Groups!

My friend Kim Junot, a creator of fine dance floors, made a great suggestion this week: “why not start a group?” I agreed that this was a good idea, since there is some evidence that I have “fans” in SL after having visited some clubs and finding many people using my effects.

Creating a group is technically simple; The creative aspect is more difficult. What is the name of the group? What are the titles of the officers and members?

In the end I decided the best thing to do would be to reinforce my brand, “Electric Pixels”. I believe that in order to make things easier for customers, the name should be easy to remember. By making my group name equal to my brand name, I have taken another small step to building up the brand.

What do I do with this group? Basically, I considered the group from the viewpoint of my customers: what would I want to know? There are only a few things I would want to know myself:

• Announcements of new products. Remember, your best customers are your previous customers. Make sure they know you have new things to sell
• Announcements of major events, such as moving locations, temporary closings, etc.
• Announcements of special sales events – and not just spammy advertising, this has to be real sales only

I don't think the customers want to know anything else, but I encourage anyone to correct me.

To make it easy for customers to join my group, I built a Group Inviter device and planted it in the middle of my shop. It appears as if you simply Touch the device to be joined to the group. The script for this is a little goofy, however. It turns out that Linden Lab's LSL does not include any APIs for interfacing with Groups! So how can you possibly script a Group Inviter? Easy – I fake it by simply having it send me an IM with the name of the requestor. Then I just add them manually. If too many people ask for invites and I cannot keep up, well, I would LIKE to have that problem!