200,000 Banner Impressions on XStreet SL

My translation agency is recognized as Official SL Solution Provider by Linden Lab since March 2009. During a promotion for solution providers I recently got 200,000 free banner impressions on XStreet SL. This means my banner would be shown 200,000 times - not necessarily to 200,000 different people. Excited about this opportunity I submit my banner and the link to Kimmora Linden, and a little later my banner went live.

One question was where I would like the banner to link? I checked out some banners and saw they mostly link to an XStreet item, some to an external website, and some to a SLURL. I asked on Plurk for feedback on banner ads, and most people reported they never click on banners at all. In the end I decided to link it to one of my free promotional offers on XStreet itself, so I can track if the banner ad made a difference.

I had no idea what to expect, or how long those impressions would last. Two hundred thousand sounded like a large number to me, but I could not estimate what kind of visitor traffic XStreet SL would receive. A banner on XStreet SL changes whenever you come to a new page. So if you look at 3 products, you will see 4 randomly selected banners (including the front page banner).

I was rather surprised how quickly the impressions got used up. Only a few hours after the banner went live, the first 10,000 impressions were gone already. In the end, the 200,000 impressions lasted about 3 days. Of course I was curious to see the results.

The XStreet backend gives a nice realtime overview about the status of a campaign. In the end my banner received 58 clicks - this means out of 200,000 times the graphic was displayed, only 58 people (0.029%) clicked on it. This is somewhat sobering, but then again I offer niche services only suitable for a small fraction of residents.

Of course, those 58 clicks might have resulted in additional exposure and business opportunities. The linked product - my Language Kiosk - is a useful tool and free of charge. Surely those people who clicked my banner should consider my kiosk an interesting thing and "buy" it.

Alas, it does not seem like this. While there is definitely an increased exposure - those 58 clicks really end up on the product page - it does not seem to result in an increased attractivity of the kiosk. The number of purchases stays in the range of sales outside the advertised period.

Conclusions

Without doubt, a timeframe of 3 days is way too short to draw any generally valid conclusions. My product is pretty niche - a service offering rather than a retail product. Nevertheless the pricetag for those 200,000 impressions would be 7,999 L$ - had I actually paid for them I would have been extremely disappointed. To cover a full week I would have needed 500,000 impressions at least, at a whopping 17,499 L$.

• To get a better impression, a merchant is well advised to do A/B testing with 2-3 different banners. My banner was static - the majority of banners is animated to overcome the "banner blindness" of most shoppers. A proper test would consist of various versions of the banner, animated and static, with different wording as well.
  
• One of the biggest problems I see is that the banners are not context sensitive. A merchant books 200k, 500k or 2 million impressions, and the ads get randomly displayed. It would make much more sense to ask for a list of keywords and/or categories, and only show the banners relevant to XStreet products of a certain category or keyword.
  
• A by definition intangible and immeasurable effect is exposure. My banner got shown 200,000 times, so a lot of people have supposedly seen it and might remember it in the future.

Still this has been a very interesting experiment, and I thank Linden Lab to give me this opportunity. I would be interested in hearing feedback both from merchants who use banner ads, as well as from shoppers who click or not click on them.

Have you clicked on a banner before? If yes, did you buy the product? If no, why not? Did you buy banner advertising before and where you happy with the results?

I look forward to hear your feedback!

When worlds collide

Yesterday I went to fix the internet access of a RL acquaintance and hooked up his new roommate to his ISDN telephone connection. While I was busy with the hardware, the roommate and I had a little smalltalk and suddenly she disclosed she has a talent for languages and works as translator for 5 languages, and intends to learn Arabic next.

I literally had to bite my tongue to suppress the reflex of offering her a job with my Second Life company Babel Translations. That was such a weird moment, where the worlds really overlapped and almost became indistinguishable. What she told me fit so well into my concept. It felt so normal and natural to talk with her about a business opportunity.

What would have happened had I not stopped myself in time? She would have assumed I run a RL translation business. She might have even been interested in the job offer, and then the explaining would have become awkward. On the other hand, who knows, maybe she does even know SL? For all I know she might be a well known Fashion Blogger or content creator.

Nevertheless that was one of the most bizarre moments regarding SL I ever had. Did you encounter colliding worlds as well?

Getting my hands dirty again - my SL6B booth

People have been complaining that I was rather uncommunicative the past couple of days, did only reply sparsely to GTalk, did not show up a lot on Plurk and was rather busy in-world. The reason is that I was busy building my SL6B booth, and I am quite pleased with the process and result so far.

The theme of this year's SL Birthday Celebrations is "The future of virtual worlds". While exhibitors are encouraged to give their vision of the future, the nature of the 20 sims assigned for the expo are somewhat limiting. A barren, volcanic rock - supposed to be an asteroid - with dark ground textures. An sky featuring permanent starry night. And a grid of roads and paths reminding of the Bladerunner movie.

I initially had a different idea for my exhibition space, trying to build a futuristic version of the tower of Babel. But at the same time I wanted my contribution to be educational, so I needed some display room. Seeing my assigned plot and the atmosphere of the sims, the ideas started to float and almost automatically this type of museum-style building emerged.

One key feature about my building is the concept of "floating words". I chose the words "Language", "Culture", "Context" and "Understanding" in the major languages of second Life and have them floating around my space like bubbles in sparkling water. They are small enough and few enough to (hopefully) be not annoying.

Here is a closeup of me with some floating words around me. So this is what kept me busy the past days, and now I need to work on what I will show on the 32 display panels. What? Thirty two? PANIC!!!

Client feedback on translation services

The second anniversary of Babel Translations is only 3 months away, and looking back is exciting and also satisfying. Building this business was challenging fun, and getting the brand recognition Babel has today, was hard work - but work that makes me proud.

In the past two days I got some very nice customer feedback, which I would like to share:

"I just wanted to tell you that, since yesterday when I updated the French translations, sales of 2 of my items have shot up."

I got a lot of comments like that over the years, and each time is as wonderful as the first time.

"You are 5% more expensive than competitor, so I had no choice, I cannot trust my translations to the 'cheaper'"

Almost exactly a year ago, the pricing issue came first to my attention. By then, I was known to lose clients because my services were too expensive. But in that case I had almost lost a client because I was too cheap! In the last year I was often tempted to lower prices or offer large discounts. But I did not. We offer quality work and try to give best customer service - and there is a price to be paid for that. Quotes like the above, and clients who come to me after being disappointed with a competitor, show me that there is something to be said for my approach.

I thank all the clients over those 21 months for their trust and their business!

Nominated as Entrepreneur of the year - please vote

To my huge surprise I got nominated as "SL Entrepreneur of the Year 2008" by the SL business publication "SL Entrepreneuer Magazine". I am very thrilled about this - Babel Translations has been a challenging project for the last 18 months but one which fills me with pride and satisfaction.

If you are so inclined, you can vote for me on this website. The competition is fierce as there are some great names on that list, so many thanks to all of you who cast their vote for me. In any case, being nominated is a great award already.

Babel Business Development (What Peter has been up to lately - Part 2)

As my faithful 2 readers know, over a year ago I founded "Babel Translations and Text Creation", by now the largest and oldest translation agency in Second Life. Part of the service of Babel Translations was always to offer conceptual and planning work to clients as well. I did not advertise this - it more came naturally during the discussions with the clients. My close friend and SL sister Trinity Dechou suggested a while ago to branch these services out. We discussed the idea a while, made concepts and plans, a portfolio of services and towards the end of July we founded Babel Business Development, a company offering full service marketing and business services to Second Life companies.

Our slogan is "We make a difference", and our goal is to provide exactly what a business owner in SL needs. Unlike RL, where specialists care for their respective areas, in SL businesses are often run by individuals with limited capacity who need to take care of a lot of things: creating their products and services, handling sales, generating public interest,supporting their clients, etc. Trinity and myself have both RL backgrounds in Sales and Marketing/PR, as well as a track record for being successful in SL. With this experience we offer the tools often forgotten or misunderstood to business. With the ability to view business as an outside source we can offer advice on areas to be developed. One core concept is to give our clients only what they need. We do not want to "take over" their business, not change their ways, not take away the power to make the decisions from them. Our clients remain independent, and get from us as much or as little as they want.

Fairly fast we found our first prospective client, an averagely known fashion designer with her partner, who reported to struggle with sales lately. A visit on site revealed many things with potential for optimization, starting from the layout of their shop, product presentation, and continuing with their blog and brand representation. We prepared a report and a number of next steps, alas we seemed to have overwhelmed them and they literally fled the scene.

We changed a few things in our presentation, and set a "Meet and Greet" on the client's property as the first step, and soon enough we found our second client, a rather well known accessory designer, and conduct a brand research for them as of the writing of this blogpost.

Coming from a country where creating your own business is ridiculously difficult, and been employed my whole adult life, for the third time I am thrilled how easy it is to create a business in SL. People with good ideas, designs and creations can simply start to market them, and the abundance of creativity in SL is proof of that. I did not come to SL to become an entrepreneur - but here I am, running the market leader in translation services, a successful furniture company, being the business soul of another company, and now the co-founder of a business development company. Not only is this fun, not only is this useful, it only taught me a lot about myself.

One year Babel Translations - growing of a virtual business

A year ago I danced in one of my favorite SL hangouts in the Dublin sim and met SL oldie Brooke Fairplay. We chatted about SL now and then, how it had changed, and about her business in SL. When she learned that I am not an English native speaker, she casually mentioned that she thought of targeting an international audience as well but somehow never got around to do it. The discussion followed me for a few days. I realized that with my background in marketing and foreign communications - and applied business English for almost 30 years now - I could offer translations and sales-driven text creation as a service to the SL community. This was the moment Babel Translations was born.



Since I had not a lot of L$ back then, I set myself both a financial and time limit. I saved 2000 L$ aside, looked for office space. My first office was at 50L$/week, and I placed a classified for another 50L$/week. On day one I got my first client - the landlord of the office tower - and by the end of the trial period I had translation jobs for 4000 L$ and a revenue of 500 L$. "That goes rather well", I thought, and continued with Babel Translations.

By that time I was primarily offering English/German at a price of 2 L$ / word, but soon requests for other languages came. I recruited French and Italian translators, soon Danish and Swedish followed. I charged 3 L$ for those languages, but kept English/German for a long time at the lower level as I was making these translations myself. In August 2007 I acquired my first reference customer. Blaze Columbia of Blaze Fashions not only insisted on paying the double rate, she also gave me some valuable business tips, like implementing a minimum fee for jobs. Back then I was in awe of what I considered "large" amounts of money, so I did not follow her advice of establishing 500 L$ as minimum fee, but instead chose 250 L$. I was reluctant to mention this limit to the first clients, but none of them objected. So up to date 250 L$ stayed the minimum amount for translation jobs.

Also in August, I managed to acquire the first large translation job worth 9500 L$. I still can remember my accelerated pulse as the client paid the 50% advance payment. It was the single largest sum of L$ I ever got until then. The client turned out to be a repeat account, returning each month with multiple translation jobs. Also in August I moved into my current office at Beachwood, something I never regretted so far as this estate is run perfectly well by landlady Kitty Umarov.

September marked the month where I got first asked to deliver a complete concept. Finally I could apply another of my RL skills, and developed a shop concept, along with English and German press releases, advertising texts and notecards. December on the other hand was a comparatively bad month, with "only" 13 translation jobs, but at the same time the month with the most beautiful job ever. Usually SL businesses asked for translations, but this time a private citizen asked for a translation. He is French, his girlfriend German - they only communicate in English, but he wanted to have one if his favorite love songs translated into German for her. Despite Decembers bad results, I was happy I could pay a bonus to all translators at the end of the year.

In January I took my associate Tina Lynch aboard. Not only did she work on French translations, but she also replaced my notecard-based bookkeeping with a sophisticated spreadsheet based on Google docs. Under her lead we refined the spreadsheet over the next month, and now it is an invaluable tool of keeping track of jobs, degree of completion, distribution of jobs among translators and calculating revenues and fees.

The most "odd" feeling decision took place in February: I almost completely stopped doing translations myself, since it became too time consuming. I started to focus completely on marketing and sales now, and in consequence had to recruit people for English/German. As a consequence I had to raise the price for those languages to 3 L$ / word as well.

In May, Babel Translation took over the competing agency "2nd Tongue Translation". For a couple of months we have silently cooperated already, granting 2nd Tongue a bulk buying rate for the languages they did not offer themselves. As 2nd Tongue's manager had to reduce her SL involvement, Babel Translations stepped in and integrated 2nd Tongue's business into our own.

Today, Babel Translations is the premiere translation and copywriting/text creation agency in SL. With a 3-figure number of jobs and a 6-figure amount of translation fees in recent months, our 50 translators provide the finest and most professional translation services in SL. We cover almost 20 languages, and each language is at least covered by 2, typically 5 translators. The translators themselves are in most cases RL translators, or have a similar qualification in language teaching, journalism or other text creation parts. Even though Babel Translations is a virtual company, we praise ourselves with having the highest standards and providing the best possible service to SL companies.

The past 12 months with Babel Translations where very challenging, but also provided a lot of fun and satisfaction nevertheless. I want to take this opportunity to thank all my clients who put their trust into Babel, as well as all my translators for their exceptional work and loyalty. My special thank goes to Tina, with whom Babel would not be where it is today.

Thanks a lot - I am looking forward to the next 12 months!

No, I did NOT make Babbler!

[13:01] Peter Stindberg: Hi there. What can I do for you?
[13:01] TK: who are you
[13:01] Peter Stindberg: You sent me a friendship offer
[13:02] TK: oh are you the translator duder
[13:02] Peter Stindberg: That's me
[13:02] TK: i need a translator thing
[13:02] Peter Stindberg: An online chat translator? Or commercial trabslation services?
[13:03] TK: online chat
[13:03] Peter Stindberg: Sorry, wrong person. I offer translation services - not a tool.
[13:03] TK: ok i need translation sevice
[13:04] Peter Stindberg: Let me send you my pricelist.
[13:04] TK: ok
[13:04] TK: i need mone
[13:04] TK: y
[13:04] TK: im broke

All's well that ends well

I had a long talk with a certain person I had a business dispute with this afternoon, and another long talk with his associate. In fact we should have had that talk many weeks ago, but the issue became emotional on both sides. The person in question made a remarkable turn, which I honor greatly. His associate did only now hear of the whole matter as RL issues were predominant.

We acknowledged each others position, and reached an amicable agreement on the open payment. I received a satisfactory amount of money. However, since I never was after the money, but more after the acknowledgement that my claims were justified, I donated 4/5 of the amount to the independent SL publication REZ magazine.

Both asked me of course to take down the blogposts. I even got offered money as compensation for my time doing so. I declined and made it clear - and I repeat this publicly - that I refuse any payment for taking down or changing the blogposts. I preferred for a while to simply anonymize the blogposts, but then again I was so glad that this annoying issue got finally resolved, with all parties standing behind the compromise, that I decided to take the posts down completely.

In fact, we even restored trust and business attitude to such a degree that I got assigned the task to finish the project as initially discussed. I am very glad about the whole turn of events. Better reaching this point late, than never. My grudge is completely gone, and I will deliver results of best possible quality.

Interactive Simulated Genital Arousal System

I was talking with a client today, who wanted feedback on some names he has chosen for his products. He's a scripter, a technical type of person, so he prefers technical, descriptive name. Though I have a technical background as well, my marketing-half tends more towards "catchy" names.

Trying to bring my point across, I told him that one of SL's top selling products would probably never had that success, had its creators chosen to call it "Interactive Simulated Genital Arousal System". Instead, they came up with the name "Xcite!", which is a marvel of marketing communication.

My googleized virtual office

For reasons I will not elaborate on, I decided that "Peter Stindberg" should become a completely virtual personality, with as little ties into RL as possible. And with Peter Stindberg becoming an entrepreneur, working with people all over the globe together, and with the person behind Peter Stindberg accessing the grid from all over the globe as well, it became more and more necessary to put some essential information accessible from anywhere as well.

My friend Avarie Parker, brilliant head behind the SL Entrepreneuer Magazine, pointed out Google Docs to me. Reluctant at first ('That surely can't work as advertised'), I am an avid fan of the web enabled spreadsheets and text processing features. My friend and associate Tina Lynch worked wonders with a spreadsheet for Babel Translations, and I collaborate with Ivanova on our ideas for GREENE concept in a shared document.
Gina showed me Google Calendar, a web enabled calendar for planning and scheduling, as well as seeing other's calendars. Very handy is the ability to include other calendars, like the Planned Outages of SL from Linden Lab.

To keep up to date with the constantly growing number of blogs to monitor, Google Reader came to the rescue. Instead of opening a subfolder in my bookmarks and waiting for the dozens of pages to lead, Google reader aggregates them for me and gives me a nice overview list.

Finally, I arranged all those little helpers on my personalized iGoogle startpage, which looks the same from everywhere I access the web. Two handy widgets further enhanced the experience. a World Clock to keep track of the time at my friends locations, and the list of online friends in SL so I can see who is online without being present in SL.

For me, those tools have extremely contributed to me being organized and keeping informed.

Lost in translation

After accepting a job and handling the financial side, this dialogue happened:

[7:55] Peter Stindberg: How did you find us?
[7:56] V.G.: tomorrow 8 am in sl are ok

Public reception

Peter Stindberg: May I ask how you found Babel Translations?
Ariel Erlanger: actually I just did a classified ad search on "translations", and of the few that came up yours seemed the most reputable, and also you published your rates up front which was a big plus.
Ariel Erlanger: i don't like to have to start off by negotiating rates, so that's a big selling point. and having good english in your ad was the clincher. just in case you were curious!
Peter Stindberg: Well you checked the classifieds. There's 4 companies offering translation services who look halfway professional.
Ariel Erlanger: if you're very loose in your definition

Too cheap?

My lovely sister Chey is about to relocate her island, and is extensively using a tool called Rez-Faux by creator Lex Neva. I decided to cold-call Lex and offer her translation services. To my huge surprise - and Lex' as well - she was already considering to get some texts translated, and she was even considering to specifically use my services for this. "Good timing", as she mentioned - indeed.

However, what made her not contact me so far was the fact that my service offerings were too cheap! Cheap prices, so her line of thought, equal cheap quality. And since she has a serious business, she wants and needs quality of course.

On the other hand, I often have clients who gasp in disbelief if I give them a quote, who think that 900 L$ for a 300 word notecard is outrageously expensive.

The problem is of course the different perception. People like Lex, who get a substantial amount of US$ or EUR from their SL work, tend to think in RL categories. Lex knows what services cost in RL, and she thinks in RL categories. The job I got from her would have been something along the lines of 40 EUR / 50 US$ in RL. To see the same work offered in SL for 1500 L$ made her suspicious regarding the quality.

On the other hand you have SL residents, who are struggling with their first business attempts. Who probably camped for weeks or poledanced or DJed their virtual bums off, in order to afford a stall in the cheapest mall. Translation costs of 1500 L$ seems unbelievably expensive to them - something they might - MIGHT - afford in the distant future when their business generates a little revenue.

So why are we so cheap? Or why are we so expensive? We are so cheap because my company - Babel Translations - is a purely SL company. Of course the amount of work in a translation is the same as for a RL translation. But neither myself nor my translators expect to get rich by this - in RL terms. Almost all of them are RL translators too - they know excatly what their work is worth. But by immersing completely into the SL economy, 1500 L$ is not "peanuts" anymore. This translation job in RL - with its 50 US$ revenue - allows them to have a nice dinner in town. They need 4-5 of those jobs per day, to pay their bills. But in the SL economy, 1500 L$ is not peanuts. It pays the rent for two weeks. It buys a new dress AND new hair. In fact 1500 L$ get your farther than 50 US$ do.

And why are we perceived expensive by others? SL has a tendency to skew perceived pricing. Last Call is giving out high quality clothing in their "eternal sale" for 100 L$. In many resident's perception, this lowers the price for quality. What they forget is that LC sells probably thousands of outfits each day, generating hundreds of US$ each day. What Babel Translation offers is an individual service. It is real work involved, and we can only ever sell one copy of each. So asking 3-4 L$ per word is a fair price, and for those thinking in two economies, it's a real bargain.

Looking forward to get some comments on this :-)

Happy Holidays

My good friend Gina (who is due for her own blogpost for a while already) had the courtesy to make some great photographs of me. One of which I turned into the official season greetings card for Babel Translations:

Making a point for translations in Second Life

To many, Second Life appears to be a US dominated community. But every one of you ran into the occasional French, German, Italian or Japanese user already. True, English is the predominant language on the grid. But you'll be surprised how many ethnic communities there are throughout SL. As you know I run a translation agency in SL, so my daily challenge is to raise awareness that even though English is widely used and accepted, you are missing on opportunity to not support other languages as well. And also if you have offerings for your German or French commune, you are missing on opportunity if you don't address the English speaking population.

In order to make my point, I had a close look at the key metrics published by Meta Linden, as of early October. Unfortunately, these statistics only list Countries and not languages. And it also does not list the total number of users, but only the countries by activity and hours spend online. As much as I had loved absolute numbers, I decided to go for countries by activity since this is the important number to my clients anyway.

To my best knowledge, I broke the countries listed down to languages, for example splitting Spanish speaking users from the US count, dividing Belgium into French, Dutch and German users, as well as taking away French users from Switzerland. Then I focused on the languages I am offering translation services for, and tried to calculate their share on the active user community. The result looks like this:

Language Percent
English 39,7%
German 15,1%
Spanish 11,8%
Japanese 9,4%
French 8,3%
Portugese 5,5%
Italian 5,3%
Dutch 4,9%
100,0%

I am well aware that this statistic is - like all statistics - rather skewed. However I think it comes rather close to what I see in SL on a daily basis, and what my clients seem to have realized as well.

As one conclusion to push my point I decided to give a 10% introductionary offer to new clients. If you plan to go international with your second life business, now is the time to do so. And if you think it's too expensive: the majority of translation jobs we do is less thann 1000 L$ in translation fees.

When do YOU plan to go international?