down that path!).

Anyway, with these problem in mind, I set out to build myself an "alternative" to group messages; a device that could collate a mailing list for me, and then send out a notecard (or item... or an IM... or anything else I wanted) to everybody on that list, without taking up one of their precious group slots.

This was pretty much my first "real" scripting project in LSL... and the solution that I fashioned was a bit clunky (You couldn't make http calls from LSL in those days, so the system used e-mail for server communication, and most of the collation was actually done by an out-of-world process).

Yep, it was an ugly solution for sure... but it worked, and it solved my immediate problem. People happily clicked on my magic poster, and my mailing list gradually got larger and larger. Every time I sent out a newsletter, the store would fill up with green dots. Green dots begat more green dots, and my customer base expanded... yay! :)

Unfortunately, in recent times (and when  I say "recent", I'm dodging the truth ... I guess I mean "during most of 2007") I kind of fell out of the habit of sending those newsletters. There's a couple of reasons for this - but, basically, growing the "Lucky Designs" company was getting pretty much 99% of my attention last year, which meant that there was comparatively little time available to work on new products for LapGirl (and there's a limit to how many times you can send out a newsletter without actually having new products to talk about!!).

Lucky Chairs - on the other hand - are a much bigger deal. They're the kind of "killer app" that you *can* persuade people to sign up to a group for ... so from the Lucky Designs perspective, I didn't really have a driving motive to make the mailing list system work. The other (more fundamental) reason for the lapse was the fact that the PC which handled the out-of-world components of my clunky subscription service went up in smoke, and I never did get around to re-installing the software on a different machine. So, for a while, all those LapGirl subscription requests were just building up in a mailbox ... un-serviced...

And you know what? As it turns out, failing to follow my own "Golden Rule" is probably the single dumbest "business thing" that I've ever done in SL. Over the last couple of weeks, I've started a harder push on promoting the LapGirl business again - including reviving the old mailing list ... and wow! - the tills are humming! For the first time in (longer than I can remember) LapGirl is turning over more cash than Lucky Designs. I really don't know why I ever let things slip so much!

Some considerable pain was involved getting the notification system up and running again - (including manually cutting-and-pasting details from about 400 subscriber emails that had been lingering in a neglected mailbox ... My CTRL-C/CTRL-V muscles are still sore!!) ... but everything is ticking over nicely now.  ...That said, there's no denying the fact that - in these days of easy http access - the most sensible decision would probably be to think about retiring the existing system and starting again from scratch.

The more I think about that, the more tempted I am to use Zero Linden's silo back-end as a datastore... Admittedly, that approach would require *much* more hoop-jumping than a MySQL-based solution (I'd need to emulate some SQL-ish index and locking features from first principles, just to make it viable), but would - potentially - make the whole thing a *much* easier sell to third parties (kind of like a "host-it-yourself" alternative to the Subscribe-O-Matic, for the semi-web-savvy user ... "just drop this php onto a web server, and you're good to go!"). God knows I've had plenty of enquiries about buying the system in the past, and I've promised umpteen people that I might make a more polished version of it some time in the future. Maybe it's finally time to come through on that offer? ;)

Watch this space...

Oops, that was Christmas, right there...

Norovirus ... it's the disease sensation that's sweeping the UK! ... and, of course, being a total trendsetter, I decided to go and contract it a couple of weeks before everybody else ... and in a much more complicated, side-effect-laden way than the hoi polloi. I'll spare you the gory details - but take it as read that I spent a whole lot of time immediately prior to Christmas being generally unwell, and unable to focus on Second Life world domination plans...

Which is a shame, as I had a couple of neat products to roll out over the festive season ... but they ended up getting a really low-key release, as I just couldn't make it into SL long enough to get the momentum going with all the Lucky Designs regulars. I guess that's one of the hazards of being a (primarily) one-man show ... you can't afford to take sick leave!

Anyway, since this blog has become a potted history of my SL business adventures, I figured I should still blog the items retrospectively ... even though they're not actually on sale any more. (Though, give me another 10 months, and I'll probably have them out on the shelves again...)

 

Firstly, Lucky Santa - my old collaborative project with caLLie cLine made a re-appearance for the 2007 season ... this time sporting a much more up-to-date 3rd generation Lucky Chair script. Of course, since we originally built this item, caLLie has gone on to become an international virtual supermodel megastar ... but that seemed like a good excuse to call her in for a new promotional photoshoot *grin*.

"Lucky Santa is the perfect centerpiece for your store's Christmas Grotto - he's a third-generation Lucky Chair, with fully-customised dialogue and effects. Sit on his knee, and let Lucky Santa decide if you've been naughty or nice.... your customers will love it!"

And secondly... The Lucky Advent Countdown made its debut. I love the principle behind this device ... a really simple mechanic, underpinning a sure-fire traffic builder. Unfortunately, during the critical pre-Christmas run-up, I spent more time lying in a dark room wishing that the world would stop spinning than doing useful things like hyping my SL wares, so not very many people found out about it :(

It's too good to waste - expect a less-seasonal remix of the basic concept to emerge sooner or later. Definitely before next Christmas ;)

Anyway,  I hope you all had a great Christmas holiday - (fortunately, I was fully recovered in time for the big day, so Christmas in the Korvin Household wasn't a *total* wash-out!).

Wishing you all a very Lucky 2008!

The Electrolux Innovision Award

I'm extremely proud to announce that I picked up a rather cool item of (virtual) silverware earlier this week - the "Electrolux Innovision Award", in a special event intended to "recognize and celebrate the most creative and exciting inventors in Second Life". You can read more about the shindig over on the Millions of Us blog, here.

I was really pleased to be invited to the event - aside from getting to carry home some phat l3wt, it was nice to mingle with a few people whose work I've always admired from afar ... and perhaps somewhat affirming (and pleasantly surprising!) to discover that so many them knew who I was too, and what I'd invented. I guess when you work as an independent developer, it's easy to fall into a little bubble, where you don't really have the best idea of how your work is perceived outside your immediate circle of friends/customers, by the world at large... so ... yeah... I was really hyped up and happy by the time I left :)

Not a bad little event either... really nicely-designed venue ... the "innovision" build resembles a huge light-bulb, floating out of a giant electrolux cardboard box. I find these abstract, in-your-face-metaphor builds are sometimes a bit hit-and-miss, but this one was perfect; really nice work, and *just* the right size too. I think my only criticism is the inclusion of (possibly) the most frustrating physical elevator I've ever encountered in Second Life... it took me a good 4 or 5 attempts to get up to the presentation area inside the light bulb (I don't think it jived particularly well with prim shoes!), and it claimed several other victims over the course of the event...  

The event kicked off with a short presentation from Deva Bade (aka Carola Lundell of Electrolux), about their presence in Second Life. They seem to be taking an interesting approach. No doubt warned away from the (obvious) folly of trying to sell prim fridges and prim vacuum cleaners to SL residents, they instead seem to be trying to promote themselves as some kind of facilitator for SL's inventor/gadgeteering community, and pushing for some kind of brand association with virtual world innovation. Or -- maybe in simpler terms -- trying to be the "inventor geek" equivalent of Pontiac's Motorati ;) (my words, not theirs). It's an interesting approach to take - but from the materials they put out, they do appear to be playing a long game. It'll be very interesting to see how their presence pans out.

The presentation was followed by a short "panel discussion" about a few topics of general interest to SL inventors. The electrolux blog describes this as a "fast and furious chat conversation about how to provide customer service of new innovations and how to integrate web sites and email into Second Life" ... but to be honest, it was probably the weakest part of the event - didn't really have enough formal structure to be considered a proper "panel" imho, ... and the discussion got a bit random at times. Nevertheless, the hostess - Daphne Molinari, did a pretty good job of keeping things moving ... and for that matter, the hosting throughout the event was pretty slick and impressive. Top marks on that front :)

So, onto the awards - you can read who got what, and the introductions were given to each award over on the MoU blog, so I won't waste space repeating that here, other than to say I was really happy with my introductory blurb; somebody had obviously done their homework :)  ...worryingly, Daphne crashed out just as I was walking up to receive my award - but she got back in-world pretty fast, and I guess SL wouldn't be SL without at least one good crash per event ;)

Then we all went downstairs - (or *tried* to go downstairs - the demon elevator _really_ wanted everybody to stay upstairs, and took some considerable fighting to convince otherwise) ... for the unveiling of a new contest being run by electrolux. They want people to invent a new word, bringing to mind innovation in SL - you can read all about it at the electrolux "innovision hub" in-world. The prize is L$100,000 ... to be awarded in a fortnight's time.... gotta be worth a try, right? 

The music was turned on, and the event ended with a party. Flea Bussy impressed us with some *amazing* avatar designs - a few of which made it into the flickr pool here ... but - sadly - it was already time for me to make my excuses, and leave.

Dressed as a fish.

(thanks Flea!).

Anyway, I had a great time, it was _wonderful_ to be awarded a prize, and I'll be watching with great interest where electrolux go from here. Thanks to all involved! :)

New products, New home, and 10,000 chair-hops a day.

Wow... July has - possibly - been my busiest SL month *ever* (which is why the blog fell a little bit by the wayside). Apologies to everybody who's relying on my RSS feed to see what I'm up to. Here's the obligatory catch-up post...

First, the latest version of the Lucky Chair ("3rd Generation") went on sale couple of weeks ago. The new version of the chair is way more user-friendly than previous incarnations - has nice pop-up menus, and a boatload of handy new features like wildcard wins, options for cash prizes, self-repair mode, test wins, content tags, full oXDos compatibility... the list goes on! Suffice to say, it's a pretty major advance over the 2nd generation design.

Perhaps one of the more interesting new features - from my point of view - is the fact that the chairs can (optionally) report usage statistics back to a central server ... so, for the first time, I can finally track how popular lucky chairs are. (Or, at least, how popular this new batch of lucky chairs is). Can you believe that these new chairs are already reporting over 10,000 uses every day? Pretty impressive figures ... I doubt you'll find many other SL marketing attractions that pull in that kind of audience figure :)

Last month also saw the release of a brand new product - "What's in the Box?", which was developed in co-operation with a new Lucky Designs collaborator, Fnordian Link. I originally hooked up with Fnord a couple of months ago, when he came to me with a pitch for new device that he thought would be of interest to Lucky Chair customers. Weeks later (and after much refinement of the original design), "What's in the Box?" (AKA WITB?) is now available for purchase.

At heart, WITB? is a simple guessing game - if you're the first player to guess the prize that's concealed inside the box, you win the round (and the contents of the box!). Between "guessing" rounds, the unit displays a slideshow of potential prizes... so, in order to play the game, players need to hang around and watch pictures of your products.

The benefits to you, as an operator, are multifold: People spend time in your store playing the game (=dwell), people have to concentrate on pictures of your products in order to play (=improved brand/product range awareness), and of course - ultimately - you're dropping sample products into the hands of potential customers ... which they percieve as being higher value than a "regular" feebie, by virtue of the comparative scarcity/difficulty to obtain (the "lucky chair" effect!).

Development of WITB? was a new experience for me, as although I've collaborated with other developers on various SL projects in the past, this is the first time I've shared scripting duties with anybody. Fnord wrote the core of the script, while I concentrated on some of the trickier anti-cheating refinements (and ensuring the game has the same look + feel as other Lucky Designs products). The process went really smoothly - I'd anticipated a leisurely development cycle that would probably last a few weeks, but I think we managed to nail the majority of the code within a couple of days. Fnord was great to work with; expect further collaborations soon!

And finally - Lucky Designs has moved! The company was starting to outgrow the parcel we had in the November Sim ... so, I've moved to a much larger plot in Bermuda. (Frequent readers might recognise this as the spot that formerly housed my millionaire playboy mansion. What can I say... land is at a premium... sacrifices have to be made. *sob*). The building is actually a (very slightly modified) prefab by (???), called "Enigma" - as soon as I saw it in the store, I thought it would make the *perfect* beachfront corporate HQ. The new place has a huge showroom, a presentation room (which we packed full of avatars for the "WITB?" launch event), and a couple of other areas which I've got plans for... all to be revealed soon!

Do drop by and check the new place out :) http://slurl.com/secondlife/Bermuda/50/21/22/

Meanwhile...

Almost forgot to mention - I'm sponsoring this week's picture contest over at Linden Lifestyles....

 

Some might see this as nothing more than a cheap scam in which I get to see a bunch of my friend's avatars virtually naked.

Damn.

Busted.

Seriously though, a lot of people who only really know me through the Lucky Chair business are surprised to discover that I run a few (more conventional) content-creation sidelines too (The aforementioned LapGirl Boutique being one of the more successful brands in my portfolio). I often test-run new "Lucky Designs" inventions in one of my stores.... and when the Lucky Chair regulars show up for a preview of the new tech, and ask - out of curiousity - "whose store is this anyway?" - they have a bit of a double-take when they discover it's mine.

Well, here's my viewpoint: would you take fishing advice from a guy who's never actually caught a fish? Would you take your car to be serviced by a guy who's never worked on a real engine before, but has read a bunch of really good books on the subject? Or board a plane that's about to be flown by a pilot who has some radical new ideas on the science of aerodynamics, but has never actually sat in a cockpit....?

Of course not; that's crazy. And by that same token, I wouldn't presume to tell people how to build an SL business, or how to promote SL products, unless I had personal experience (and success!) at doing exactly the same thing myself.

And *that's* why I run a sleazy lingerie empire in my spare time.

No, really it is...

:)

LapGirl Remixed

*gulp* - has it really been more than a month since I updated this thing? Oops.

So... what have I been up to? Well, I totally re-built LapGirl Boutique, due to the fact that one of my neighbours parked a butt-ugly barrage of advertising hoardings right outside my front door. (nice? not!). I guess she did me a favour really - it's been more than a year since my last rebuild, and things have moved on a little in terms of SL store design since then. As such, the new store goes for a more realistic look than the previous version. Well... realistic to a point; I've got lots of funky themed areas in there...

The front cash desk. My new pet theory is that the more you make your store look like a real store - in terms of furnishings, ambiance, structure, etc - the more likely you are to tap into people's real-life conditioning to want to buy something when they find themselves in an environment like that. Of course, I've got no way to really prove this great piece of thinking unless I build a control copy of this store somewhere else, sans cash desk.... but nevertheless, it's a great cod-psychology excuse when people ask me why I wasted so many prims on a cash register.

(oh, yeah... about that cash register... Iris recently pointed out that the display panel makes it look like I stole it from a gas station. Oops. That'll teach me to examine the goods more closely next time...)

Nutterfly's "Ink Fairy" tattoo range now has its own store-within-a-store. I had a lot of fun theming this area. And before you ask... that's a tattoo gun on the counter top, not a sex toy!!

Are we the only Lingerie store with a built-in dungeon?

(the vampire hot-tub was one of the first things I ever built in SL. It's got a pretty neat particle effect if you hop onto the "virgin" pose-ball. Try it!)

Test-drive area, complete with stripper pole.

Go on.

You know you want to.

Now... this is interesting (pay attention!) - I'm field testing my new "micro auction" system in this corner. It's simple - just pay the relevant box to make a bid. The box holds onto your payment until either (a) somebody else makes a higher bid (in which case you instantly get your money back),  or (b) you win! ... in which case you get the contents of the box. Auctions recycle every few hours - the idea is to have a constant stream of short, low-price "micro auctions". So far, it's proving really popular :)

Expect to see retail version of this system in the Lucky Chair store very soon....

Crowdpricing and Podcasts

Walker Spaight has coined a wonderfully web2.0-esque phrase to summarise exactly what it is that MobVends do.... "crowdpricing". I love that word! ... so expect me to use it a lot in the future :)  ... you can read what he had to say about MobVendors over on 3pointD.com. In a predictably yin-yang fasion, Prokofky uses the associated comments section to diss Mobvends/Lucky Chairs. Yay!... my first public denunciation by Prokofky Neva - I feel like I've finally arrived on the SL developer circuit! My FIC membership card must surely already be in the post?

Elsewhere in the SL mediasphere... (this happened 6 weeks ago, and I have to admit - with slight embarassment - completely passed me by at the time) ...the "GBAffair" Podcast devoted an entire episode to Lucky Chairs! Episode #61 (direct mp3 link) features almost 30 minutes of LC-related goodness ...chat, interviews, and even a spot on Lucky Chair etiquette! Great stuff :)

MobStalking...

What a week! After a few (worryingly) quiet days immediately following its retail launch, MobVend suddenly took off in a *huge* way mid-week, and a reporter from SLNN.com came to interview me over the whole phenomena [article here]. Neat! :) 

For me, the whole week has been a heady mixture of terror and excitement. Terror because - well, let's face it, the baseline performance of SL has been particularly poor this last couple of weeks, and the MobVends *do* encourage crowds on a scale that tends to push SL to its limits. This scheme definitely sits on the borderline of "sensible things to attempt in SL", and the last thing I want is a pitchfork-wielding flashmob baying for my blood if one of the units flakes out under the strain! 

I guess that's why I've been nervously following the flashmobs... observing from a distance; re-assuring myself that everything is running OK (and getting some great crowd-shots in the process!)

And as for the excitement? Well... I guess you have to experience one of these flashmobs first-hand to understand it, but the atmosphere at these events is *wonderful*. I'm not really sure how to explain it, but there's the strangest kind of buzz in the crowd; a combination of camaraderie and anticipation as the price ticks down (even if you're only there to watch!) - then the buying frenzy as the "mad minute" kicks off - w00ts from the people who get the best price, wails from the people who weren't paying attention ... but nobody seems to stay upset for long, they just wait around for the vendor to tick down all over again... Great stuff! :) 

 

One thing that's become apparent is that - currently - the MobVends aren't as "slow-burning" an attraction as the lucky chairs are, and the more strategically-minded users are viewing them as a tool to get a short-term flurry of large crowds into their stores.

 

I'm expecting that perception to shift as more MobVends come on-stream. If you consider the fact that there are currently around 500 lucky chairs operational in SL... if there were 500 mobvends, each running a 20 minute prize cycle, then it would (mathematically) take a well-organized mob nearly a week to "floor" them all (assuming they didn't eat, sleep, take toilet breaks, or any other messy meatspace stuff like that) - in other words, there should be plenty of activity to occupy even the most insane flashmobber soon, and sufficient variety to allow them to pick and choose the sites that they decide to mob. In that sense, I guess sellers who get into the scene before it reaches any kind of saturation point are going to be the ones who stand to gain the most from serendipitous traffic.

(Hrm... salespitch!)