I've made no mystery of the fact that I am not a big fan of Second Life but at the WOMMA conference I'm at today I just saw a very good case study using Second Life in a very smart way.

Second Chance is a tree reforestation Project. They created a campaign that took the popular online social media experience and connected it offline for a  real world impact. Users can buy a tree online and plant it in Second Chance's island which will cost users approximately $1. For every tree that is planted on the virtual island a real tree will be planed in needed regions in Brazil and Costa Rica.

My complaint about Second Life has been I've never seen how it accrues any value to something outside Second Life. This campaign connects real world to virtual life. It has a clear objective and connects a users action to a reaction. It also has a strong viral component. If I'm an environmental activist this is a very easy way for me to promote my cause to networks online. It's on Facebook, etc. It's a complete campaign. Not just something thrown up on Second Life to see what sticks.  They can draw a clear ROI by taking the investment costs and dividing it by the amount of trees planted giving a cost per tree number that will tell them whether this campaign was cost effective.

Take a read of this interview done by Kris Hoet, Marketing Manager for MSN EMEA. Interesting stuff. Great job Kris.

Tech Crunch does a good job of identifying the point I made here about consumers wanting to own their personal data. I just  bought two more books yesterday on Amazon. I keep wondering how long it will be until someone gets really smart and creates a site where my Amazon data can live with all my other purchasing data so I can actually shop around! Or at least have my Amazon purchases show up on my blog and my Facebook profile if I so choose. As it is now I have to manually input them into each profile. And if I rate the book on Amazon I want that rating to show up on my other sites. Am I losing you?  I know my father just said "WHAT?" Dad, we'll talk at Thanksgiving.

The big story this week for those of us interested in social media marketing is Open Social, Google's first step into the social networking field. For now this story is still mostly a developer story. But I'm a marketer so I look at this and say 'how does this change the game for me?'

First, what is it? Jeremiah Owyang does a great job of explaining it in common language. My favorite part of his post is this;

Web Marketing no longer is limited to your corporate site. Let go of the concept of ‘driving traffic to your website’ as a sole measurement of success. The web, it’s message, and your battles are now fought on the open and distributed web. Trusted decisions between prospects and customers are made on these social communities and networks, savvy executives need to go there.

This is so true. A companies web traffic is an element of that story, but only a piece. Marketers must be able to gage the pulse of their brand in the larger social media. Brands/products are being debated and rated with or without you and it's a marketers responsibility to acknowledge and respect that. Social media is quickly becoming a part of all smart marketing mixes.

I had an odd thing happen today. I got an email from a co-worker in MSN asking me some questions about a session he saw I was giving at The Conference on Marketing 08. The interesting thing was I didn't know I was speaking at the conference. I had submitted an abstract from a call for presenters awhile back but didn't know my session had been selected. A guess a bit of an odd way to find out, but just the same I'm pretty excited.

I'm speaking at the Social Media Symposium. It's definitely an A list of presenters. I'm more excited to hear about what these visionaries are going to say than I am about my own session. If you really are judged by the company you keep this group ain't a bad group to hang with. If you are in Naples, Florida on February 4th come on down. Check out the details here.