Business and Blogging

Virtual Worlds and Business: Play or Work?

by Des Walsh on May 21st, 2007

Today on the b5media business channel we are looking at the theme “work and play”.

I thought about virtual worlds, such as Second Life.

In an interview with me last December, Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book, asked me if I had tried Second Life. I hadn’t, and the question took me a bit by surprise, because we had been talking about blogging in a business context and here was Debbie asking me about - as I thought - online games with people “dressing up” and playing roles in a virtual world.

Since then I have come to realise that Debbie was obviously way ahead of me. Second Life, or more generally, the phenomenon of virtual worlds, is proving to be of great interest in the business arena.

What was play is becoming work - or “play as work”.

The point was re-inforced when I participated at ad:tech Sydney earlier this year. From several presentations I formed the conviction that any company wanting to make the most of the online environment would be wise to get up to speed on what is happening with virtual worlds.

So today seemed as good a time as any to do some research on the subject.

Wagner James Au, “embedded reporter” at Second Life, in his post Here Come Virtual World Intranets …Seriously observes of the current scene:

Online worlds on the Internet? That’s so last month ago. Judging by recent initiatives from Sun and IBM, the latest trend is a corporate-controlled, business-centric virtual world architected for internal use only– call it the intranet metaverse.

Dawn Turner lists some of the uses to which this technology is being put:

Corporations use their virtual environments to test their marketing strategies on Second Life citizens, host training sessions for employees in virtual training rooms, host conferences and seminars, find potential employees, and more.

Gartner declares that eighty percent of active Internet users will have a “second life” in the virtual world by the end of 2001. Gartner outlines some of the pros and cons of enterprise use of/participation in virtual worlds and advises enterprise clients that “this is a trend that they should investigate and experiment with, but limit substantial financial investments until the environments stabilize and mature.”

Gartner then offers a set of five “laws” (which I believe would more appropriately be called “guidelines”) for corporations wanting to explore the use of virtual worlds:

• First Law: Virtual worlds are not games, but neither are they a parallel universe (yet)
• Second Law: Behind every avatar is a real person
• Third Law: Be relevant and add value
• Fourth Law: Understand and contain the downside
• Fifth Law: This is a long haul

Heather McConnell on a Hill & Knowlton blog, is opting for a degree of scepticism about virtual worlds and the enterprise. She comments:

I still think Second Life is a great and fun tool, but it’s important for businesses to understand not only the security and privacy issues involved but also the technological boundaries that still exist.

So far, what I have been able to pick up about business and virtual worlds has been more about larger enterprises, not about small and medium sized businesses. One exception is Stephane Cheick, who asks:

When will a Second Life or one of its notable competitors, including Active Worlds and There create an enterprise, secured, easy to use and bandwidth conscious tool for smaller companies to start deploying/testing?

I haven’t joined Second Life yet but expect I will soon. I’m anticipating that the experience will be an interesting combination of work and play.

But first I intend to dedicate some time to taking in Robert Scoble’s four part video interview series with Wagner James Au, starting here.

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POSTED IN: Corporate, General, Marketing, Policy, Small Business, Social Media, Virtual Worlds