Second Life - first impressions

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I’ve spent a few hours getting into Second Life: creating a persona, designing my avatar (graphical body, face, hair, clothing, etc.), and learning how to move around. (There’s a useful overview article on Second Life by Business Week here)

I still haven’t left the Help Island — and to which I cannot return, apparently — as I’m not that confident about my ability to move around, pick up and store objects, and so on. No doubt practice will make perfect.

Mrs BetterComms is not swayed by my arguments that I’m doing ‘research’ — she still sees it as playing a game online and and a waste of time. My first thoughts about Second Life, back when I first heard about it a few months ago, were very similar.

But I have a growing appreciation for the importance of Second Life to us as business communicators.

For a start, there is no ‘end point’, no ‘winner’. A game has a defined set of rules and a measurable outcome, yet Second Life has no such elements.

Then there is the added complication that the ‘people’ you meet in Second Life may not be who they appear to be. For example, I have created a female avatar for myself. I know what my reasons for this are — I leave it to you to postulate your own.

Second Life allows me to look at new ways of servicing a growing band of international contacts and clients.

What if — and this is a step I would think the developers would be looking at — you could use Skype to interact by voice with other ‘people’ in Second Life, instead of a clumsy text-based interface?

Imagine an HR department for a company, or an external HR consultant for a smaller business unable to justify a full-time HR professional, being able to be interacted with? Because of the nature of Second Life, anonymity is easily achieved. Your surname is never revealed — your avatar uses a false surname — and you can even use a false first name when you create your account.

Imagine being able to interact with other businesses, or your business colleagues, in a virtual face-to-face environment? Especially if, in future developments, you are able to digitise your own features to be your own avatar? Cross-global meetings and conversations can happen in real time, face to face, but via a digital representation.

Now, as a ‘downside’ to all this, there is absolutely nothing in the above that cannot already be achieved and is acheived on a daily basis. Email, voip, video conferences…

Why go to all the trouble of learning how to interact and manipulate a digital equivalent of yourself when tools already exist that are far easier to manage and use?

Cost would be one reason — if you are already online, then it costs nothing to enter and participate in Second Life. True, it similarly costs nothing for email and skype-driven voip. Video conferencing still costs, unless you use something like clunky webcams, but the costs are dropping.

For me the jury is still out — Second Life could be a massive waste of time, or it could be another useful way of communicating with publics. After all, eBay now provides a full-time living for many people, and apparently Second Life also provides a full-time income to some.

When new tools and technologies come along we often scoff and fail to see their potential. But minds far more open than ours seize the day and lead the way for all of us.

This has happened with fax machines, email, eBay, blogs, it is happening with podcasts and vidcasts, and it may well happen with Second Life.

Yes, it is yet another tool in the toolkit that we have to have an at-least-basic understanding of (if only the implications of it) and yes, there are barely enough hours in the day to do our ‘regular’ stuff, let alone consider and get our heads around all this new stuff (flikr, digg, memeorandum, Second Life (which recently enjoyed its third anniversary and doesn’t look like ‘going away’ anytime soon; read their newsletter for more), etc., etc., etc.).

I see specialisms further developing within the comms world and ‘generalists’ becoming a dying breed except in places like Adelaide where there is not enough ‘big’ business to allow specialist consultants a decent living. I know that small/medium sized businesses will always require external consultants, but my experience is that they don’t pay very well. I may be wrong. But the big PR firms have ‘got it’, hiring as they now do digital and social media specialists.

It behoves us as non-vanilla communicators to at least be aware of the developments in the online comms space.

Tagged as: customer service, tools