Thursday, January 10, 2008

Business in SL

If you have an interest in business in SL, you don't have to go far. As I posted in my comment on a previous blog entry, there's always the list of businesses in wikipedia. But there's a lot more out there. Gartner provides fact-based consulting services that helps their clients use and manage IT to enable business performance, access exclusive research, share best practices with other IT executives, and get personalized support from teams of Gartner analysts. They have a few reports on Virtual World Environments like second life, including "Top 4 business areas to pilot virtual environments" and "what virtual worlds have to do with your business life". They also issued a report entitled, "Findings: Second Life University Classes for Real-Life Credit."

One of the more interesting things these articles say is that the top 4 business areas to target in Virtual Worlds are collaboration, learning, marketing and commerce. Do you agree? Why or why not? What specific aspects of these rather broad areas would you target? Of course, comments on other aspects of this post/articles are welcome.

1 comment:

Donna Z Davis, Ph.D. said...

Hi Dennis (and company),
In our brief introductions in class on Tuesday, I forgot to mention what I do in addition to being a PhD student. I've worked in the field of public relations/marketing/communication for the past 25 years and have taught Visual Communication and Public Relations Campaigns in the College of Journalism on and off for the past 20 years. In our classes, we've always talked about "why" people behave the way they do as one of the most important things one must understand before you can begin effectively communicating with them. That said, there are certainly some things I'll never understand about people, but will always enjoy trying to figure it out... especially as I continue to study and report on current family social science research in my daily public radio program "Family Album Radio."

Like many of the students in this class, I'm brand new to SL and am overwhelmed and intrigued by its potential. There's no question corporations,opinion leaders and celebrity seekers will attempt to go where there is an audience and SL (as well as other virtual worlds or NVEs) are building audiences in unprecendented fashion. Those who figure out how to ride the wave have extraordinary opportunity and this class seems to be helping us drop in on that monster wave. As a "non-traditional" student (i.e. old), I recall life before cable, before cell phones, and before the Internet. The adoption of this technology and how it is already being marketing to our youth will create a generation more connected than the Millenials... I agree with the top 4 business areas to target in NVEs mentioned and believe that businesses and organizations that are able to harness their potential will find great success.