In virtual worlds like Second Life® you will see the term “hunt” or “treasure hunt” appearing at different places. Most of these places are shops that are announcing upcoming or currently running hunts.
What is a treasure hunt?
A treasure hunt is a sort of marketing tool that is used to generate “real” traffic (meaning not just automated bots sitting around at your place). Hunts are attracting users to come to your location and search for a specific item. In most cases, the hunt is “themed” like “Halloween”, “Christmas” or “Summer Fun”. The item to search will be one specific object like a beach ball or pumpkin.
The basic idea of getting people to your location is often circumvented by people who are using scripted radar scanners to find the hunt box, grab it and go along to the next location (that’s why I call this type a “grab-and-run” hunt). People who do that, will usually not recognize what you have to offer in your shop because they don’t stay long enough to see what you have to offer. They may come back if they like the gift that they found in the hunt box, but you are giving away a big opportunity to advertise your shop.
One thing you can do to keep people longer in your shop is to hide more items to find. That’s why some shops participate in several hunts. This might not work as expected since most hunters are just looking for “their” specific hunt item. That’s why the concept of “race-and-hunt” systems have been invited. This system will not hide just one item to find for the hunter, but they have to find several of these boxes. Now, most shop owners don’t want to give away more than one free item, so that the hunters may need another incentive for searching multiple objects.
Most of the race-and-hunt type systems have an online counter that counts who has found how many hunt boxes. This has been done with the Hope-Rose hunt that was organized by the American cancer society and with the back-to-school hunt that was developed and organized by myself. The basic idea with this type of hunt: people touch the hunt boxes and get counted by a centralized database. With this approach, the finds can be counted and winners can be found depending on the number of boxes they have found. This sort of hunt is much more effective if you award cash prizes for the best hunters.
How to generate more traffic?
A well organized treasure hunt is a big traffic magnet, but how do you get most out of if? First of all, if you use the hunt-and-race type of hunt it will give you more valuable traffic than the regular grab-and-run hunt. This is only true if you have more than one hunt box hidden though. You can say: the more hidden boxes, the longer the avatar will stay at your place. In my “Ultimate Hunt” system, merchants can set how the gifts will be delivered. If you set the system to “cruel”, the avatar have to find all boxes in your shop to get the gift, if you set it to “generous” they will get the gift right after they have found the first box. There are other settings like “random” or “average” for less extreme give-out methods. There is no need to award more than one gift because the finds will be counted and the avatars all have a chance to win the grand prize just by finding enough boxes. Anyway, if you want to give out more than one gift from your shop, you can do it. This will even encourage them more to find all your boxes.
How to generate more sales?
You see, generating traffic is easy if you set up a hunt in your shop (as long as the prize will be attractive). But what about sales? Will each hunter also buy something in your shop? This is not very likely because hunters do like to hunt for free stuff. Some of them just do it for the fun of finding all the boxes. But your shop will get seen by every hunter and if you have something that may attract one of them, you may get a new customer that you would not have gotten otherwise.
Also be careful what you give away as gifts for the hunters. They will unpack their gifts after the hunt, some of them do it even weeks later and so you have to take care what you give out and how you do it.
First of all: Choose a name for you gift that will remind them about the hunt. Don’t just name it “blue jeans”, name it “back to school hunt blue jeans” instead, so if they will search for their back-to-school hunt gifts, they will find it.
Use Landmarks: It is also very important that you put a landmark in the box with the gift, so they will come back to your shop if they like the gift. Some shops just forget to put the landmark in, so the hunter have to inspect the gift, find the creator and check the pics for their shop. This is not convenient for the customer, so most of them won’t do it.
Use high quality: Don’t give out crappy freebies to hunters. They will unpack the stuff, look at it and throw it away along with your landmark. Some of them may even remember your store and avoid visiting it again. This is your opportunity to make a good first impression to people who don’t already know your store. You don’t need to give away products that you sell for thousands of Lindens, but it’s always good to give something in the range of 250-500 Linden. If you have time to make something special, produce a special edition related to the hunt theme (for example a “back-to-school outfit”) that is exclusive for the hunt only.
How to advertise?
A well organized hunt is also a great advertising tool. If you spend hundreds of Lindens to renew your classified ads in your profile, you should consider to participate in hunts. Hunts are usually advertised in world as well as in weblogs on the Internet. If there is an order in which the shops are chained together, it’s always best to be on the top of this list. Hunters usually start at the starting location and make their way through to the last shop on the list. But if there are too many shops, most people does not make it until the end. So if you have a chance to get up the list, you should do that.
How to organize a hunt?
Organizing hunts have been a difficult and annoying task. This is how you did it the classic way:
1. Create a set of hunt boxes, one for each shop.
2. In each hunt box, put in a landmark to the next shop in the list.
3. Send each hunt box to the appropriate shop with instructions.
4. Each shop will now add their gift in the hunt box and hide the box in the store.
5. Go to each shop and check if they did place the box correctly and set them to buy for 0L.
6. Contact each shop owner that did not follow the instructions and make sure they put out the boxes.
7. Check all the boxes again (you may still find some missing).
8. Contact the shop owners with hunt boxes that have landmarks to shops who did not put out the boxes yet. Ask them to replace the landmark in their box to the correct one.
9. Go around and check if they did make the changes.
10. During the hunt, keep checking if shops dropped out of the hunt. If shops dropped out, continue with step 8.
You see, his is quite a bit of work, especially if you have 100 shops or more participating in the hunt.
The web based hunt
Now let’s have a look at a web based hunt like my “Ultimate Hunt” system:
1. Rez a hunt server, touch it and choose “set landmark”. This will be the location where hunters will appear for the hunt.
2. Put one gift (or more) into the server, touch it and choose “update inventory”.
3. Rez and hide the hunt box (or as many additional boxes you want to hide in your shop).
4. touch the server and choose “start”.
That’s all for small shops who don’t want to spend much time for the setup. The hunt organizer just need to send out the hunt server and hunt boxes to each participating shop. Setting up the chain of shops will be done automatically on the Internet and can be managed by an admin page with a web browser.
For shop owners who want to have more control over their hunt items they can check them on a web page and even add hints here.
5. touch the server and choose “get login”. You’ll get a URL to your setup page on the web.
6. on the page you will see each hunt box and you can add a hint for each of them. You can also see detailed statistics about the hunt:
- number of avatars hunting in the shop
- number of found hunt boxes
- names of avatars who found boxes in the shop
- number and name of the gifts received by hunters
The hunt also limits the give-out of the gifts so that each gift can only be received once for each avatar. So you can give out your gift certificates or items that have transfer permission. In the usual grab-and-run hunts you can’t control this without using a web database, so in these hunts an avatar can come several times and pick up another copy of the gift. With the web-based system, the database already knows who have received which gift from your shop and will refuse to give-out another one.
Another advantage is the automatic cleanup. For a regular hunt you have to delete the hunt items manually after the hunt is finished, the web based system makes it possible to communicate with the objects so that they can clean up themselves if they are no longer needed.
How to get a hunt like this?
Now you may ask, how can you YOU organize a hunt like the “Ultimate Hunt” that I have developed. I decided that I will rent out my system for people who want to organize their own grid-wide hunt and don’t want all the hassle with setting up a classic hunt. I’ll charge a basic fee of 10.000 Linden for the web setup. The organizer will get an admin access to check if a shop has dropped out or if there are problems with the hunt items. I also offer this as a full-service for another 20.000 Linden where I keep a list of participating shops and send out the setup pack for the hunt (this offer is limited to 100 participating shops maximum and a hunt duration of 2 weeks).
If you are interested, please contact Jim Gustafson in world to book a time frame for your hunt. This is a limited introductory price, so make sure to book it fast.