3pointD.com

I have to say, I continue to be impressed with what Reuben Steiger’s virtual-world services firm, Millions of Us, has done for Pontiac’s presence in Second Life. Their Motorati Life project essentially gives users land to build projects promoting not Pontiac but anything related to Second Life car culture. Residents make project proposals, the best of which make it onto »Motorati Island« and are catalogued on the Web site. Users have created monstrous monster truck rallies, death courses, exploding and self-reassembling cars and much more. The latest sounds awesome. It’s Tre Ceres and Un4given Spoonhammer’s Drift or Die, in which you run down menacing zombies in your car, dodging exploding barrels (of course) and other hazards. What I love about the project — besides the fact that it’s almost completely user-created — is that it’s an excellent way to promote engagement in a brand in a manner that’s entertaining to an audience that’s never actually asked to buy anything. You could certainly argue that a more benign manifestation of this would be to simply give users land without the branding, but who’s going to pay for that?

In a slightly more traditional vein, though still fun-sounding and virtual worldy, Pontiac is opening a car dealership, of all things, in Second Life. L$50,000 in cash and prizes will be given away in a Let’s Make A Dealership game show »at the dealership site« this Friday, MC’d by Gideon Television, who’s quite the media presence these days. You have to hand it to the car company for having enough faith in Millions of Us to let them work with what seems to be free rein. Motorati isn’t as media convergent as the things I usually harp on here, but it’s just as cool.