A comment made by Brian Solis at this week’s Media Relations Summit in New York triggered a walk down memory lane, or at least a flight over an island my avatar once visited.

Brian and his co-panelists were chatting about the current popularity of Twitter when he declared that the only completely worthless foray into social media thus far has been Second Life.

His slam on the Linden Lab virtual world stuck with me while full-time tweeters for jetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines and Ford Motor Company received accolades for their stewardship of their respective brands.

Before joining Ford, Scott Monty worked with the self-described “social media insiders” that launched the agency Crayon by holding an event on the virtual island “Crayonville,” inside Second Life.

While Second Life and its currency of Linden dollars did not scale into a viable mass-marketing medium, it earned plenty of mass-media coverage and spawned experimentation that helped define a new career for people like Monty, jetBlue’s Morgan Johnston and Southwest’s Christi Day.

I was fortunate to work in a corporate environment with a long history of skunkworks projects.  PR Newswire EVP John Williams created an interactive T-button for press releases while most people were still using 9600-baud dial-up modems.  So flying around in Second Life in 2007 was not only  acceptable, but almost expected by PRN clients who were happy to see a partner willing to explore a world where avatar anarchists routinely trashed corporate buildings and disrupted attempts at commercialization.

What did PRN do in Second Life?  We gave away public toilets and changing rooms.  Of course, these rest rooms featured video display boards that carried the headlines of press releases originating from in-world businesses as well as out-of-world copy pertaining to social media.  We didn’t charge for distribution of releases inside Second Life, instead opting to collect donations for the Denver-based charity Water for People.  We also created the position of Ambassador to Second Life to build relationships with the owners of media properties and businesses in the community.

Needless to say, there wasn’t a sustainable business model for PR Newswire and most other companies inside Second Life.  But it was far from a failure on many levels.

Our “ambassador” picked up skills for one of the hottest customer service/PR/marketing jobs today — that of community manager within a social network like Twitter or Facebook.  A clean-water charity received a nice corporate donation.  Employees and select customers got the satisfaction of knowing PRN had dippped its toe in the water from an imaginary pixelated island to see if there was any business value.

In a way,  Solis, Crayon and other bleeding-edge marketers were also winners.  Sure, they were mocked for Coca Cola’s “virtual thirst” vending machines and Nissan’s attempt to give avatars Sentras to drive, but many of us were envious of their creativity and that they worked with clients who embraced new ideas.