BusinessWeek has an article online about virtual workplaces:
This article talks about the now past trend of using virtual worlds as marketing platforms, and how the current trend is to use the platforms for employee collaboration and communication. One quote from the article touches on density in worlds like Second Life as it pertains to marketing potential:
“As of Apr. 30, there were more than 13.4 million residents of Second Life, but only 340,623 had logged on in the previous seven days. Those users in turn are spread out over 65,000 virtual acres, so foot traffic in any particular place—say, on a company’s branded island—tends to be light. “It’s fair to say we saw a bubble when companies began to market in Second Life, and now companies are entering less publicly but for internal enterprise use than for external marketing,” says Dave Elchoness, founder and CEO of VRWorkplace, a virtual world consulting firm. “There’s not a large population for marketing in Second Life or other virtual worlds,” he says.”
The article also points out that the pilot projects taking place now are not the multimillion dollar projects of a year ago. Smaller and more focused projects at companies and educational institutions are more of the norm:
“But is using virtual world technology cost-effective? Marketing can be expensive: According to a 2007 estimate by Parks Associates, companies spent $15 million advertising in virtual worlds in the U.S. in 2006 and the figure is expected to rise tenfold by 2012. Other pursuits are less pricey. The costs of creating a virtual world mainly reflect the time to build and customize an environment, according to Forrester Research (FORR). “Our goal has been to say that for a whole pilot for a year they better be able to do it for $10,000,” says Greg Nuyens, CEO of Qwaq, which focuses on lower-end graphics to keep costs down. Companies that want something more elaborate can spend much more with other vendors, Nuyens says.”
IBM’s efforts are mentioned at the end of the article:
“As unproven as these new digitized worlds may be, IBM is adopting virtual world technologies with gusto. The company has begun a mentoring program that encourages people who are retired or are about to retire to share knowledge with newer employees. Many in the program are using virtual worlds to meet, mentor, and make presentations. Globally, IBM is finding that virtual worlds are starting to help bridge culture and distance. IBM’s Hamilton says virtual worlds actually make employees want to start working relationships with one another, adding, “Geography doesn’t seem to be the barrier it once was.”
The push to move big business into these virtual worlds last year was terribly premature. Linden Lab leveraged the wild success of platforms like World of Warcraft in the media to tout Second Life as the next big thing. The media went into a feeding frenzy and all kinds of hype developed around the story, fed by a few highly touted success stories (of which BusinessWeek published the most popular on a multimillion dollar virtual real estate baroness). Thankfully this hype cycle ended towards the end of 2007.
The platforms, specifically Second Life, were not ready for this marketing push, either with active user populations (customers) or the ability to support large numbers of people concurrently in an online virtual world. User concurrency will be an issue for years to come with any of the virtual worlds, including the ones just now coming to market. The most success will be found in small learning communities, workgroups, and any other collaborative environment focused on a real world group (classroom, team, group or community). Any virtual world use that leverages geographic distance to pull together groups of people will be the early winners in this new shift in focus away from marketing products.
Another trend that will accelerate over the next two years will be the privatizing of virtual worlds, or the ability to ‘host your own worlds’. Explosive growth and acceptance by the mainstream will occur when all of these private servers are linked together for a global Metaverse. Think early 1990’s and the Internet, and that’s where we are sitting today with virtual world technologies.
