The Fury, The Bluster, The Status Quo: LL/Customer Communications

I generally avoid the subject of LL's relation to its product and its customer base. I do not want to turn into one of those "SL Bloggers": spending more time reading each other's writings with the requisite commenting and counter commenting. I would rather be highlighting those things that interest and excite me and share them with others.

However, I cannot help myself. While looking for a script snippet, I somehow landed in the discussion on LL's new communications strategy. I was pleased to see that this Amanda Linden was far more engaging than her predecessor Kat Linden, who was so much a PR frontman as to be surprised that customers might respond for her in kind.


Reading down the responses was a poor choice on my part. I have many other things I need to do*. However, Amid the high noise-to-signal ratio, with the usual squawks about democracy, old issues, and "back in the day" posts, I was very pleased to see a rather coherent tone of dialogue occur:

Lab: We are listening to our customers
Customers: Prove it
Lab: Ok


There were two great disappointments to me reading these, however.

1) The Linden-du-Jour having cutesy names to refer to the SL Customer base. Amanda Linden repeatedly used the term "Resi." I should hope she get this out of her head right now. We are Primary or Secondary customers, Vendors and Third-Party App Developers of their platform. We should be communicated with as such. This goes both ways, of course.

2) LL is a company that rests entirely on one product. It tries to account for a broad customer base whose interests are often in contention with each other and their forums and office hours have breed a great deal of discontent of the years. This has lead to louder and louder clamoring by a very small body of commentators. The result: more reasonable voices that have legitimate concerns appear to be overlooked. LL Reps continually try to speak to the ranting our Screaming Mimis instead of having a conversation with the rest of us. This is rewarding bad behavior and LL will do to move away from this.

After nearly 5 years in Second Life, I am still enjoying myself. Sadly, every time I look up and delve into the broader SL/LL community, I see the same floorshow and I get the distinct impression none of the actors have changed.

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*Yes, clearly I then went and took the time to post a blog post on it to expound on my views and beat my chest and scream into the aether. So much for priorities...