Huh? Yes, as a member of the admin team I organized a pet photo contest for Halloween in 2019. Inspired by my love of drag queens, I went ham with the captions and the office wide Slack channel blew up. Strangely enough, this led to a conversation with a marketing executive and I was able to share that writing is my passion and that I was hoping to pivot into copywriting. Over the next couple months, I was approached to write Facebook ad copy, and my ads ended up having the highest CTR to date.

Then What? I was promoted to the Linden Lab marketing team in March 2020, the most normal month that ever monthed. It was challenging to take on a new role while working remotely for the first time; almost every task I was given was something I had never done before. The team was small, five people total, and I was the resident copywriter. Within a month I was tossed into the deep end: writing media pitches, blog posts, community engagement, and more. However, I wasn’t afraid to do hours of research and ask questions when necessary.

Who Is She? Linden Lab has two products: Tilia, a money services business, and Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world composed almost entirely of user-generated content (UGC), and truly pioneered the entrepreneurial aspect of UGC with a digital marketplace. It debuted in 2003 and although it did receive significant media attention from 2006-2008, it had faded from the mainstream conversations on gaming and internet culture by the time I joined. For about a decade, the platform had plateaued into a consistent 750K monthly active users, although the robust virtual economy reported a GDP of about $500 million USD in 2015. Unfortunately, if mentioned in the media, Second Life was often regarded in the past tense or presented in a way that negatively stereotyped our users. When I joined the team, we had some damage control to do. So, we embarked upon a rebrand. There were a lot of web properties that hadn’t been updated in years, so we switched to a newer CMS for extra customizability. Suddenly I was in charge of landing pages with themes like cyberpunk, LGBTQ+ Pride, surfing, and more. By the end of 2020, we had gained about 250K monthly active users.

At the beginning of 2021, we saw the need for more balanced efforts on both acquisition and retention. Our email marketing strategy had been bare bones, a couple campaigns a year. Seeing an opportunity for more targeted engagement, the marketing analyst and I worked together to assemble audience segments. This culminated in a weekly newsletter focused on community engagement targeted to high hour users, as well as seasonal event emails to larger groups.

Origin Story: While studying screenwriting at NYU, I had honed my knack for background research in order to create authentic characters and stories. Similarly, my understanding of the psychology of choices played an important role in my copywriting. These days I remind myself of the advertising adage “you are not your customer” and approach a range of consumer profiles with an open mind. My screenwriting teachers often told us “the audience is smarter than you think,” and I believe that notion of respect is just as important with marketing copywriting. If you think that you are smarter than your customers, it will show.

The Metaverse Craze: The resurgence of interest that came with Mark Zuckerburg’s announcement about Meta gave us an opportunity to show how much we had learned and grown over the last two decades. Seizing the moment, Second Life facilitated several high-profile business partnerships and hosted a new class of special virtual events. These provided opportunities to overcome misconceptions and negative stereotypes by writing about underrepresented elements of SL, important for both community engagement as well as new user acquisition. A virtual cinema initiative featured Film Threat, we debuted a virtual theme park inspired by the Zenescope universe, and special events were hosted by Titmouse, Adult Swim, and even Fashion Week.

What I learned: When dealing with a product this vast and hard to categorize, it’s paramount to maintain key value propositions. In this case, the concepts of agency and infinite possibility guided the messaging. I wrote copy for landing pages and email campaigns that stressed inclusivity, social connections, and the creativity of doing anything you can imagine in a virtual world. Using our community blogs and social media, I shared stories of what artists and entrepreneurs were achieving in our metaverse. I dismantled misconceptions around the product by showing that in Second Life, you can express yourself like never before.