My question on virtual worlds

After sitting through the panel on “Communicating in Virtual Worlds,” I posted the following question [afterwards] within my New Media Summit post and also on moderator Christian Renaud’s blog:

Do you think Second Life would be The Next Social Medium? Do you think companies will do their marketing on Second Life or do you see companies creating their own branded virtual worlds a la Wells Fargo’s Stage Coach Island?

Here is how Christian answered my question:

 

Lisa,

This is a great question, and I’ll actually write a blogpost to elaborate more on this answer, however I think that virtual worlds (in a broader sense than just second life) will be one tool in the toolbox for marketeers. Just as there are currently asynchronous (email, video on demand) and synchronous (telephone, live webcast) tools for different jobs, virtual worlds will provide another synchronous tool for ad-hoc gatherings of people. So, user groups, training, press conferences, etc., are things best done in person, however you cannot always get the people to the same geographic location, so this is where virtual worlds are a great tool. It allows us the intimacy of personal meetings without the geographic dependency. In that way, it is already a new social medium for conversations to occur.

As far as the second part of your question goes, I think this strikes at the root of what will be the development of these technologies over the next 5-7 years. You have companies that want to ‘go where the people are’ and will set up in Second Life or wherever. You have companies like Wells Fargo and MTV who need specific assurances (and in many ways, so do all major companies due to risk and PR) that the user experience will be defined within a narrow band. This is akin to the walled-garden service providers of years past, with AOL as the sole remaining vestige, versus the ‘wild wild internet’ access-only service providers. MTV, with Virtual Laguna Beach, needs to make sure that there aren’t child-predators, nudity, profanity, and so forth, so they created a walled-garden virtual world with Makena. Wells, so the story goes, was in Second Life early and didn’t see the protections embedded in SL that they needed to ’secure’ the user experience and do real business, so they defected to their own walled-garden (in all fairness, some of their rumored concerns have been addressed, while most have not).

What I forsee happening, for what it is worth, is that you will see the creation of virtual worlds by a number of major companies (Google, IBM, others) as Second Life has put ‘blood in the water’. So, you’ll have a period where you have people attempting to generalize the market, with worlds similar to Second Life, and another sector that creates walled-gardens like MTV for their specific experience objectives. Over time, there will be attrition and consolidation in the market with some companies implementations winning out over others, and also the education of virtual world users that will drive the demand for ‘avatar portability’, which will ultimately result in a more browser-based approach to virtual worlds, where you can take your representation of yourself to the website/virtual world of whatever company you like, and they have crafted a virtual world (as companies do from a UI/User Experience perspective in SL today) that meets their goals and objectives, just as we saw the evolution of user experience emerge in web page design.

It will be a grinding 5-7 years as all of these competing implementations have to fight it out for market dominance, only to result in customer demand for interoperability and standards between the two/three leaders (like email, IM, web have done). My contention, and this is where the MTV folks and I would most likely disagree, is that users are not going to get as invested in an avatar or virtual world if it is constrained to a single brand, whereas a general standard that allows your avatar to traverse multiple domains would be more effective.

Obviously, this is going to be the flashpoint for companies who attempt to wall in their demographic and make it so compelling that no one wants to defect (the switching costs of losing access to your friends as you move from one social networking tool to another is a good example of this).

Ok, on that note, I’ll go caffeinate so I can be more lucid and on-point in my next blogpost. Thanks for the great question Lisa!

Now I’m really wishing I asked it while the panelists were in the same room, because now I’m really interested in what Dave Kamalsky (IBM), Mat Small (Millions of Us), Achim Muellers (BMW) and Paul Steinberg (Intel) have to say. (There was so much information in that panel it took a while to process it and well…that’s my excuse for not asking it during the panel discussion).

Thanks Christian for the answer and looking forward to the caffeine-powered post (I have a feeling the caffeinated “lucid” post will be way over my head).