After the Business Week cover story about Second Life, we don’t have a client that is not exploring the development of a branded attraction in the popular 3-D virtual world. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games are no longer the sole domain of teenage geeks. Second Life is taking the genre mainstream with 205,000 users, growing at a clip of 25,000 new residents a month. The median age of a Second Life resident is 32 and women log 43 percent of the in-game hours. Participants can roam around in its ”metaverse” with their alter ego avatar. They use this representation of themselves to buy land, build virtual homes and businesses, chat with friends, all in the online environment.

Marketers are now racing to explore this opportunity. Needless to say, it’s a balancing act. Wells Fargo is still reeling from the uproar in cyberspace from its ill-fated “Stagecoach Island” experiment. They created a closed environment and was not in tune with the Second Life culture. Wells Fargo’s island has since been transplanted to a competing virtual environment known as Active Worlds. The lesson is clear, any brand has to be in tune with the Second Life culture. If they’re seen as predators who are not one of them, they will be eaten alive.

Who will be the first in your industry with a branded attraction where customers can configure their products, join virtual parties, watch videos and talk to virtual brand ambassadors? The momentum of word-of-mouth will build as people start sending screen shots and post movies from Second Life on You Tube, etc.

The promise of Web 2.0 is coming true faster than imagined. And if you run into Kidcox Goodnight, it’s me and my son. I swear it was not my idea to create a midget in a dress!

Developing branded content online is so 2004, so hopelessly Web 1.0. Today’s successful brands are built on social networking. And if you’re trying to reach the younger crowd, there is no hotter place to network than at MySpace.com. Tap into its 74 million (!) subscribers and your brand can go from obscurity to stardom in no time. Brands and fictional characters are allowed to have “personal” profiles and friends lists on MySpace. Case in point, a viral campaign for plastic surgery television drama “Nip/Tuck” created a MySpace profile for one of the primary characters, The Carver, and an in less than two weeks, 60,000 MySpace members had linked to Carver’s profile.

And this week, Walt Disney Pictures announced a new innovative approach to leverage the MySpace community. Pirates of the Caribbean II trailers have been granted to a randomly selected MySpace member from more than 57,000 participants that have joined the movie’s official MySpace profile. The trailer will be given to the winning MySpace member in the form of a tag allowing the user to view and share through e-mail, instant messaging, bulletins and blogs. Additional prizes will be awarded to every 10,000th member to join the film’s community as well as the member that distributes the trailer to the most people. It will be another interesting experiment to follow on how to unleash the viral branding bug.

The new head of Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, will be the first Fortune 500 C.E.O. blogger. As C.O.O. of the company, he has used his blog as a powerful platform to groom Sun’s corporate brand with employees, analysts, developers, customers and other stakeholders. He is considered one of the most skillful executive bloggers, with a mix of self depreciating humor and stingy commentaries about competitors. His blog already attracts some 300,000 unique visitors a month, a number that will likely grow as he assumes the helm of Sun. In a recent Harvard Business Review article (Nov. 05), he forecasted that executive blogs are as inevitable as email:

For executives, having a blog is not going to be a matter of choice, any more than e-mail is today. If you’re not part of the conversation, others will speak on your behalf.

Stay tuned to how Schwartz will use this platform to engage in conversations, set the agenda and build the corporate Sun brand.