… and the Web 2.0 marketing mash-ups keep coming! To promote her latest video, the Internet celebrity who rose to fame almost entirely through her insanely popular MySpace page is becoming a Second Life avatar next week. This according to an announcement I just got from Endemol, the Dutch television company who’ll be co-producing the video and the Second Life site. “On Monday,” the Endemol rep promises me, “you will receive a press release about the Tila Tequila Mansion in Second Life.”

Stop and ponder the strangeness of that sentence, and what it says about the state of Web 2.0.

Many have pointed out how MySpace is essentially the world’s most popular MMO, an online roleplaying game where the avatars happen to be webcam photos. (Instead of collecting gold or experience points, the game is to add friends and comments.) On that score, Tila is the ultimate power leveler, with a reported 1.6 million friends, and pageviews to her MySpace site in the billions. To extend her virtual brand, which merges her real life appearance with a hyper-stylized, bad girl persona, “Tila Tequila” the MySpace avatar is becoming an actual avatar in Second Life, to help promote her new digital-only music video, “I Love U”. (It’s available exclusively on mobile phones.)

The question is how far this brand extension can go, and to what ROI. Endemol also produced a “Big Brother Second Life” last year, but with minimum buzz, even among Second Life Residents. While SL has several hundred thousand regular users, those numbers are dwarfed by MySpace users; what’s more, the do-it-yourself grassroots culture of Second Life may not be an ideal fit for Ms. Tequila’s celebrity. And who’s going to be controlling her avatar, anyway? Her, or a young assistant working with United Talent Agency or Strategic Artist Management, who now represent and manage Tila Tequila from Hollywood? And how much more meta can we get with identities and Web 2.0 brands, before it all collapses into a black hole?

I guess those questions will have to wait until next week, when my Second Life avatar interviews hers.

Images courtesy of Tila’s MySpace page.