• National Model United Nations Conference (NYC – Marriot) – I am the president of this club and am leading a delegation of 14-17 people (depending on who can go) and we are representing Slovenia this year.  More on this later.
• Grassroots Soccer Tournament – This non-profit event was first brought to my attention by an enthusiastic individual named Marisol Martinez.  This is a unique program that combines soccer and education.  They use soccer as a tool to assist in teaching youth about the dangers of HIV and AIDS.
• Junior Achievement – This program brings in people to teach about business to the youth.  This year, I will be teaching a 2nd grade class about topics such as production and paying taxes (fun huh?).
• Connectology Conference – A series of speakers will come in and talk about a variety of topics.  Several topics are addressed simultaneously so I mixed and matched topics I am interested in.  I selected Global Service and Volunteerism, Creating Your Personal Vision, Trust in a Leader, Plan and Implement a Successful Event.
• Model United Nations Meet and Greet – I would like to organize a meet and greet between the area Model United Nations organizations.  I think it would be a great opportunity to bring together clubs and share our lessons learned as well as plan for the future.  Unlike Monroe Community College’s Model United Nations program, most other clubs are student run and not classes.  Being such, we face difficulties such as fundraising and preparation issues.

I have a couple of other things on my schedule (including classes) but I look forward to the challenge of completing these tasks.  Of course, I am not doing everything by myself.  I am working with others to achieve many of these tasks and greatly appreciate their capabilities in making it happen.  I hope everything turns out well.

This will be my final blog post as a student of Dr. Neil Hair’s Commercializing Virtual Worlds class.  It was an interesting experience overall.  More importantly, it has been the first time I have been meaningfully challenged in a long time.  It is something I truly appreciate.

I was fortunate to work with excellent team members.  Anne Pelkey brought a contagious sense of optimism and hope that compelled us to work hard and achieve a higher standard.  Bradley Fuller tackled the difficult challenge of creating and modifying our Second Life location.  I would like to believe that I added value but I am loathe to do a self-assessment due to natural bias.

A Second Life investor attended the presentation and communicated with Bradley for a significant length of time.  The investor asked some tough questions and was immediately able to hone in on our greatest weakness:  knowledge of Second Life’s population.  We haven’t spent much time, relatively speaking, in Second Life as the established residents.  The investor asked us how we would approach selling the business to others and provided unique perspectives on the norms of Second Life.  They asked us a question we were unprepared for:  how would we approach the less socially accepted aspects of Second Life such as slave shops and sex clubs?

Our perfunctory answer was to tailor ourselves to the market.  While we believed that we could find a way to deal with the sex clubs, we were sure that slave shops were off the table.  In the end, we did receive an offer—although it was far lower than what we desired.  We were excited that someone even though that an offer was worthwhile.

I learned a lot in this course.  If the course if offered again, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a challenge.  If you’re looking for an easy “A,” I suggest that you look elsewhere and also consider why you are going to school.  I have seen and done many things in the short time that I have been on this planet; this is definitely a unique experience and one that I will remember with great detail.

We started out with very little knowledge of Second Life itself.  We are ending with a little more knowledge about this niche world.  Not only is it a niche, it is additionally comprised of its own niches.  The population of Second Life is smattered with subpopulations that engage in activities that are quite distinct from one another.  The business that my group is attempting to create is focusing beyond the niche to the mainstream users.

Our ultimate goal is to make Second Life more acceptable as an economically self-sustaining world.  If everything works correctly, the business will expand the market for businesses in Second Life without taking away the share.  For perspective, visualize the pie as growing bigger but not necessarily changing.

Second Life’s tepid growth rate may be acceptable for Linden Labs, but I can see the potential for greater things.  It has the ability to make make virtual our imaginations.  Considering the chaff that fills the internet these days, Second Life offers a very rich experience—though even its champions have succumbed to tunnel vision.

They claim that Second Life is useful as an educational tool but I have yet to see it fully utilized.  I walked into a conference early in the course.  The avatars were sitting plainly in their seats while the guest of honor sat in the front answering questions via chat.  As they asked their questions, I wondered how this was better than simple instant messaging.  As I watched the PowerPoint presentation on the screen, I realized that there were simpler methods out there to achieve the same objectives.

A visually rich environment such as Second Life should present rich information.  Otherwise, the program is an unnecessary addition to a process.  Second Life could easily be used to present blowup diagrams and schematics of equipment or to visually demonstrate a rendering of how atomic particles interact with matter.

This will require either a high level of knowledge/training for the instructor or a Second Life guru who is involved with the lesson planning process.  True talent can be difficult to find.  Perhaps it is simply a matter of transitioning a programming from one focus to another.  I lack sufficient knowledge to make worthwhile suppositions.

The class has definitely been interesting.  I have enjoyed the experience in Second Life.  I am definitely anxious to present our business to the class.  I feel like our group has a very viable plan.  We’ll see after Wednesday!

The Commercializing New Worlds Class is winding down.  The business project is due at the end of this week and Team TAG is ready  to wow some folks.  We meet in Second Life this week to talk to Matthew Anthony, a graduate of RIT and an entrepreneur in Second Life.  If you never thought you could make a living off of Second Life, think again.  This particular gentleman makes enough to live comfortably just outside of New York City with no need to have a second job.

Mr. Anthony sells virtual turtles and the food that they need to survive.  Yes, you heard me right.  The turtles will perish without the virtual foods that Matthew Anthony and his partner sells.  This demonstrates the flexibility that Second Life offers in terms of the products that you can sell.  Many would think that people would not pay their hard earned dollars to maintain a virtual pet and yet they make a decent living.

It is amazing what they do with their turtles.  They can reproduce with each other creating a unique color for each turtle.  Mr. Anthony related the story of one person who wanted a rare color turtle and paid the equivalent of approximately $100.

He demonstrated some of his other ideas which included a virtual representation of a card game.  When attacks were made, a virtual character would appear by the card and attack the other player.  This design was old and some changing to Second Life’s scripting broke a few of his scripts but it was interesting nonetheless.

Team TAG has some interesting things up its sleeve with regards to a Second Life business.  We have found some fascinating analytical tools for Second Life.  We are also developing a marketing campaign that will engage consumers and attract businesses.  I am certain that our final presentation will offer a unique value proposition that is truly compelling.  Who knows, maybe Matthew Anthony will want to engage our services as well.

See the writeup here:  Internet Marketing

Or read/hear the full interview here.

Transcript

Tim: My name is Tim, clearly. I am Peter’s Brother and I work for a PF Public Relations and Social Media Agency in Boston. And I’m an account manager, some of my contracts are seeking more consumer technology based I represent Spark Capital … two D.C. firms like Charles River Ventures which are pretty established… Spark and Charles Rivers Ventures are actually early stage ventures … and things like Twitter, Boxee, 5min.  So most of my client base involves digital media and tech sector so a lot of their programs rely heavily on traditional media..like newspaper and broadcast and magazines.  As well as a big social media component.  Clearly Twitter is a big focus for us..Facebook and trying receive messages for my clients through a lot of different community related avenues

Marisol: Hello, my name is Marisol Martinez. My first question is, Do you feel social media has helped expand your business? And if so, to what extent?

Tim: I really feel like social media is blurring the line with traditional media and in Public Relations because we are so heavily focused working with reporters like with the NY times and the Wall Street Journal. You find more and more of them are turning their coverage to the internet.  So a lot of content you will see isn’t measured by what makes the front page anymore or the front section of a specific newspaper but how many hits you get on a website article. And I have actually known a few very high profile columnists like … and Newsweek who have given up or actually forced out because their articles and columns were not getting enough traffic news…at any given moment.

I feel like the pressure for social media and digital media and getting your name out in terms of Twitter attracting people to your company and to your article, to your product is becoming so instantaneous. Especially with the focus on real time with Twitter’s influence, Facebook . Everybody wants to know what’s going on now, how, and why. And I feel like if your not in that conversation you are kind of left behind and I also think for a lot of my clients who are kind of new–getting early adaptors focus on what they are offering and different things they are doing only takes like through social media.  Techcrunch, which you know is a big tech blog based in the Silicon Valley.  That actually is more influential and a lot more important for my clients and their businesses than getting on the front page of the tech section at the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.  So, I feel that with … and the need for speed, social media is driving that, and it’s going to become more blurred–the lines between social and traditional media over the next 4-5-6 months.

Marisol:  Just a follow-up question on that.  Do you feel that bloggers have affected the credibility of news disseminated online?

Tim:  No.  I definitely do.  I think that’s a great question and I see it all the time.  You know, I think that media driven by bloggers, and driven by Twitter, and driven by Facebook.  Getting the word out faster than anyone else by you, by Paul Hansel at the NY Times, by Jessica Escalera at the Wall Street Journal who are very high profile reporters, but you could break the news, I could break the news, I could be overhearing a conversation at the airport and I could tweet about it, and whether that tweet’s right or wrong, people online are sometimes muddied because they are not real journalists.  So they kind of have a little bit of an excuse to think that it’s factual, and one of the big bloggers at Techcrunch, which writes everything and everything they want about a company whether they like it or not because they are bloggers.

They were actually at a Yahoo! earnings call, I think it was about six or seven months ago, and one of the bloggers was multitasking and writing a bunch of different stories at the same time, then accidentally wrote that the CEO or whoever it was on the call with Yahoo! was laying off 5% of the workforce, and it was incorrect–it was irresponsible, and within a matter of seconds, I think, their earnings and their value dropped and their stock.  All the blogger had to do was go online 2 minutes later, cross it out, and make a little addendum–oh sorry, I made a mistake.  But that company lost money because of that certain blogger and their mistake.  So, I feel like there is responsibility for bloggers when it comes to breaking news in that consumers run the risk of being misinformed on an even greater scale because of new media and social media.

Ed:  Ok, My name is Ed.  What would you say the number one piece of general PR advice to a company any company to deciding starting going to into Web 2.0 and social media and that kind of thing?

Tim:  So, I’m sorry so you are basically asking me are there any general rules of thumb when somebody is trying to embark in social media?

Ed:  Yeah

Tim:  No, it’s not a proven formula; I actually don’t say Twitter accounts for a few of my clients who are mostly consumer focused which is a pretty avenue for Facebook or Twitter if you’re Jet Blue or Whole Foods to be recognizable, people are interested in your brand. I think you have to set the expectation if you are smaller that means constituents in social media made of slots, your Twitter handle.  You know what I mean that I feel I know who you are. You are not going to build a huge user base in a matter of hours or days even. And what I find works the best is putting a real person and a real voice behind whatever social media personality you have, making sure you are not being self promotional people don’t want to go on and just read what they find on your website, people kind of want to interact.

Social media, we all know is social so when you blog in twitter you don’t want to put latest news is from XYZ company you want to know what’s going on their casual breakfast or you want to know the personalities at the companies. I think there’s a great opportunity for companies to add a kind of human aspect through things like twitter, Facebook where people are not only engaged in learning about your brand and knowing about your brand, but also try to find out who the real people are behind your company. And also you need to chat , if you can….Facebook or Twitter or social media or a blog and update it–once maybe in a week you know you got to do it a couple of times a week you have to be really in trenched and that is the difficult part for big clients and my small clients because they just don’t have the manpower and if you are going to do it you really have to go whole hog you on it, you just can’t devote 10-20% of your time you need somebody who is monitoring the chatter, keeping track of conversations.  Know what people are saying.  Twitter has become a customer service tool and you can find out exactly what people think about your brand and your services and that is a great way to interact and kind of build that customer awareness.
I actually have time for one more question.

Monica:  Hi, I’m Monica.  What do you think are some of the drawbacks about social media networking?

Tim:  I think a couple of things actually. One of the main things is that setting the expectations for you and your brand or company I think if you go on it seems its like a great promised land and everybody is doing it so we should do it too and that’s the biggest mistake that you can make because your identity can utterly become lost, your branding can utterly become lost–messages can easily be misinformed to your clients or investors that you represent so if you want to go on Twitter, Facebook and be really, really casual and snarky and fun and build these relationships, you need to have that fun voice that kind of leads everything you do. Or else, you are just going to become a brand that has lost its identity which translate into, I think, negative branding for a lot of clients, and new companies especially.

And also, one of the other drawbacks is to try and respond to every single person. I think that with some of my previous experiences dealing with bloggers for instance who may not have a million followers on their blog, but they have 200-300 really passionate people who all of them interact with them and if you are not upfront with them right away and you are trying to go in through situations and promote something, or sell something, or raise awareness for your brand, and you are not honest about who you are and you are writing really big comments on Amazon or going on Itunes and writing  really great things about specific movies or song whatever it is, for some reason someone is going to eventually find out.

And I’ve seen so many companies get burnt for not being honest, so I feel like there’s like a couple of lessons learned in terms of making sure you are honest of who you are and what you present and also really engaging bloggers in social media with real people. I think that’s the key whatever you are trying to reach as a real person and that you really try to engage the.

Marisol:  Alright, thank you so much for your time, we really appreciate it

Tim:  Yeah! No problem.

We presented our businesses to our fellow classmates through Second Life this week.  My team, The Awesome Group (name change pending) was able to overcome our lack technical skills to create a six-screen theater with multi-level seating.

The first pic shows Flo Quida during our presentation.  Unfortunately, we were co-located during the presentation due to class scheduling preventing us from reaching more dispersed locations.  I will have to say that talking to a computer screen was certainly a different experience.  The presenter is unable to “read” the audience and loses the ability to dynamically adjust their topics.  I did find myself still using gestures while I was speaking even though they were useless in the virtual setting.

Still, the experience was interesting.  Each team created a unique presentation.  The stores were recreated to reflect the directions of the businesses that each group had decided upon.  The “dating service” group created an interesting avatar that would serve as the mascot.  It’s interesting that they chose a female to be their representative.  I would have thought that they would have a both male and female mascots.  It is possible that they don’t need it depending on the gender makeup of Second Life.

Overall, I see that the businesses have promise.  They have good plans and good analysis to follow.  I am glad to see something interesting for once.  The academic environment is blasé and full of boring subjects with little creativity.  The out of the box ideas are so refreshing and the wondrous environments are a sight to see.

Second Life is definitely a world where real-life assumptions should not be automatically applied.  I do think that many did struggle with that in the beginning and possibly resisted the appeal of Second Life—I am guilty of this.  I had difficulty creating a vision for something I had so little knowledge of.  I truly hope that I have been able to overcome such myopic vision as the others have done.  It has been a great learning experience so far.

We had a virtual meeting this week in Second Life.  Overall, it turned out to be a unique experience.  The presentation contained two screens, one was a backup for the slides and was unfortunately needed when the primary screen encountered errors.  Professor Neil Hair intended for the students to be geographically dispersed and attend the lecture virtually.

As you can see from the picture, half the class showed up because they had just come from another class.  It was amusing but the fact is that the other half were sitting comfortably (?) in their homes and communicating as intended.

I was here…

So what value did the features of Second Life add?  I can think an alternative method of presenting through the use of Google Docs and Google Talk.  Both require a higher degree of effort in inviting users to take part.  For presentation purposes, I think that Google Docs could have provided crisper images coupled with reduced hardware requirements.  The advantage of Second Life is that it helps to bridge the media richness gap between digital and real world communications.

Media richness is the amount of information that is capable of being conveyed in a communication medium.  Email, for example, is one of the least media rich mediums.  A person cannot always easily or successfully convey emotional elements or subtleties.  That is why nuanced communications such as sarcasm, humor, and moroseness cannot be conveyed by email.

In person communication is the most media rich form of communication.  The changes in pitch, volume, and speed of speech are combined with facial expressions, stances, and body movements to provide the receiver with a wealth of information.

Digital communication can provide voice, 2D video, and textual mediums.  Second Life ups the ante with the third dimension.  Now, you can present objects through an interface that is accessible to anyone at no cost.  A presenter can use custom gestures to convey an added degree of media richness.  They can manipulate and utilize objects for the audience to see.  If created properly, the audience can examine such objects themselves virtually.  It can save on equipment transport costs as well as setup costs if the real-life object is complex.

Will everyone be able to utilize Second Life to its full potential?  Probably not.  The interface is still not user friendly and requires some advanced knowledge to fully take advantage of.  The hardware issues are difficult to address because they exist with both the provider and user.  The continued development and improvement of Second Life can bring this virtual format closer to the mainstream.

The joke here is the efforts of commercial enterprises in Second Life.  There was a rush several years ago to enter virtual worlds.  Many so-called experts proclaimed it to be the wave of the future and claimed that companies must take advantage of this revolutionary platform before they are left behind.

Several companies did try…and they failed miserably.  They failed to understand the complexity of this new world.  The platforms are still immature and conventional wisdom cannot be applied to a world unrestricted by the confines of natural law.

A lecture provided by Neil Hair showcased the evolution of internet marketing, a field that is still raw because of the continuing development of the internet.  Some companies have had success with the internet, but a clear cut model is still far from being complete.

Without a clear understanding of how to take advantage of the internet, several companies delved into the world of Second Life.  They faced many difficulties.  They didn’t understand the new world they were in.  Some of its constituents were unhappy with the prospect of “evil” companies invading their space.  Virtual worlds had technical and user issues abound with inadequate resources to address them.

Virtual worlds failed to retain any significant growth.  Linden Labs, for example, uses suspicious statistics to describe its user base.  Upon opening the viewer program for Second Life, I am greeted with an interesting statistic describing users online for 60 days!  Why 60 days?  They proudly proclaim the large number of residents in Second Life which happens to include anyone who had created an account regardless of whether they had stayed 60 seconds and never came back or returned every day.

I do admit that the allure of the virtual life can be strong.  I am fascinated by the creations within and the ingenuity of its dedicated user base.  A strong argument cannot be made for companies to fully engage with virtual worlds unless the core issues of virtual worlds are addressed from server-side hardware improvements to user interface improvements.

Why did the companies go all out when they entered Second Life?  The Xerox site was once fully developed but is now a bare island with a billboard to let you know that they still own it.  American Apparel exited after a “terrorist” attack left some of its constituents “dead.”

There are plenty of people in Second Life who have had commercial success.  These “natives” have been able to parlay their talent into a viable commercial scheme because they understood their populations.  The entrepreneurs even carry influence within Second Life.

If a company wanted to enter Second Life, I say that they must engage the entrepreneurs of Second Life.  They should form partnerships or joint ventures within Second Life to leverage the expertise of the natives with the products of the companies.  Yes, this does mean losing some degree of control but it reduces the barriers to entry significantly.  Entering Second Life this way minimizes the exposure of the company due to a lack of understanding.  As with any partnership/joint venture, the company can use this cooperative agreement to acquire the knowledge and insights that have escaped them.

They can make an agreement to host select items within certain stores in exchange for a cut of the profits or a sponsorship deal.  Eventually, if the virtual words do take off into the mainstream, the companies can leverage their newfound knowledge into a proper standalone entry.

The execution of this suggestion is very dependent on several items.  First and foremost is the legal status of virtual worlds.  The application of the law is still murky.  Individuals from all over the world use virtual worlds and the laws of their respective nations become unenforceable across borders without a real-life agreement between national governments.

Another item of concern is the willingness of the owners of virtual worlds to enforce necessary rules such as intellectual property protection.  They would go a long way by enforcing rules protecting creators throughout the virtual world.  To do this, they would have to expand their workforce to be able to settle such matters within a reasonable time.

It will be a while before real-life commercial entities are able to make virtual worlds viable for them.  For now, the virtual world natives are the only ones who are most able to understand their fellow residents and have monetized it accordingly.

I experimented with some radical services for the day.  The Imagination Network was based on gaming at the time but had a graphical user interface that users would navigate with.  Click on the bar to go to the chat rooms.  Click on another object to go to the gaming area.  The novelty wore off as its specialized gaming nature got old without the content of the rest of the internet readily available.

Next came my experience with the providers Prodigy and America Online (AOL).  They both provided portals to the internet and the fantastic resources beyond.  America Online eventually won my favor because it provided a good portal, interested array of unique features (Air Warrior!), and a nice browser.  America Online soon became extremely popular and it became overloaded as more customers began logging on.

Cable made dial-up internet obsolete.  The speeds they offered was fantastic.  The quickness of the internet allowed me to have better access to information by reducing the load times to a fraction of dial-up.  Even better, the internet was becoming better organized and searchable through the advances of Yahoo and later Google.  The AOL portal was no longer necessary.  Improved search algorithms brought the relevant items to you faster.  The rapid expansion of internet sites also reduced the efficacy of Yahoo’s categorical listing for finding interesting sites.

Today, I still use cable.  It is somewhat faster than the service I had when it first started but even that speed was sufficient for modern content—with the exception of streaming HD video.  Google is now my start page due to its simplicity in design.  Compare its page with the garish and overloaded pages of other providers.

The internet refuses to stand still.  It continues to evolve.  Right now, they have termed it Web 2.0.  The web is far more interactive than it was when it first came out.  Consumer generated content fattens the internet and companies are still trying to figure out how to reliably use it for marketing.  Social networking rules the roost and Twitter is coming into its own.

I imagine that the internet in 10 years will look remarkably different from how it looks now.  It is developing as I continue my trek through life.  I know that this may sound weird, but it is like a childhood companion for me.  It is something that I can say I grew up with and watched it develop.  What did I ever do without it?  I will definitely say that it has positively influenced my development throughout the years, bringing the world to my fingertips and opening my mind.