Laura P Thomas, Social Media Strategist, Dell

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 Pacific Virtual 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.

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To join us in Second Life:

1. Go to SecondLife.com, create an account, and install the software.
2. Log in through the Second Life software using your user name.
3. Click here to be teleported to our studio before 2pm Pacific.

Justin Bovington, CEO – Rivers Run Red

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!

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To join us in Second Life, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Go to SecondLife.com, create an account, and install the software.
2. Log in through the Second Life software using your user name.
3. Click here to be teleported to our studio before 2pm Pacific.

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.

Virtual Worlds Keynote
Real World Expos in Virtual Spaces

To embed this video on your own blog, right-click on the video for the embed code or click here for social networking options.

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.

If you think you might have questions do make sure you’re there for the live session; the Q&A portion is not recorded! This is to keep each episode short and to the point for maximum usefulness in business environments. As usual, if you have questions for a speaker you might have missed, you can also email me at info [at] calebbooker [dot] com.

Recap from last time:
Last week we held the very first session of Virtual Worlds Keynote with guest speaker Jonena Relth, President of TBD Consulting. Her topic was “Why We Sold Our Real Building and Went Totally Virtual” and proved to be a valuable resource for anyone who has ever considered taking a team online. I loved how grounded in real-world concerns her approach was, and the story that she tells about the discovery of this new tool is meaningful for a wide variety of professionals. You can view it in its entirety here:

Why We Sold Our Real Building and Went Totally Virtual

This video now begins its life as a tool that you can use when proposing a solution for cutting travel budgets, team building exercises, or cost effective training. You can get the code for embedding this on your blog by right-clicking on the video itself, or click here for various social networking options.

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To join us in Second Life, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Go to SecondLife.com, create an account, and install the software.
2. Log in through the Second Life software using your user name.
3. Click here to be teleported to our studio before 2pm Pacific.

Clear a half-hour of your schedule at 4pm SLT and join us in Second Life (SLurl) as our guest Jonena Relth, President of TBD Consulting, gives a 15 minute presentation entitled: “Why We Sold Our Real Building and Went Totally Virtual”. We’ll be recording and broadcasting live through Treet.tv.

If tough economic times have driven your business to look for new cost-cutting measures, or if you’re at risk of losing highly skilled employees due to a long commute, do not miss this! Extending well beyond virtual environments, Jonena will cover how her company has combined a variety of Web 2.0 technologies and old-fashioned spreadsheets to get the job done right.

After the presentation we’ll be holding a Q&A that will not be recorded, so be sure to arrive on time to secure your seat!

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To join us in Second Life, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Go to SecondLife.com, create an account, and install the software.
2. Log in through the Second Life software using your user name.
3. Click here to be teleported to our studio before 4pm Pacific.

• Myst Online is back! Why does this mean anything? Well, it failed twice. The game just isn’t financially viable. The creators, however, just switched the lights on and aren’t even worried about making any money out of it. That’s how cheap it has become to run these things!
• Apple gets a patent for a 3D shopping destination! Apple fans are fanatical. We have now officially bought ourselves a few million supporters of 3D environments.
• Layoffs Won’t Stop Project Wonderland – The latest from a GigaOM affiliate blog about the Wonderland team’s determination, stating that the project has enough momentum to carry it forward without any need for Oracle’s help and a number of companies are taking a serious look. Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing we started seeing just prior to the first dot-com bubble?

These are three specific examples, but in general I can tell you that there’s more virtual worlds news trying to cram itself through my news reader than ever before. I’m also hearing a lot of behind-the-scenes chatter of some huge announcements coming this summer. Brace yourself folks, 2010 is going to be a big year for virtual worlds.

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Want some hard facts, but don’t want to go through hundreds of articles to find it? I can’t blame you. Here, chew on these PDF links:

• BP Improves Online Collaboration, Reduces Costs With Protosphere – A straight-forward case study.
• Engage! Exhibit Hall Cheat Sheet – A list of companies who are selling virtual goods and reaching out to people at a physical conference.
• The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide – Great if you need a quick overview of what’s out there.

Ask yourself: if the meeting is easier to attend, was the meeting just as worthwhile? More? Less?

Oddly enough, since most of us instinctively equate sacrifice with worth, many feel that spending four figures on a flight and blowing a few days of work off to attend a meeting will be more beneficial than saving ourselves the time and money and absorbing the same content in our office. This despite all survey and testing evidence that says online meetings are just as beneficial and enjoyable. Still, can you blame people for “going with their gut”?

This is why I think NMC is making the right move with their SL Pro! conference, to be held in Second Life February 23-25. They’re going ahead and charging $99 in real-world dollars to attend virtually. By charging a real-dollar amount to attend they’re creating a perception of value in the content.

I wouldn’t be surprised if paid attendance online events started to become a lot more common in 2010.

Metaplace closed its doors due to some low numbers. Personally, I think this was a case of having built for tinkerers first, rather than creating a bunch of games and then saying: “You can also tinker!” The gratification was seriously delayed. They’ve gone into hibernation in order to create “something great”, which was their approximate tagline the last time they tried to hype their brand before launch.

Forterra Systems is also in trouble. They laid off half of their staff, and are saying things like: “We haven’t decided anything. It might be acquisition, further partnerships, further investment from investors, or organic growth over time…” which is possibly the scariest language a corporate leader could ever use. Again, my two cents here: they were narrowly focused on military and emergency response training, and had killer AI. Then, over the last year, they started announcing compatibility with SCORM and a bunch of other standards only corporate trainers care about. This moved them from their core competency, simulation, into competing directly with training companies. Bye bye niche market…

Meanwhile, to the shock of the entire world, Second Life lives! I’m about as “platform agnostic” as a person can get but I have to admit that Second Life got my recommendation as the platform of choice many times this past year for two very simple reasons:

1. Its cheap to build in.
2. It can basically be forced into whatever shape you need.

That’s it. I mean, it’s horrible in many ways that other platforms are fantastic, but the bottom line is the bottom line.

We’ve had our illusions properly shattered. Geniuses can fail, hacked-together products with bad customer service can win, and the “economic downturn” didn’t destroy the planet.

Now what?

Well, now we have a bunch of recently laid-off technologists wandering around in a slowly recovering economy trying to figure out what their next move is. The two companies I mentioned set loose a small hoard of brilliant people in a world where developing costs are at an all-time low, there are more niche markets than you can shake a stick at, and the world is just begging for a truly unique idea.

Here is my one and only prediction for the new year: 2010 will be the year of the entrepreneur.

Does that sound like you? If so, drop me a line. I’d like to hear about it.