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!

One journey ends, the next journey begins

The journey of Peter Stindberg has come to an end. This morning's email brought the final confirmation - the account will be put on hold. My journey will continue though - as Peter Linden.

Based on my experience with translation work in Second Life, I will coordinate the multilingual efforts of Linden Lab. This includes proper localization of the viewer into the major SL languages, creating multilingual versions of the Linden Lab blogs, creating language specific portals for each country and working closely with the communities in-world for those languages, but it will also focus on adding multilingual capacities to the Linden Scripting Language. Part of this will include work with the metrics group to determine a resident's language more reliably through behavioral patterns (which sims get visited, what language gets used in open chat and IM's) than the simple viewer language detection.

I thank all my friends and readers for their support so far, and I hope they will extend their friendship to Peter Linden as well.

Good bye - and hello!

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!

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!

It's a small second world

For the last couple of months I keep on bumping into persons I met before - only in completely different places. And I am not talking about "tourist locations", but a small shop here, a hidden club there, a lonley castle - you get the idea.

The most unlikely coincidence however happened early this week. A new client - Emilie Watkins Premier Equestrian Supplies (great clothing, check it out!) - approached me for some Japanese translations. Since I am always curious about the type of business my clients run, I visited her shop with my new old friend Cake, who in turn brought her friend Nynke in. As I understood it, the Ladies bought quite a lot of the clothing, so giving the translation jobs to me was already a smart move for Emilie... I saw a few things in the shop which Angi, another friend of mine, might like, so I sent her the landmark too.
Angi visited the shop the next day, and in turn brought one of her friends in. Not onlydid he knew the shop before, but he wanted to show it to Angi the week before and simply could not find the landmark. And finally it turned out that he even knew the owner, but under her previous account which she had to give up for some reason. And as Angi tells me he was quite happy to get back into contact with her again.

Nominally, we have millions of residents, but only a fraction of those is online regularly. The population of a small town, so no wonder one bumps into each other occasionally. SL is small then, really small. But still it is funny how things turn out sometimes.

Additional read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_phenomenon

How to conduct business - not

I think this creator of a very well known and widespread product in SL misses out on a business opportunity.

[8:47] Peter Stindberg: Hi xxx, my name is Peter and I run a translation office in SL. I was approached by a user of your product who asked me to translate your manual from English to German since he doesn't know English good enough. Though I'd love to do this for him, I wonder if not maybe you would be interested in requesting a German (and maybe a French, Italian, Spanish...) manual yourself? It would certainly benefit your business. I am taking the liberty to send you my latest notecard, and I'm certainly open to negotiate bundle deals for translations. Best regards, Peter!

[8:48] xxx: Sorry, not interested. If I appeal to forgein users that means also giving them support in german. I cant do that.

[8:48] Peter Stindberg: You really think so?

[8:49] xxx: I already get more questions in spanish, german, and japanese than I can handle. I dont want to make them think I can help.

[8:51] Peter Stindberg: Hmm... I see your point. And you don't think a disclaimer "No support unless in English..." would help? After all German users are the second largest language group in SL.

[8:52] xxx: Let me put it this way. English users dont read the notes in my profile. English users dont read the manual. German users arent giong to notice the warning even if it were in 72 point font and blinking.

[8:54] Peter Stindberg: OK, but you'd be OK if I do the German translation for a private user?

[8:54] xxx: Sure. Since when are instruction manuals a trademark secret? Just make sure that there's a disclaimer at the top notifying that I am not condoning or supporting this document. So they dont think its official or something.

Well, I am going to check out the competing products and see if their creators are more receptive to my offer.