Second Life Orientation

Interesting fact in a Reuters Second Life article I read today: only about 12% of new SL users make it through orientation. Wow!

SL's answer is to let other people handle orientation. Apparently one "private" orientation has pushed retention up to 20%.

I think this could be a good solution for many, especially organizations targeting a more casual use of Second Life around trainings or corporate meetings. This way you might be able to cover only the skills needed like talking and moving and skip flying or teleporting initially.

The trick will be developing what is likely a complicated sim if you are a small shop. Maybe someone will start building some different orientation options and then renting them out for specific campaigns or events.

Blogging for Advocacy Communications

My current employer has a fear of blogs (and other social media by default) because of the inherent inability to control the message. Last week I attended a Web Managers' Roundtable event that was hosted by the World Bank and included a speaker from Ogilvy on that topic.

I immediately got the sense that this was not a fear unique to my office. Especially when you deal with sensitive issues, there is a tendency to avoid situations you can not control. One woman from the Department of Homeland Security who asked a question at the end of the discussion called it the "Duck Tape" affect in her office. Everything is judged by how much ridicule it might attract in the outside world.

One argument raised during the presentations really made a lot of sense to me.

If you aren't participating in blogs and other social conversations, you just aren't at the table. The conversation will continue with or with out you.

This argument resonated with me because it is very similar to a point I heard made about lobbying recently.

If you're not at the table, you're on the menu.

Lobbying is typically important to many trade associations in Washington, so perhaps this is an argument that might gain some traction in offices like mine. I certainly plan to test it out soon.

Word Frame becomes Cloud Frame

I got my first chance to do a wire frame with out the wires. While working on it, I realized that while relative importance and position on the page could still be communicated with without lots of boxes and lines, the relationships of nearby things could not.

So I added clouds. Clouds can be color coded to show relationships with like items. They can also characterize the amount of space something may be expected or desired to take up on the page, because that does not always follow logically from an items importance. For instance, I knew that sponsor logos would take up a certain vertical space, but that did not mean I felt they were more important then a preview section that may take up the same amount of space and thus use a larger font in this system.

Below are the thumb nails of the result and what it looks like without the clouds. Clicking on each will show the pdf of the full sized result.

This has been passed on to a consultant to do the design and build the templates. So this is the real test, does it communicate well.

What Are people doing in Second Life anyways?

I heard an interesting theory from a smart guy that works for a vendor of ours. His observation of Second Life is that people go there to have a second life. His firm does a lot of political work, so they're basic take was that fantasy land was not the place to try to communicate about people's real life issues.

I think there is definitely a kernel of truth here, but if you have a message that can be communicated in a fun environment, maybe SL is worth a look. Driving a car on a test track sounds fun and is certainly not something I can do in my real life, so having a car manufacturer set this up on a SL island might work. (It has been done, I do not know if they think it worked.)

I've had an idea for a while about developing a simulation game that would be interesting and fun and sneakily educate people about the background that goes into a particular industry's issues. most business' political issues stem from their particular business models and the unique factors that come up in that business.

Showing that business model and its unique factors has always struck me as an underused way to show the underpinning logic behind often selfish seeming political requests.

Lots of people know what they know about evidence because of CSI, even if they're wrong. My guess is that lots of people know what they know about counter-terrorism from Tom Clancy's video game series. If you make the game realistic enough, people will probably assume that these details are correct, even if they are slightly exaggerated for affect.

Word Frames

It occurred to me many months ago when I attended a Tufte seminar that wire frames shouldn't have wires.

Those lines always end up making the whole layout look very boxey. Yea, I know, its not meant to show design. Its not going to end up being boxes just because that's how the wire frame looks. But more and more, wire frames are making there way out to be viewed by people without that inherent knowledge. So as a communications tool for that phase of Web site design, it may be failing.

Next time I'm hankering for a wire frame I'm going to try something new... a word frame. If you look at what is trying to be communicated by a wire frame, there is no need for the hard-and-fast boundaries that lines create. You can communicate importance, size, and relative positioning with text styled at different sizes and weights. And skip the lines.

I'll give it a try some time and let you know how it works.

SL Training?

Remote training. Online training. Webex Training. Sounds like a good time to multi-task doesn't it.

Ever multi-tasked while sitting around in Second Life?

Perhaps that is the killer business application. Training. The tools are all there or you can probably build the few you may need to add. Chairs, tables, tools for interfacing with each other. Would you pay more attention looking at an Avatar then a power point slide on WebEx?

I would.

Then again, I might also get distracted by the fact that half of the audience was dressed like extras from the Matrix or just the fact that I could fly around the room.

Again, might work for existing users of SL, but newbies? Maybe not.

Second Life -- the Audience

I've started wandering around Second Life to see what applications to work it might have.

Early Notes:

1) Requiring users to go through "demo island" seems like a barrier to casual use. Perhaps that's the intent or perhaps they got too many complaints that there was no orientation. I could see that. Heck, I still can't figure out how to open a box someone gave me yesterday.

So if you were going to do meet ups in Second Life for people who don't normally interact in this kind of world at least, I'm not sure how that would work.

So the goals in Second Life need to be tailored around brining the message to residents not bringing the interesting tools and environments possible in SL to outside audiences.

That seems to match the marketing applications I've read about for Second Life, but not other comments I've heard about using Second Life for corporate team building.