Viral Success Factors for Virtual Business

Please join our global discussion group
every Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / SL time

This Tuesday, Mar 9, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Wells/97/56/27

This Week’s Topic

Viral Success Factors for Virtual Business

Why does one viral virtual business attempt succeed, while others fail? What are the key aspects of a successful business plan, product model and marketing strategy that catapult a virally based virtual business into the headlines? What are some characteristics that work against success, and how can they be avoided?

This week we will explore these and other questions about the nature of viral virtual businesses. Bring in some examples of viral virtual businesses you know about, both on the web at large and in virtual worlds, so that we can compare and contrast their strategies and results.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!

Three Successful Viral Marketing Campaigns
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/135/spread-the-word.html

5 Must-Dos After a Successful Viral Marketing Campaign
http://www.97thfloor.com/blog/5-must-dos-after-a-successful-viral-marketing-campaign/

3 Secrets to Successful Viral Email Marketing
http://www.articlesbase.com/viral-marketing-articles/3-secrets-to-successful-viral-email-marketing-1668260.html

7 Steps to Creating a Viral Video
http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/technology/article/7-steps-to-creating-a-viral-video-steve-strauss

How “Surprise” Helps Viral and Word of Mouth Marketing
http://www.doshdosh.com/how-surprise-helps-word-of-mouth-and-viral-marketing/

13 Sure Fire Strategies for Launching Successful Facebook Applications
http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/02/facebook-application-strategies/

Design Learnings From Viral Applications Presentation by Jia Shen (CTO/Founder of RockYou)
http://www.slideshare.net/seasonxu/design-learnings-from-viral-applications-presentation

How to Make Virtual Spaces that Engage and Challenge
http://rezzable.net/web2-0/how-to-make-virtual-spaces-that-engage-and-challenge-13-best-practices/

How Can I Get Event Announcements (choose one or more)?

* Follow Joel Foner on Google Buzz (joel dot foner at gmail dot com)

* Watch http://joelfoner.com or add this feed to your RSS reader

* Follow @JoelFoner on Twitter

* Join the We Are The Network group in Second Life™

* Join the We Are The Network hippoGroup ( this does not take up a group slot – tap the “We Are The Network” sign at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™)

* Join the We Are The Network Fan Page

Please Note – Mixed Text and Voice Session:

We Are The Network is an open, mixed voice / text discussion session. Please feel free to participate in voice or in text, to your preference. The facilitator and some participants will be using voice, so you may wish to enable voice in your viewer so that you can hear the voice portions of the session.

To enable voice, choose Preferences from the Edit menu, click the “Voice Chat” tab along the left of the form, and then make sure that “Enable voice chat” is checked. Again, speaking is not required for this session, however if you do not enable voice, and use speakers or headphones, you will not be able to hear part of the discussion.

Thanks for attending!

Joel Foner (Second Life: Joel Savard)

http://joelfoner.com/about

http://twitter.com/JoelFoner

An Exploration of Game-Based Education

Please join our global discussion group
every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Mar 2, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

An Exploration of Game-Based Education

The incorporation of game-like elements have started to become more common in educational settings, as well as in business. The typical reason for these additions have been to increase “engagement” and interest. In some cases there are clearly documented improvements in objective results.

In this session we will explore common game-based approaches, find out how game-based curricula and approaches can enhance education, and discover situations where game-based learning may be ineffective or even counter-productive.

… I wonder if I put up a leaderboard and keep track of points for number of comments in the discussion whether it will further enhance the depth and quality of the discussion? (kidding… sort of?)

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!

DICE 2010: “Design Outside the Box” Presentation (28:19) by Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell. This video is from a presentation at a game design conference, but the content parallels much of the discussion in both business and academic circles about the “game-ification of everything”
http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box-Presentation/

A mind-blowing fact from his presentation (early on) is that there are more Framville players than the total count of Twitter accounts! (hint: We’re talking several million people here!)

Game Education Summit Europe 2010
http://www.geseurope.com/

3rd European Conference on Games Based Learning (ECGBL 2009)
http://www.academic-conferences.org/ecgbl/ecgbl2009/ecgbl09-biographies.htm

Carnegie Mellon Game Education Summit site
http://www.gameeducationsummit.com/index_2009.php

How Can I Get Event Announcements (choose one or more)?

* Follow Joel Foner on Google Buzz (joel dot foner at gmail dot com)

* Watch http://joelfoner.com or add this feed to your RSS reader

* Follow @JoelFoner on Twitter

* Join the We Are The Network group in Second Life™

* Join the We Are The Network hippoGroup ( this does not take up a group slot – tap the “We Are The Network” sign at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™)

* Join the We Are The Network Fan Page

Please Note – Mixed Text and Voice Session:

We Are The Network is an open, mixed voice / text discussion session. Please feel free to participate in voice or in text, to your preference. The facilitator and some participants will be using voice, so you may wish to enable voice in your viewer so that you can hear the voice portions of the session.

To enable voice, choose Preferences from the Edit menu, click the “Voice Chat” tab along the left of the form, and then make sure that “Enable voice chat” is checked. Again, speaking is not required for this session, however if you do not enable voice, and use speakers or headphones, you will not be able to hear part of the discussion.

Thanks for attending!

Joel Foner (Second Life: Joel Savard)

http://joelfoner.com/about

http://twitter.com/JoelFoner

News Slam 2!

Please join our global discussion group
every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Feb 23, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

News Slam 2!

This week we’ll be taking another run at “News Slam”. News Slam is a mashup of a poetry slam and a current events quiz show – with a twist.

What is a News Slam, and why are we doing it?

Staying current with world events is always a challenge, given everything else we’re all trying to do in our lives. News Slam is a fun way to catch up with some things going on around the globe while maybe finding a topic we all want to dig into in a deeper way, either in this session or a future one.

I suppose we could even say that this is a serious game, enabled by a virtual world, but… that would be too serious – let’s have some fun and learn some new stuff!

News Slam How-To

Join us! You can find a news item while you’re here, so don’t sweat it if you don’t have any preparation time. If you can spend a few minutes searching, you might find a nugget that will be really interesting, so if you have a few minutes, please feel free to go hunting.

* Anyone and everyone is encouraged to participate. This is not a contest!

* When you’re up, you’ll say two things (in text or voice – either is fine)

1) One sentence that explains a news item about a country other than the one you’re currently living in

2) One sentence that gives your reaction to the news item (either about the news itself, or the way the item is written or presented)

THERE IS A TWIST – you can completely make up your news item if you want, but do not tell anyone whether your item is real or not!

* Then we vote on whether we think your news item is real or not

This is all in fun, and maybe one or two folks won’t be able to hold it in and might comment on their own, and who knows, maybe we’ll end up in deep discussion about one of the news items… that’s ok too, although I’d like to see if we can get through several news bits.

This week we’ll be trying a wee bit of an experiment, an experiment I’m calling “News Slam”. News Slam is sort of a mashup of a poetry slam and a current events quiz show – with a twist.

What in the world is a News Slam, and why are we doing it?

Staying current with world events is always a challenge, given everything else we’re all trying to do in our lives. News Slam is a fun way to catch up with some things going on around the globe while maybe finding a topic we all want to dig into in a deeper way, either in this session or a future one.

I suppose we could even say that this is a serious game, enabled by a virtual world, but… that would be too serious – let’s have some fun and learn some new stuff!

News Slam How-To

Join us! You can find a news item while you’re here, so don’t sweat it if you don’t have any preparation time. If you can spend a few minutes searching, you might find a nugget that will be really interesting, so if you have a few minutes, please feel free to go hunting.

* Anyone and everyone is encouraged to participate. This is not a contest!

* When you’re up, you’ll say two things (in text or voice – either is fine)

1) One sentence that explains a news item about a country other than the one you’re currently living in

2) One sentence that gives your reaction to the news item (either about the news itself, or the way the item is written or presented)

THE TWIST: You can completely make up your news item if you want, but do not tell anyone whether your item is real or not!

* Then we vote on whether we think your news item is real or not

This is all in fun, and maybe one or two folks won’t be able to hold it in and might comment on their own, and who knows, maybe we’ll end up in deep discussion about one of the news items… that’s ok too, although I’d like to see if we can get through several news bits.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!

GlobalPost – interesting new take on web news by some “real journalists”
http://www.globalpost.com/

All Voices – An Open Media Reporting Site
http://www.allvoices.com/

Digg World News
http://digg.com/world_news

The Home of Poetry Slam Central

http://www.poetryslam.com/

Individual World Poetry Slam
http://iwps.poetryslam.com/

How Can I Get Event Announcements (choose one or more)?

* Watch http://joelfoner.com or add this feed to your RSS reader

* Follow @JoelFoner on Twitter

* Join the We Are The Network group in Second Life™

* Join the We Are The Network hippoGroup ( this does not take up a group slot – tap the “We Are The Network” sign at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™)

* Join the We Are The Network Fan Page

Please Note – Mixed Text and Voice Session:

We Are The Network is an open, mixed voice / text discussion session. Please feel free to participate in voice or in text, to your preference. The facilitator and some participants will be using voice, so you may wish to enable voice in your viewer so that you can hear the voice portions of the session.

To enable voice, choose Preferences from the Edit menu, click the “Voice Chat” tab along the left of the form, and then make sure that “Enable voice chat” is checked. Again, speaking is not required for this session, however if you do not enable voice, and use speakers or headphones, you will not be able to hear part of the discussion.

Thanks for attending!

Joel Foner (Second Life: Joel Savard)

Google Buzz Hands-On Workshop

Please join our global discussion group
every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Feb 16th, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

Google Buzz Hands-On Workshop

There’s been a lot of buzz about Google Buzz this week. We’ve all probably heard about various security concerns, and rather than re-hashing that, I thought we would do something a bit different. This week we’ll have a hands-on workshop focused on two goals:

1) Develop a list of best practices with what we know so far about Google Buzz in “public mode.”

Public posting is the most common mode so far, as people experiment to see how Buzz is, or is not, like the other social networking services that we already know. Some things take a little practice and tinkering, and already there are some key things to know about interacting with Buzz. Let’s find out what we know as a group!

2) Get some hands-on experience using Google Buzz in “private discussion mode.”

Private Google Buzz posting is a feature that has received relatively little coverage that I’ve seen. I think this is potentially one of the “killer app” parts of Buzz, and suspect it will be the usage mode that gets Buzz to be a go-to tool for team coordination of projects and other not-so-public discussions.

I’m going to try to have a web conferencing rig running for this week, so we can have a live shared browser view while working through what we know and what we can figure out.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!

12 Undocumented Tricks for Google Buzz
http://aext.net/2010/02/12-undocumented-tricks-for-google-buzz/

If Twitter is Micro-Blogging, is Buzz Micro-Commentary?
http://blog.sxdsalon.org/2010/02/13/if-twitter-is-micro-blogging-is-buzz-micro-commentary

Google Improves Privacy Options (Feb 11)
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users-and-improvements.html

Google Announces Startup Changes to Improve Privacy Awareness and Settings
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-experience-based-on.html

Google Public Policy Blog: “Using Your Feedback to Improve Buzz”
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/02/using-your-feedback-to-improve-buzz.html

[Mashable] Google Buzz has Completely Changed the Game
http://mashable.com/2010/02/14/google-buzz-column/

How To Use Google Buzz. The Unofficial (and Frequently Updated) Guide
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/02/13/complete-guide-google-buzz/

How Can I Get Event Announcements (choose one or more)?

* Watch http://joelfoner.com or add this feed to your RSS reader

* Follow @JoelFoner on Twitter

* Join the We Are The Network group in Second Life™

* Join the We Are The Network hippoGroup ( this does not take up a group slot – tap the “We Are The Network” sign at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™)

* Join the We Are The Network Fan Page

Please Note – Mixed Text and Voice Session:

We Are The Network is an open, mixed voice / text discussion session. Please feel free to participate in voice or in text, to your preference. The facilitator and some participants will be using voice, so you may wish to enable voice in your viewer so that you can hear the voice portions of the session.

To enable voice, choose Preferences from the Edit menu, click the “Voice Chat” tab along the left of the form, and then make sure that “Enable voice chat” is checked. Again, speaking is not required for this session, however if you do not enable voice, and use speakers or headphones, you will not be able to hear part of the discussion.

Thanks for attending!

Joel Foner (Second Life: Joel Savard)

The debates about Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) appear to be continuing unabated. Integrated Marketing Communications, if you haven’t run in to this phrase before, is a set of strategies that remove the traditional boundaries between public relations, marketing, advertising and other corporate messaging, in both the online and offline spaces, to create an environment where all efforts are coordinated in a synchronized way.

These debates repeatedly raise a few questions. Is IMC a winning strategy? Is it the future? Is it the right thing to do? Can it be implemented in an old-school organization? … and others.

Recently I’ve been attending #IMCChat,  a great weekly Twitter Group Chat hosted by Beth Harte (@BethHarte on Twitter) and Anna Barcelos (@abarcelos on Twitter), and after these sessions and a number of side discussions decided that it’s time for me to weigh in.

Many of the arguments for and against separation of advertising, marketing, product management, branding and public relations are internally focused. Questions abound as to the merits of having silos, or silos with communication, or no silos at all, with discussion focused on whether these approaches work for the organization.

Inward-Facing Analysis is Fundamentally Flawed

I believe that any inward-based analysis is fundamentally flawed, that the battle was already fought in public on the social web, and has essentially nothing to do with the “view from inside the castle.”

Why do I feel comfortable making such a bald proclamation? The answer lies in the social media era itself, which I think of as starting around the time of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which was published ten years ago and recently revised. The words of each of the 95 theses seem to be just as powerful today as they were ten years ago, and perhaps even more so.

Three Reasons IMC has Already Won

1) As a Potential Customer, Information Delivery Silos were Merged Long Ago

In a print and broadcast world, organizations were faced with a choice. With each expensive placement, whether a page in a magazine, newspaper or journal, or an ad spot on a prime time television show, or a sponsor placement on drive-time radio, a decision would be made as to whether that slot would be used for primarily PR, marketing or product advertising purposes. Message delivery options were expensive and “one shot” broadcasts—essentially a silo of message delivery.

Today people are real-time connected to social, mobile networks, spending more and more time online, and less and less time with any connection to print or broadcast media. Modern web sites, information pages, social media networks, blogs, webinars and Internet-enabled social gatherings in Twitter Group Chats or virtual worlds are complex environments. These environments do not support the traditional monolithic view of silos of “communications intent.”

Silo-based communications using these tools appears non-sensical to today’s consumers. What would people think of seeing one web site that is purely for public relations, another web site for marketing, and yet another for product sales—all for the same company?

From the customer’s perspective, there is no separation between these disciplines and the information provided. They will make brand judgements from how you interact in social media, from the tone and content of blog posts, from how crisis responses are handled, from design of web sites and online catalog systems, and from how well integrated the whole of the company’s presence is across the web.

In addition, or maybe this is the primary point, with every public contact from an organization, there will be thousands of people scrutinizing the contact for consistency, hypocrisy, the appearance of gamesmanship and value. These thousands, and in some cases hundreds of thousands, of people will then immediately share and amplify their observations using the web, social media and personal video broadcasting.

It is all part of one whole from the customer’s perspective. Your customers have huge, global peer groups whose focus is to penetrate attempts at spin, and to cross-check attempts to manipulate and control messaging. Inconsistency will be noticed immediately, and detract from the brand, across types of contact. That’s just the way it is these days, no matter what the voices behind the castle wall say to each other.

Well-crafted corporate presentations meld the experience at all contact points together so that customers and potential customers receive elements of marketing, PR, and advertising in every encounter with the company, regardless of how the customer prefers to engage in contact.

2) A Consistent Social Media Customer Experience Requires Integrated Skills and Thinking

Integrated skills and thinking across these disciplines is required for consistency in today’s transparency-amplified public operating environment. A single customer support rep’s snarky comment could become the next PR crisis. A PR or marketing message that conflicts with sales materials, or is blatantly contradictory to the current trend of public discussions will be caught, often within minutes, and amplified to be a global real-time discussion. This discussion is visible to all, indexed by all the major search engines, and retained essentially forever to be retrieved by search queries days, months or years later.

Customers and potential customers watch the public face of a company over time, and in particular through the inevitable public crises. How did the company respond? Was it open and forthright, or did the previously “social” company retreat to information hiding and spin management?

Without integrated skills, and integrated operations, the risk of delivering uncoordinated, inconsistent perspectives escalates, and during times of crisis escalates the likelihood that the person “on the firing line” will not respond in a way that is positive for all aspects of the issue (across these disciplines.)

3) IMC First-Movers are Well Positioned to Disruptively Eliminate Competitors

It is easy to say “we can get to that later.” Unfortunately for many companies today, getting to this issue later may mean a discovery that your market has been appropriated by a competitor who is more nimble through effective IMC. Today’s fast-moving startups do not tend to have the walled garden structures in place that support non-integrated marketing communications, for good reason. In their model, anyone and everyone in the company is a public ambassador, and must understand these issues in order to advance the organization’s goals.

Speed, effectiveness, efficiency, consistency, authenticity and across the board direct engagement between employees, organizational groups, prospects and customers are a required part of competing with today’s social-enabled companies. Integration reduces operating friction, reduces the amount of time, effort and money required to make decisions and pro-actively generate results in all three areas.

Speed is now a critical factor, in ways that were not true even a year or two ago. Real-time communications via Twitter, Google Buzz and other real time status updating services capture an increasing share of Internet users’ information for search results and purchase decisions. The rate of information spread when a topic goes “hot” is like a wildfire, and a non-integrated organization will likely take much longer to respond than an integrated one. When minutes and hours matter in the public’s perception of organizational effectiveness, do you want to leave the impression with customers that you don’t care, merely because it took too many meetings to figure out who’s doing what?

The Real Question

The real question is “Will your organization integrate these disciplines before one of your competitors does, then uses their advantage to disrupt your market segment and renders your operating model obsolete?”

Are We Engineering the Species that will Replace Us?

Please join us for a discussion every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Feb 9nd, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

NOTE: Since we’ll be watching some of the videos linked below at the start of the session, We Are The Network is scheduled for 90 minutes rather than an hour this week, to allow enough discussion time for a topic that will no doubt be … large.

Are We Engineering the Species that will Replace Us?

“It’s just science fiction!” We tell ourselves this little white lie about the movies we flock to. We think “wow, that’s cool, and pretty scary, but that could never happen.” The science fiction of the future is starting to happen closer and closer to home, and there are now some surprising signs that we may already have reached milestones on the road to engineering a cyborg (part human, part computer) species that will ultimately replace us.

You may think this is random paranoia, and feel free to say so on the way in, but I challenge you to say absolutely that we’re not on the path by the end… I’ve found it pretty hard to avoid the uncomfortable conclusion that “we will be Borg” sooner than any of us had expected.

In this session we’ll review some real working examples of technologies that would have seemed unbelievable five or ten years ago, and a compelling TED talk that maps out a potential roadmap for our future.

What does this mean for us? How will we get ready for these changes? Where will this head as it unfolds, and what will it mean for our society and humanity in general?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!

Three things to consider:

1) A science fiction movie trailer, one that we all probably presume is “way” in the future, and a quick explanation of a plot element of another related science fiction movie.

2) Real working engineering results, with proof videos that demonstrate significant pieces of functionality from the movie trailer

3) A compelling TED talk that ties the threads together in a way that will likely make you stop and think.

It’s a fun ride… ready? Here are the links:

1) The “I, Robot” movie trailer (2:29)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpv8nkYq_9U

… and a paper titled “Managing Business Complexity: Discovering Strategic Solutions with Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation.” This paper has a section that talks about tools for ABMS (agent-based modeling and simulation) with specific reference to the Matrix and the Terminator movie series. On the one hand this section describes what could happen when agent-based systems get out of control, the small comfort provided is that as of today the complexity of those systems appears to be far away or impossible. Is this enough comfort, given the number of technologies today that seemed to be impossible a small number of years ago, and the rate of technology evolution?
http://books.google.com/books?id=Bb3SH2f-v9cC&pg=PA56&dq=skynet+reaches+consciousness&ei=txVvS_uvF6rUyQTK6K2XDg&cd=1#v=onepage&q=skynet%20reaches%20consciousness&f=false

Another perspective on Terminator 2 http://www.units.muohio.edu/psybersite/cyberspace/ai/t2.shtml

2) Reality on the Ground Today

March 2009 – BostonDynamics Big Dog at Fort Benning (4:46   A 200+ pound quadruped robot that can carry 300 pounds, and can walk on it’s own across real battle terrain, in sand, through water… a “soldier’s new best friend”)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3vCUFf_-uo

March 2008 – BostonDynamics Big Dog Stability Demo (3:29   Watch Big Dog recover just as an animal or person would from a strong kick to the side while walking, from slipping on ice… more stable maybe than I or you might be in similar situations)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww

BostonDynamics Big Dog info page
http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_bigdog.html

And… just in case you were thinking “Well, ok, but that’s just a four legged robot. They’ll never be able to replicate the way a person walks, with a robot on it’s own, like in I, Robot.” Sorry… been there, done that. Here’s a demo from October 2009
BostonDynamics PETMAN Prototype Demo (1:14)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67CUudkjEG4

This one is WAY different than the futuristic science fiction movie robot, right?

3) A TED talk Feb 2009 “Juan Enriquez: Tech evolution will eclipse the financial crisis” (18:50)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNcLKbJs3xk

How Can I Get Event Announcements (choose one or more)?

* Watch http://joelfoner.com or add this feed to your RSS reader

* Follow @JoelFoner on Twitter

* Join the We Are The Network group in Second Life™

* Join the We Are The Network hippoGroup ( this does not take up a group slot – tap the “We Are The Network” sign at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™)

* Join the We Are The Network Fan Page

Please Note – Mixed Text and Voice Session:

We Are The Network is an open, mixed voice / text discussion session. Please feel free to participate in voice or in text, to your preference. The facilitator and some participants will be using voice, so you may wish to enable voice in your viewer so that you can hear the voice portions of the session.

To enable voice, choose Preferences from the Edit menu, click the “Voice Chat” tab along the left of the form, and then make sure that “Enable voice chat” is checked. Again, speaking is not required for this session, however if you do not enable voice, and use speakers or headphones, you will not be able to hear part of the discussion.

Thanks for attending!

Joel Foner (Second Life: Joel Savard)

How in the World do you Explain a Virtual World?

Please join us for a discussion every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Feb 2nd, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

How in the World do you Explain a Virtual World?

If you have spent a while working, building, creating or socializing in virtual worlds, you’ve no doubt ended up trying to answer the questions “what is a virtual world?” or “what is Second Life?” Most of us who have virtual world experience are used to the blank stares, incredulity, interesting assumptions, and inability to fully communicate what in the world a virtual world “is” to those who have no context for the discussion.

How do you explain a virtual world to someone who has no idea what you are talking about? Which ways of explaining what a virtual world “is” work, and which don’t? Do you need to tailor the explanation to the person, or are there generic explanations that seem to reliably connect with your listener? Are the press-induced brand identities of places like Second Life too overpowering to overcome, except on a one by one basis? Can a virtual world grow sufficiently to have more than hyper-niche acceptance if each new user must be courted individually.

These and other questions arose near the end of our last discussion “How Would you Measure the Health of a Virtual World,” so we are continuing the discussion into a related new area this week.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!

How do you explain virtual worlds to people who don’t know anything about them?
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/07/how-do-you-expl.html

Learn to explain virtual ventures to relatives
http://svensworld.de/learn-to-explain-virtual-ventures-to-relatives.html

VWR: What is a Virtual World?
http://www.virtualworldsreview.com/info/whatis.shtml

How Can I Get Event Announcements (choose one or more)?

* Watch http://joelfoner.com or add this feed to your RSS reader

* Follow @JoelFoner on Twitter

* Join the We Are The Network group in Second Life™

* Join the We Are The Network hippoGroup ( this does not take up a group slot – tap the “We Are The Network” sign at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™)

* Join the We Are The Network Fan Page

Please Note – Mixed Text and Voice Session:

We Are The Network is an open, mixed voice / text discussion session. Please feel free to participate in voice or in text, to your preference. The facilitator and some participants will be using voice, so you may wish to enable voice in your viewer so that you can hear the voice portions of the session.

To enable voice, choose Preferences from the Edit menu, click the “Voice Chat” tab along the left of the form, and then make sure that “Enable voice chat” is checked. Again, speaking is not required for this session, however if you do not enable voice, and use speakers or headphones, you will not be able to hear part of the discussion.

Thanks for attending!

Joel Foner (Second Life: Joel Savard)

What is a Twitter Group Chat?

When you first start out with Twitter, you find that you can post status updates, and your followers will (may?) see them. Then you learn that putting an “@” sign before someone’s Twitter name creates a reply. Conversations with more than a couple of people get pretty awkward with only these tools.

Luckily, some folks figured out that by adding a “hashtag” (#), you create a unique phrase that is easy for Twitter Search to find. This is what enables Twitter Group Chats to work. For instance, searching for #hockey will find an on-going stream of Tweets about hockey.

It didn’t take long for people to realize that you could organize a group chats with hashtags. Twitter Group Chats are highly socially viral. They encourage lots of social interaction, and spread quickly, assuming the topic is interesting.

Twitter Group Chats are socially viral in a big way, and here are the six reasons they spread so quickly!

1) Starting a Twitter Group Chat is “Too Easy”

Invite someone else, or a bunch of people, using Twitter, email or whatever other means, to chat with you. Tell them the topic and the hashtag you’ll use.

Here is the hard process involved in starting a Twitter Group Chat. Are you ready? Have you got at least half your morning coffee in you? (Just kidding…) Ok, here we go.

To start a Twitter Group Chat, send one (1) Tweet with your chosen hashtag. It’s done. Twitter Group Chat in motion. That’s it. Have a great time!

Your followers may appreciate a Tweet that tells them you’re starting a chat, and that they’ll be seeing more traffic from you than normal. Here is an example:

“I’m about to join a Twitter chat about education, so you’ll see more Tweets than normal for a while. Feel free to join in #education.”

2) Great Tools Make it Easy to Follow the Conversation

There are a variety of tools, including the “Search” option on the Twitter web page. I tend to use TweetChat for Twitter Group Chats.It’s easy to use, “just works” and has a really simple interface.

To use TweetChat, go to http://www.tweetchat.com and type the hashtag (without the #) into the smaller text box at the top of the screen. Then click “Go.” Watch the conversation unfold. That’s it!

If you want to send Tweets as a part of the chat, click “Sign In” (you’ll only have to do this once in the session.)

I usually click “Toggle Font” which makes the font smaller, and shows more Tweets on each screen. You can change the update speed, which by default is every 10 seconds. The rest you can twiddle with and figure out. It’s pretty straightforward.

TweetChat will automatically add the hashtag from the search textbox to every Tweet you send in Tweetchat, and will keep refreshing the list with new Tweets. You can click Pause if the chat is moving too quickly. TweetChat will auto-pause as you scroll the list, which is a nice touch.

3) Seeing Part of the Conversation Makes Friends and Followers Curious

So what’s with this virality thing? The magic of Twitter Group Chats is that your followers see only a part of the conversation. They only see what you Tweet. (You might want to consider this in phrasing your Tweets, so that they will make some sense to a person who isn’t seeing the question or other parts of the conversation.) They will see interesting snippets, and if they know about hashtags, will jump in on their own. If not, they may @ or DM you to ask “what’s this about?” You can quickly tell them about hashtags, and then they’re in too!

As opposed to other sorts of viral spread, which typically happens slowly, over hours or days, the viral spread of a Twitter Group Chat is fast, and often within 15-30 minutes all sorts of never before seen people have appeared as a vital part of the conversation.

4) People Join the Chat to be Social!

Unlike watching a video, or joining a “page” or scrolling a list of Tweets from hours or days ago, people join Twitter Group Chats to be social. This increases their involvement, and increases the chance that they’ll both want to participate in another one, and to tell their friends about their experience. This assumes that you have chosen a great topic and been a good facilitator, however that you can also learn with practice!

5) When Friends and Followers Join, Their Friends and Followers Get Curious

Once your friends join, and the other participants’ friends join, then their followers get curious, and it keeps on spreading. Having repeated discussions at set times can build real-time community quickly.

6) Transcripts Are Easy

People who could not attend at the time of the chat will often want to read a transcript, and given the open nature of Twitter there are many ways to create and post a transcript of the conversation.

The Downside: The Floodgates Thing

There is one downside of Twitter Group Chats. If you Tweet a lot, and don’t provide context for your followers, or if they decide that the topic is not to their liking, you can get your followers irritated and find yourself un-followed. The easy solution to this is to remember that while you are in a chat, your followers are still seeing every Tweet, so be respectful, provide some context, and try to keep your comment volume moderate.

A Few Things To Know

You may want to do a quick search on your hashtag before announcing it, to see if it is being actively used. If so, just make up a new hashtag so your conversation isn’t mixed with others in Search. There is no ‘regulating body’ controlling hashtags, since they’re just text. However you can find commonly used hashtags in various directories such as http://hashtag.org/.

Large groups can chat a lot and pretty quickly! Do not be disheartened if it seems hard to keep up at first. You will find that there are some skills involved in scanning chat quickly and following the conversation in a text chat environment.

Conversations will veer off topic, and that’s usually ok. As facilitator, you will need to decide how strong or light a hand you’ll use in shepherding the discussion. Be consistent and respectful. Sometimes allowing the group to careen around will generate valuable and surprising ideas, but whether that is appopriate is entirely your choice to make.

It is very common to have multiple discussion threads going on at once in chat. Again, how you handle this as facilitator will depend on your style, the conversation goals and the group of people involved. A once in a while reminder that “we’re trying to follow ‘topic x’ ” may be all it takes to pull things in if the discussion goes too far afield.

Remember to use your favorite URL shortener if you’re tight on space (and how many Tweets are not?)

That’s it!

Have a blast with Twitter Group Chats, and have fun meeting people you never expected to find in 140 characters!

How Would You Measure the Health of a Virtual World?

Please join us for a discussion every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Jan 26th, we will be at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

How Would You Measure the Health of a Virtual World?

Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, have issued a post titled 2009 End of Year Second Life Economy Wrap-up. While economic measures are clearly relevant, are they the only, or even core way to judge the vibrancy and health of a virtual world? Are the economic measures complete and consistent as presented, or is there more to learn based on what is and is not included, and what the numbers say to us? How would you measure “health” of a society or world? What are the key indicators other than economic? How does our approach for measuring the health and well-being of a virtual world connect to the physical world, or does it?

It seems that we are faced with similar questions outside of virtual worlds. Some economic indicators suggest that we are in economic recovery. Does that evaluation connect to the health of our society (not just in economic, but medical, community, educational and other terms), both in the U.S. and globally? How would we decide that we are doing well, or not doing well, overall?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!
2009 End of Year Second Life Economy Wrap-up (including Q4 Economy in Detail)
http://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2010/01/19/2009-end-of-year-second-life-economy-wrap-up-including-q4-economy-in-detail

The Radical Libertarian: The Measure of a Society
http://radicallibertarians.blogspot.com/2005/12/measure-of-society.html

Should society measure “progress” not just by increases in GDP, but rather through a set of more precise quality of life indicators?
http://www.helium.com/debates/111694-society-measure-progress-increases-gdp-through-set-precise-quality-life

Green Economy: Taking the Measure of a Society
http://blogs.worldwatch.org/greeneconomy/taking-the-measure-of-a-society/

A Better Measure of Society’s Well-Being
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/a-better-measure-of-societys-wellbeing-20091002-gghw.html

How Can I Get Event Announcements (choose one or more)?

* Watch http://joelfoner.com or add this feed to your RSS reader

* Follow @JoelFoner on Twitter

* Join the We Are The Network group in Second Life™

* Join the We Are The Network hippoGroup ( this does not take up a group slot – tap the “We Are The Network” sign at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™)

* Join the We Are The Network Fan Page

Please Note – Mixed Text and Voice Session:

We Are The Network is an open, mixed voice / text discussion session. Please feel free to participate in voice or in text, to your preference. The facilitator and some participants will be using voice, so you may wish to enable voice in your viewer so that you can hear the voice portions of the session.

To enable voice, choose Preferences from the Edit menu, click the “Voice Chat” tab along the left of the form, and then make sure that “Enable voice chat” is checked. Again, speaking is not required for this session, however if you do not enable voice, and use speakers or headphones, you will not be able to hear part of the discussion.

Thanks for attending!

Joel Foner (Second Life: Joel Savard)

A question appeared in tonight’s #blogchat discussion asking how to get automatic reminders of the start times of Twitter chats. I shared my way of doing this, and got many positive comments about it, so I figured I’d blog it to help out a broader audience.

Warning – this is a really easy solution, and it doesn’t involve any bright, shiny new tools!

Whenever I hear about an on-going chat on Twitter, or a chat-enabled blog site, or in a virtual world (I am involved with several projects in Second Life™ and other virtual worlds) I just add it as a recurring appointment to my calendar, and set a reminder in the calendar! In my case, this is Google Calendar, so it is available everywhere and syncs to my phone, but this trick should work just as well for most calendaring applications.

For a Twitter hashtag-style chat, I start the calendar entry with a #, for example #blogchat, and then follow that up with a space and the full URL, so that a click will open a brower tab pointed at the chat in progress. I tend to use TweetChat for Twitter chat discussions, so the calendar entry for this example looks like this:

#blogchat http://tweetchat.com/room/blogchat, with a reminder set for 15 minutes ahead.

A few clicks, and it’s done. I hope this is useful for someone else as well. It’s been pretty valuable for me to keep track of how various chats relate to other appointments, and to remember to get online when chats of interest are about to start.