One to One Interactive research arm OTOinsights has released a report entitled
"Serious Games for Marketing: Learnings from Corporate and Amateur Efforts in Second Life," a free-to-download study comparing Second Life's ten most popular user-created sites with the ten most popular corporate branded locations.

In its study, the firm noted that overall, the top user-generated sites are more popular than the top corporate sites in Second Life. "Perhaps the explanation for this disparity is that corporate sites offer different content or experiences than user-generated sites, and builders of user-generated sites are more effective at offering the content users want. Or perhaps the corporate sites offer similar content, and the reason is that Second Life users are simply resisting corporate influence as a part of their hipster ethos. "

In the report, OTOinsights provides five insights for building future branding- and marketing-oriented sites based on its analysis:

1. Invest less in production quality and more in social interaction design.
2. Avoid virtual suburban sprawl and encourage people to gather.
3. Offer robust, high-quality shopping at multiple price points.
4. Promote builds by advertising events across in-world and out-of-world media channels.
5. Offer regular, hosted social events to drive and maintain traffic.

On the last point, the report advises that the most important activities in Second Life are social. "User and corporate builds with the highest traffic ratings host regular social events to drive and maintain site traffic. Concerts, lectures, forums, book discussions, radio shows and numerous other activities are regularly hosted at the most popular user-created and corporate builds in Second Life. Providing unique and highly social reasons for people to visit a build is a major determinant of success."

Said One to One Interactive president and co-founder Jeremi Karnell: "OTOinsight's t=zero initiative is an industry-academic collaborative research project between One to One Interactive and Indiana University's School of Informatics. Our objective is to determine useful measures of user engagement and experience with digital and social media. Our first publication, focused on Serious Games for Marketing, is meant to take a step back and objectively evaluate what worked and did not work in the rush to establish early footholds in Virtual World spaces. Our hope is that these findings will help guide future efforts as we see new entrants and innovations in that space."