PR and Virtual Worlds
This evening I read an article on Ragan.com by Christine Kent, that proposes what social media PR professionals should adopt or drop in 2008. While much of the article was about FaceBook and MySpace, the author quoted several sources who panned Second Life, saying it is a “barren wasteland”, a waste of time, “no one is there”, and “It’s turned into a hangout for porno freaks and weirdos.” These comments smack of inexperience in virtual worlds, to me, so I responded to the piece with the following:
I agree with the author that Second Life is not the right place for PR professionals. They will not interact with or reach business media people there. You may find this video of a panel discussion held with real world media in Second Life two weeks ago interesting (http://www.slcn.tv/metanomics-real-world-press-vw).
I disagree, however, with the assessment that SL is a “barren wasteland” or dying. What is dying is the hype that generated a lot of curious one-time visitors last year. Only people who are inexperienced in virtual worlds would measure their effectiveness by the amount of traffic. That is the equivalent of counting page hits on a web site. No one can experience the potential of virtual worlds by dropping in once or twice for two hours and assuming they have seen enough. (Especially if they have spent some of that time hanging out in cybersex places!)
There is a vital, intelligent and innovative group of people inhabiting virtual worlds like Second Life and Active Worlds today. They are the thought leaders, the pioneers, and the consultants who people will be turning to over the next 10 years for guidance about how to make virtual worlds work in a corporate environment. When The Well was young, people scoffed about anyone’s ability to have a “real” relationship with people you had only met online. A “community” was where you lived. When the Web was young, communicators and executives worried about losing control of their corporate messages if “everyone” had the ability to publish. The same was true with blogs and wikis. Forget about the cybersex stuff…that’s just an annoyance that exists like strip clubs around the corner from your office. You don’t have to go there.
Gartner, Forrester, Business Week and other respected publishers are bullish on virtual worlds. Gartner says they will be ubiquitous in business by 2011 (the government of China says 2010!). IBM is doing some tremendous work in conjunction with Second Life and some other virtual platforms to create interoperability standards based on open source platforms and secure identities. Just this week they announced a pioneering virtual data center for Implenia, and yes, the project lead happens to walk around the virtual project attired as a wizard. (They also announced ASME, a 3D visualization method that allows doctors to visualize patient medical records in an entirely new way. ASME allows a doctor to click with the computer mouse on a particular part of the avatar “body” to trigger a search of medical records to retrieve relevant information.) Watch for some other upcoming announcements from IBM featuring other applications for business processes. The National Academy of Engineers has identified virtual worlds as one of the top 14 challenges to be solved in the 21st century. And pay attention to the avatars and 3D representations you will see during the Beijing Olympics. I could give you many other examples.
Communicators need to let go of the stereotypes of virtual worlds as “games” or “fluff”. They are becoming serious social environments and business tools…just not for every business! As I remember, communicators were also slow to accept the Web in the late 90s because they didn’t understand it themselves and it threatened the way communications had always been done. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
