SecondLife - How To Make Money In Second Life

The stage is set, a fanfare announces the arrival of the dignitaries, the audience is hushed, the Vice Chancellor approaches the podium, the graduation ceremony begins.

For a group of students on the BP Managing Projects distance-learning course run by the Manchester Business School in the UK, this was the experience that awaited them in Second Life, a fitting celebration of their hard work.  The students were awarded their certificates in the virtual world, complete with specially designed graduations gowns, lifelike avatars of dignitaries, an academic procession and speeches.

The ceremony took place in the Whitworth Room of Manchester Business School’s Second Life Island.  Created by Corporation Pop, the Whitworth Room forms part of the School’s space-age tower structure and takes inspiration (in name only!) from Whitworth Hall where the University holds its real-life graduation ceremononies.

In a chat with me about the event Dom Raban, managing director of Corporate Pop explained that: “It would be almost impossible for BPs senior executives, who are spread across the globe, to take part in a traditional awards ceremony.  By holding it virtually, we have made it possible for them to  be rewarded for their achievements with minimal disruption, saving time and money as well as reducing environmental impact.”

“Manchester Business School has always been interested in the possibilities that virtual worlds offer.  They wanted a Second Life presence that could develop in a modular fashion, becoming sticky enough to encourage long-term interaction.  The space has evolved from a place to share ideas, to a location for training courses, and now a place for students to take part in award ceremonies.”

For BP, Don Hurrle, Director of the BP Project and Engineering College said:  “This is another great innovative step forward which is in keeping with the desire to keep the Managing Projects programme at the leading edge of possibilities in modern learning and development techniques.  It is another example of how technology can reach internationally distributed BP executives and be instrumental in building an effective community of practice.”

Director and Dean of Manchester Business School, Professor Michael Luger pointed out that this was an important milestone in the MBS use of Second Life adding that: “MBS’ innovative approach to e-learning is driving our presence in Second Life - adding value to the real time experience of our students.  The Award Ceremony for BP executives is the first of its kind in the UK and we’re delighted that we can bring the cohort together to celebrate their achievements in this way.”

So we’d like to add our congratulations to all the students for their success on this programme and also to Manchester Business School and Corporation Pop for showing us that as well as helping businesses to work and students to learn, Second Life can also be there to celebrate and reward success.  I hear the party afterwards was great too!

A few years ago when enterprises, governments, and educational institutions established their presence in Second Life, there was one piece of advice that we received consistently across the board, “The promise of virtual worlds is tremendous and the Second Life environment is great for some kinds of work. But, if you only had a behind the firewall solution, we could really incorporate virtual worlds into the core of our business.” Although Second Life is a safe place to work, many large enterprises and government institutions require complete control over their IT systems due to privacy and confidentiality concerns.

We understand.

Last October, Mark Kingdon, CEO of Linden Lab/Second Life (affectionately known as “M”), briefly hinted that we were working on this at the Virtual Worlds London Conference. At that time, we were just beginning to build an Enterprise team and formulate our plan. Since then, we’ve been hard at work to make a stand-alone, behind the firewall version of Second Life a reality.

Today, we’re pleased to share that the stand-alone version of Second Life solution is currently in the alpha phase. We have nine alpha installations in the field at organizations such as IBM, Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), New Media Consortium (NMC), and Northrop Grumman. And, we’re planning to go into a limited closed beta phase this summer with general availability later this year.

Yes, this is a server solution that is completely disconnected from the main Second Life environment with all of the rich functionality in the box.

Ok, you probably have a million questions that I’m not able to answer at this time—like, “What exactly is it? What’s the price? What’s included? And, on and on.”  Patience, my friends! At this point, I just wanted to share that we’ve made tremendous progress and that I promise to fill you in on all of the details this summer.

In the meantime, if you, or a client, are interested in becoming a beta customer, then please contact us through www.secondlifegrid.net and choose the “I’m interested in running Second Life behind my firewall” option in the pull down menu and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

By now you’ve all read the IBM case study and know that internal meetings within Second Life work well. But, what happens when you have many people coming together from across the globe from different organizations? More importantly, what happens when nearly everyone attending has never set a virtual foot into Second Life? Well, the technical, cultural, and usability challenges can potentially cause an SL event to take a turn for the worst.

But, thankfully, when the Trade Promotion Management Associates, or TPMA held an event in Second Life last month for 160 attendees representing manufacturing, retail, and industry analyst firms, the event went off without a hitch—in great part to the work of Grondstedt Group, TPMA’s inworld partner. Grondstedt led all participants through a 30-minute training session and all speakers and exhibitors through a 60-minute training session to ensure that when the conference day arrived, everyone was ready to walk, talk, text chat, and participate in this new virtual event experience.
When I read this story in Virtual World News, I had to find out more. And, so, I asked Diane M. Berry, the CEO of the TPMA for her thoughts on how the event went. Here are three questions for Diane and her responses:

Amanda: “What was the most pleasantly surprising thing about your inworld meeting?”

Diane: “I was pleasantly surprised with our entire experience: First, the number of registrants who were interested in attending the TPMA Brownbag event on Second Life surpassed our expectations; second, our partnership with The Gronstedt Group, which made attendance easy through many training sessions for speakers, attendees and our staff, and using their “real estate,” an “island” on Second Life, as well as their creation of booths, etc.; and thirdly the lack of technical difficulties. We felt the conference went off without a hitch.  I was also pleasantly surprised that, just as you have in a live meeting, at the end of our sessions we had people lingering in groups, chatting together. Our organizations foster collaboration between retailers and suppliers; this was highly valuable because it was highly collaborative.”

Amanda: “What was the most difficult or challenging aspect?”

Diane: “The Gronstedt Group removed I would say all of the technically challenging aspects. On the non-technical side, however, there is still a lack of knowledge and awareness of Second Life, so that was a bit of a hurdle for us with speakers and sponsors.  That said, the novelty of introducing people to Second Life is very rewarding, both from a personal standpoint and from a thought-leadership, image standpoint for TPMA.  One disappointment was not knowing precisely who was in attendance as attendees naturally used their avatar names; similarly, we had a bit more drop off from registration to attendance than one normally sees, most likely due to the complexity of registering, creating an avatar, and joining the meeting.”

Amanda: “Do you believe that the meeting was less productive/as productive/more productive than a real world meeting–in terms of the ideas, collaboration, and action plans? Tell me why.”

Diane: “I would say the TPMA meeting was more productive than any virtual conference our organizations, VCF and TPMA have attended or run, including webinars, because it is such an immersive experience; attendees have the responsibility of responding to their avatar’s surroundings, including other individuals, so there is some “social pressure” to pay attention. The entire experience approaches the value of an in-person meeting, but there really is no substitute for developing relationships through in-person, shared experiences, and I believe these must be mixed into every organization’s marketing program. In today’s difficult economic environment, it may be more viable for companies to run Second Life conferences which avoid the cost of travel and provide the closest thing I’ve experienced to an in-person meeting.”

Wow. Need I say more?

Big thanks to Diane at the TPMA and to Anders at Gronstedt.