I’ve been evangelizing Second Life in and out of the Agency. A media planner came to one of my introductory talks, intrigued by what he heard about Second Life. “It just blew my mind that people were making money off of this. That’s when I signed up for it,” he says. He choose Elmerr Maroon as his in-world name. His story is typical of those who get excited about Second Life, not because it’s a game, but because of that something else that grabs people.

“I met a guy in-world that told me how he had just sold his First Land for an outrage sum of money,” Elmerr told me in an interview this morning as he sipped his real life cappucino. “He told me about First Land for $1/sq ft. He told me how to search for it. So, I did a search the next day and bought my First Land. I then bought more. I was buying land for prim value more than anything. I had a house, then I wanted to landscape. I was landscaping in the sky. I put in a swimming pool and all kinds of things. Once I was done, I was bored. The joy was putting stuff up and doing things. “Then what?

“I find that people get bored with places easily. People would come over, but they wouldn’t stay long. I’d invite people over for a little while, but I couldn’t ever get a large group of people to come along. “

Then, a neighbor asked if he’d be willing to sell. Like in real life, they began to haggle.

He continued, “The guy that bought my land really wanted it and I didn’t want to sell it a first. He kept bugging me to trade. I had three, 512sq m plots of land. Something like 1,536 sq m of land. I had bought contiguous areas. I put an outrageous price on it and he snatched it up. I probably laid out US $180 and made a little over US$500. That’s not all the money I’ve spent in Second Life.”

“Then, I went to the LindeX currency exchange, where they take that money and put that into a US dollar account. You can then use that money to pay for your monthly service fees, or you can use it to transfer it to PayPal, or get a check. I’m going to choose PayPal, as soon as I can get it to work.”

He was excited talking about his land sales and he began thinking out loud about buying more land. Flip that prim!

I asked him what his friends thought about his “moguling”. “Online friends? Or real world friends?” he asked? “Real world,” I said.

“My friends are fine with it,” he said. “I came out to my mom, letting her know I was in Second Life. She said, ‘You’re doing what?’”

“I made $500,” I told her.

“Well, OK then,” she said.

Which is lesson for all of us.