Friday, January 9, 2009

All Publicity IS NOT good for you....apparently

This week, our "friends" at Linden Lab, posted a blog reminding everyone in Second Life to NOMINATE anyone they feel who might be worthy of winning a prize from Linden Lab.

This time though, our "friends" decided to open a Forum on the subject so the Community could ask questions, respond, give feedback.

The idea, according to our "friends", is that this prize (Grand Prize is $10,000USD) is somehow a recognition of the Second Life Community. I suggest you read the Forum posts before listening to me drone on.

OK? Ready now? Notice how the Forum "closed" after hard questions and poor feedback were presented? Guess Lab can't stand the idea of "Open and Transparent" Communication.

As you see, Linden Lab Employee's were at a loss to explain just exactly HOW this prize equates into Recognition from the Second Life Community. If you read the rules and qualifications of the Contest, you will see very few Residents in Second Life are actually able to participate. Mostly, those that are qualified are from the "GRID", those "little" guys that made it big building by contracts in Second Life, like Fizik. If you take a really close look at this Contest, it really does seem slanted to just a few individuals.

I don't mind that Linden Lab wants to run a Contest to bring more recognition to Second Life, but do they have to be so closed minded in how they run these Contests. Apparently, someone like myself, is woefully unqualified to be a Linden Lab Poster Child, even though I have been working for nearly 6 years in New Resident Education. Even great Builders like Barnesworth Anubis isn't qualified for this contest, which is the most amazing thing I've seen, since Barnesworth would be a great Poster Child for Linden Lab; at least he would'nt be bad mouthing Linden Lab during interviews :)

Once again, our "friends" at Linden Lab have failed to understand the Community of Second Life. This is due largely in part to the idea that Linden Lab Employee's don't come to OUR world unless it's something to do with their job. I know of only a handful of Linden Lab employee's that still log into their pre-employment accounts and even then it's for such a small period of time that even they aren't able to gauge the Second Life Community.

Linden Lab isn't looking for a real Community Mover and Shaker in this "contest", they are looking for a Poster Child that will speak wonderfully of them; looks like this contest was tailor made for our friends like Fizik Baskerville. I think it would have been a lot wiser to just hire someone like Fizik to be the Linden Lab Poster Child instead of running some faux contest and pretending to be looking through the ranks of the REAL Shakers and Movers of the Second Life Community. Maybe Linden Lab understood one thing about the Movers and Shakers, that they could care less about Linden Labs' prize or contest. None of the Movers and Shakers in the Second Life Community would even allow themselves to be considered for this type of cheap sell out process Linden Lab has setup.

First Linden Lab screws the pooch with the Open Space SIMs and here they are shortly after, hiring a spokesperson thru some faux contest. Once again, our "friends" at Linden Lab prove their inability to do the simplest of things. Here's to our "friends" at Linden Lab, when you screw up, you do it so well!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is exactly why I tried to avoid Lindens for the last 1.5 years. I have enough conversations logged with those people to remind me to run away from them. And there's a reason we banned a Linden from our Sandbox at Pixelpark, too.
The way they are handling the "discussions" on their forum is hillarious. If you can't stand your residents answers don't invite them to talk to you! Katt Linden is the worst that happend in SL for a long time.