Perfecting the Prim

A few days ago, the well-known blogger Prokofy Neva decided to pay Prim Perfect a visit – and was not impressed with our marketing in situ.

You can read about the whole event here; the resulting dialogue at times became rather heated, but what did emerge for us was some very valuable marketing tips – both in the original post and in comments from others, as well as some practical help from Melody Regent of Regent Estates, which we have acted on.   Some of it was very simple, basic stuff that we (the Prim Perfect team) really should have thought about for ourselves!

As we have said many times, the Prim Perfect offices are located on Oliveto.  This is an Open Space sim which is owned by me, Saffia Widdershins, as part of Regent Estates.  It’s not so much a store as it is the headquarters of the organisation headquarters, where we have meetings.  But it is our public face and, as Prokofy pointed out, it was letting us down by failing to provide useful materials for our visitors.  There was, for example, a display of previous issues – but there was no way to get those earlier issues – and not even a sign to say they were available at OnRez or XStreet SL!   And although there are subscribe-o-matic kiosks set out so that people can sign up for Prim Perfect, Meta Makeover and The Primgraph, there was no way to take a kiosk to display on your own land, or any signs to explain how you could get one.

In short, we were making things too difficult for people who might want to help us spread the Prim Perfect message through Second Life – and not a lot easier for people who just wanted to read the magazine!

Although we have given the location of the offices in blog posts, we had never thought to include it in Places search – and had to find out how!  It was simple – World > About Land > Options – and the check the option that said Show Places in Search (L$30/week) under … Here, we selected the Arts and Culture option – it seemed the closest to what we are doing.  We are already listed on Classifieds – but only spend $50 a week on that.  We remain unconvinced that paying more would boost our sales figures that much higher – the classified ads might make people come to the island to get the magazine, but we suspect that most people would find that a convoluted process.  Still, checking that revealed that the LM was still pointing people to our old offices on Venice – which have since moved!  This we corrected, bringing them to Oliveto too.

Next, we created a landing point for the island.  This had been left at default, landing visitors in the centre of the island.  While we think Oliveto is delightful, people who arrive with the firm intent of getting the magazine are not wanting to be amused by the Tuscan village, spend time fishing, explore Saffia’s show home or even pause at the cafe to relax and enjoy the ambience.  Now they will land straight into the office headquarters.

We have also altered the back wall display so that people who want archived copies of the magazine will be able to get them easily.  We’ve added a sign here explaining this, and also moved the subscribe-o-matics inside the building so that they will be the first things that people see.

Prokofy also felt it was important to have our kiosks available for people who want to display them on their land.  We’ve come a long way since our first kiosks which I had to install personally – that meant I was constantly joining and leaving groups just so I could hurry back and set a kiosk in someone’s sim.  Hippo Vend came as a huge relief – but while the kiosks could be transferred to other people on request, rather alarmingly they demanded the right to take money from those they were transferred too.  This was far from ideal with a vendor that, we were telling people, was handing out free magazines (the permission was a built in feature to allow refunds, and I never found a way of turning it off).

So subscribe-o-matic came as a blessing.  Usually, these are designed to be placed in stores by store owners, allowing them to over-ride the group system that limits people to only twenty-five groups.  We have been using it in a slightly different way, in that we wanted to place it throughout the grid to allow people, by clicking on the kiosk, to become subscribers.  That means they will receive the magazine every time it is published – and it’s a huge advance on the vendor system, as it means that people become regular readers, without having to chase down a vendor every time they read on the blog that a new issue is out, or give up a group.

I might just mention here that we still service ALL the systems, so that we try to get copies out to as many people as possible, updating even our old vendors.

So far, we have been distributing the subscribe-o-matic kiosks on request.  A few estate owners have given us permission to place one or other of the kiosks at strategic points in their sims; we also make it advantageous to advertisers to be hosting one of these kiosks.  But this has been a largely reactive response.  We’re always happy to respond to IMs and distribute the kiosks to anyone who asks, but Prokofy in his blog piece and comments felt very strongly that this was not enough – that the kiosks should be freely available too.  And as we are anxious to see our traffic develop as widely as possible, we have set up a stand now in the offices where people can obtain the kiosks to display on their own lands.

How will all this work?  We are waiting to see!  Prokofy has predicted that, “Saffia will thank me profusely in 60 days for all the increased attention, trust me.”

I’m looking forward to it!