• by Karl Greenberg , August 14, 2007

Toyota's Scion division has entered a second Second Life. Actually, a fourth. Toyota's Gen Y car division has this year created a presence on Whyville.com, Gaia.com, Second Life, and now, There.com. For the latter, the company--with help from Makena Technologies, which hosts There.com--has just launched Club Scion, a social club doubling as vehicle exploration.

The club is an in-world marketing campaign centering on a three-tower building that literally translates the Scion xA, xB and tC car models into immense nightclubs complete with music, dance floors, seating, hot tubs and transparent walkways and ladders.

Adrian Si, Scion's interactive marketing manager, says the idea for the program is that There.com consumers can pursue their interest in virtual socializing while roving about inside Scion vehicles and exploring their interior features.

Makena partnered with virtual design studio Metaversatility to create Club Scion. There.com and Club Scion are available, for free, to anyone ages 13 and up with a PC and an Internet connection.

"For us, the virtual world is the next generation of the Internet," he says, adding that virtual worlds like Second Life are magnets for trendsetters and influencers. He says that measuring the ROI of virtual-world marketing involves tracking on-site chatter about the brand, not sales. "Typically, what we look at is general commentary on blogs about our presence in the site, that we get positive comments," he says, adding that the key to so-called "in world" branding is adding something to the experience.

He says Scion has been cited as the second-most-noted brand behind Reuters in terms of Second Life awareness. "The key is providing value. In Second Life, we were first to provide vehicles," he says, adding that the company has tied the brand to in-world events around fashion, film, and music artists.

On Whyville--whose visitors tend to be tweens ages 8-15--Scion will launch a new program that teaches "residents" about how automobiles work, per Si. The company in June sponsored a virtual after-party in Whyville for an avatar version of Christian-pop music artist tobyMac.

There.com's target is older--somewhere in the late teens, per Si--"an age group interested in community involvement and hanging out together," says Si. "We felt the best idea was taking our three cars and making huge versions of them."

On Second Life, Scion has its own island called Scion City, where residents can get cars and customize them, a central tenet of Scion's real-life marketing strategy. Si says that from April through June, Scion got 10,000 blog mentions within the community and averaged 162 residents per day. "I asked them to provide an average [visit rate] for Second Life; they are saying that's significantly higher than average," he says.

Meanwhile, Scion is gearing up for a launch campaign for its xD vehicle, which had a "soft launch" centered on another Internet-based venture, "Little Deviant," a free Web-based game at littledeviant.com that Si says has garnered 400,000 visits since its mid-June launch.