Content Marketing Today

Want to Hold an Effective Virtual Conference? Try Second Life

When you can’t afford to fly in dozens of colleagues for a conference,

Second Life may be the next best–and biggest–thing.

I’ve written a few posts critical of the megabucks that billion dollar corporations are pouring into the virtual world, Second Life. Thanks to my good friend and former colleague, Mike Azzara, I have had to rethink Second Life. According to Mike, holding a virtual meeting–or even a medium-sized conference-in this virtual world is almost as good as the real thing.

Mike was an outside the box thinker before outside the box thinking was cool. He’s always working to identify trends that will become obvious only in hindsight. He may have done it again with Second Life and Virtual Conferences. SL is an intriguing 3D world where you can create your own avatar and interact with other avatars in all kinds of personal and professional ways. Big-time marketers are doing some expensive experimentation with it. But, you may be able to make this virtual world work for you without needing to make a substantial investment.

Second Life–80% of the way to an in-person connection

According to Mike,

Second Life is a new communications medium. Just as with the last big new medium to come along, the Internet, it is still too early to predict all the possibilities this new medium represents. But one possibility is already apparent to those of us who have spent real time in SL: It is a potent forum for business meetings and even medium-sized conferences. I like to tell people that, if you can imagine the value of attending a teleconference on one end of a spectrum, with the value of attending an in-person conference at the other end, then attending a meeting in Second Life gets you about 80% of the way there. And in some ways, meetings in Second Life are better than in-person meetings.

Mike believes that the ability to communicate in real-time within the virtual SL world can deliver the kind of connections with customers and colleagues that B2B marketers crave. Jeff Barr, a technology evangelist from Amazon.com has be able to curtail his global travel significantly by holding meetings within SL. As Mike notes,

His coworkers laugh at him because they think he’s playing games, but he is an effective evangelist, reaching customers all over the world, without having to leave his desk. There are many Jeff Barrs in SL, and more arriving every day.

If you haven’t considered Second Life as part of your B2B communications strategy, you may want to take a look. Here’s a link to the white paper mike has written on SL: azzara-virtual-worlds-and-second-life.pdf.

He may be a bit ahead of most of us. But, as for me, I don’t want to miss the next Internet. And, if holding virtual conferences in a virtual world means staying off airplanes and out of hotel rooms, I’m all for it.