Its time for a quick resume about some corporates acrivity in the virtual world of Second Life, lets see whats good and whats wrong, so which firms really tried to understand the potentials of a virtual community :
Nice presence in Second Life, a cold but clear structure with a very helpfull staff there, that’s a feature to appreciate, however the island is not very populated with guests and the corporate’s project in the virtual world are not very clear, if u ask something about that, the very kind staff will answer you with the standard sentence: “Manpower is in Second Life to gain experience in virtual worlds, connect with the SL community, discover and discuss the world of virtual work and assist new individuals with getting comfortable in SL.” Not very clear at all. Ok the welcome staff, maybe a little more focus about objectives.
Microsoft established an island fully Visual Studio dedicated, but without taking care about creating a community around their island. its just a meeting point, it seems to me too much static for a innovating corporate such as Microsoft.
The island is left without support or staff and has a very poor traffic.. a bad work for their marketing offices.
Poor traffic and ghost HQ’s offices on their Gabetti Island, but the italian real estate shows good revenues from the virtual world, there are new investments in projects about RL reproductions of residental areas .Despite that, bright five are not very heard in-world, BUT we have to appreciate Gabetti for the innovation initiative that saw them as one of the first italian firms to establish a presence in the virtual world of Second Life.
Renault Italia
Bad work for New Twingo by Renault Italia, the island includes a car-show with a nice 3d reproduction of the last car launched by Renault and a racing track . You can test the New Twingo over there but the controls are very unstable, there isnt welcome staff at all and no visitors in the entire place. That last feature seems a constant in the VirtualItalianParks managed sims. Same for BNL, Sony PS3 etc.. bad work. Second Life need something original, not just billboards.
TELECOM ITALIA – ALICE
The Second Life italian community gains all the benefits from a well-done rancing track with Formula 1 cars ready to test; The Tim Stadium is very impessing and lot of football communities were born there. They provided an available stadium with football scripts, in order to assure a good game despite Second Life’s character technical limit. Good work for Alice and ISN Virtual Worlds.
EMPORIO ARMANI
The great italian style firm goes in Second Life, a lot of marketing and media chats, but if we visit the Armani Island we discover what a bad work the italian firm made there: just a reproduction of the Manzoni Armani’s shop. But inside, the mall is empty, no one and nothing’s there . Another static project and a another bad work for VirtualItalianParks, that collaborated on the project.
Very interesting project for Mercedes Benz in Second Life, not just a car-show, but an information resource, in fact you can find there the history of the car producer with the first models untill the new Class C, available for a very funny drive on the racing track around the central building. Nice work for them. Traffic speaks for itself, there is always someone in the island
gergio, thanks for your post. For the poor traffic on the island I do agree with you but, having started to track island statistic in a proper way I’d say that single avatar traffic is far more then expected (nearly 60 different avatars a day; improvable but – for us – quite suprising).
The offices are empty, true. But they’re – actually – offices. not a shop, not an agency. So we use them when we need them (eg when interviewing candidates – see below) and usually when we use them we close the island to public access. I do agree that we’d need a “human” presence to welcome the visitors… we’re working on that.
We’re recruiting 20 virtual agents for the Sl team (and the whole recruiting process is located inworld), and hope that once the team will be fully operational we’ll be able to properly welcome our visitors.
BTW we’re planning a preview of a brand new sim we’re about to launch for our “Gabetti Press and Blogs” group members. just drop an IM to my avatar (Matteo Quadrifoglio) if you like to be included.
By: Matteo Penzo on October 10, 2007
at 12:28 pm
thank you, matteo
By: gergio on October 11, 2007
at 2:02 pm