Events are a great way to create word of mouth marketing, but taking them to a worldwide audience is expensive. Using immersive virtual world technologies you can expand your local event to a global audience without breaking the budget.
Today at 2pm PacificVirtual Worlds Keynote will be host to Laura Pevehouse Thomas, strategist for social media at Dell. Profiled as one of five “social media mavens” in the March 2009 issue of Austin Woman Magazine, she’s worked in and around the Dell family for nine years, primarily in the areas of corporate communications, employee communications, public relations, community affairs, branding and online communication.
Laura has earned the designation of Accredited Business Communicator from the International Association of Business Communicators, and received her Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Louisiana State University. Before joining Dell Financial Services in 2000, she worked at the Texas Workforce Commission and PepsiCo Food Systems Worldwide.
—
To join us in Second Life:
Go to SecondLife.com, create an account, and install the software.
Log in through the Second Life software using your user name.
Click here to be teleported to our studio before 2pm Pacific.
You would be shocked at how much time and effort goes into planning your supermarket experience. Stock isn’t just tossed up onto the shelves by category, but careful work goes into how to lead people’s eyes across the products and onto what they need to move the fastest. There’s an entire art and science at play that you’re a participant in every day, even if you don’t know it.
Every shelf is designed ahead of time using a “planogram”, which is a drawing of the shelf showing exactly where each product goes. The thing is, up until this point this has all been done on paper. Justin Bovington of Rivers Run Red came up with a much better way to plan shelves that work: use a 3D environment.
This week, Justin is going to showcase and explore the potential of virtual worlds in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) and Retail Sector. Taking it beyond meetings and collaboration: An exploration of how Rivers Run Red are developing immersive solutions and applications.
Join us today at 2pm PST (10pm GMT) in Second Life for this latest session of Virtual Worlds Keynote. Question and answer period will immediately follow this quick 10-15 minute presentation, so make sure you are there!
—
To join us in Second Life, you’ll need to do the following:
Go to SecondLife.com, create an account, and install the software.
Log in through the Second Life software using your user name.
Click here to be teleported to our studio before 2pm Pacific.
An official announcement was posted on the There.com website that they will be closing their doors on March 9, 2010. We knew this would happen to a few more worlds, although I admit to being surprised at There.com’s departure. It looks like 2010 will be the year the wheat is separated from the chaff.
The document reads like a bit of a eulogy, filled with memories of the golden years and happy thoughts of their achievements. This, I can accept – they’re going down and aren’t funded by anyone, so there are no stock holders to give solid explanations to. What I’m not so sure about is the blame they cast upon the “economic downturn”.
This was a world whose primary source of revenue was virtual goods, an industry that saw $1.38 Billion in investment last year. What happened?
As business began to slide, they started tinkering with the toy:
Throughout the last year and this quarter, we have fought the good fight by churning out new features and revisions as fast as we possibly could. [...] introduced a whole new suite of casual games, a completely new foundation for our user interface, improved internal efficiencies for the product, real estate, a whole new level of Community Involvement, etc, etc. On top of that, we’ve revised our first user experience several times [...]
This is a little disconcerting. While the move to get the “first user experience” right was a positive one, it should have been perfected back when they opened the world in 2003. The rest of these tweaks are just that – tweaks. Ask Blizzard what effect applying patches to World of Warcraft has on customer loyalty and new user generation.
What it comes down to is this: you can’t be a computer geek or Web 2.0 guru after the initial build of a .com. Instead, you have to be a business geek and entrepreneurial guru. Specialists built the enterprise, and now new specialists are needed to run it.
To put it another way: architects and engineers who build skyscrapers don’t busy themselves making sure the offices are leased out and a maintenance crew is taking care of the place. The reverse is also true: most landlords can’t manage a construction project.
Sure, every once in awhile these two specialties are combined in one person, but this is why there’s only one Steve Jobs and one Bill Gates. Its a very rare individual that can handle both roles.
There needs to be an understanding, now that we’ve seen the dot-com boom and bust and we’ve seen so many of these worlds rise and fall, that there’s a difference between building a company and running it. This needs to be a common understanding, out there in the open, not as a criticism of anyone’s skill but as a way of placing value on specialization.
Machinima is real-time animation using games and virtual worlds. NYC based Global Kids have enriched the art-form with their social issue work, all created in Teen Second Life. Draxtor Despres talked to participants and staff at GK as well as enlightens us with some machinima history and….the FUTURE….
Lots of goodness here: Draxtor, Global Kids, and a good run-down of a specific application of virtual environments. I’ll follow this up in the next few days with a good video about using Machinima for training if I can find the one I’m thinking of.
Do you know the video I’m thinking of? A general promo of Machinima for training applications? If so please leave a comment.
Last night Hélène Zuili, CEO of MakeMyWorlds, covered a specific case study of prototyping and rehearsing processes around a trade show exhibit using Second Life. She covers what tools were used for booth conception, marketing and sales, as well as how the virtual world component was used during the real world event to complement the exhibition and optimize the investment.
Virtual Worlds Keynote
Real World Expos in Virtual Spaces
What I really enjoyed about this presentation was the specifics on how this experience impacted sales. In addition to information on how salespeople became better prepared before the expo, we saw some actual conversion numbers on people visiting the virtual exhibits and following up with the company in question.
Please join us next week (Monday, March 1 at 2pm Pacific) when our guest will be Anders Grondstedt, President of The Gronstedt Group, as he tells us how Schneider Electric and IBM have found a strategic planning solution in Second Life.
