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Case Study: How ExpoNZ Created A Virtual, Global Showcase

July 8, 2009

For many locations around the globe, the country of New Zealand is many miles (and oceans) away. As such, businesses in New Zealand have the challenge of reaching and connecting with a global audience. In 2008, Virtual Expos New Zealand Limited was faced with helping businesses address this challenge. The economic environment presented a number of obstacles – rising costs, shaky exchange rates and the need to drive new business as the economy was sputtering.

On the flip side, virtual event technologies had emerged, while New Zealand companies were under pressure to uphold a clean green brand and consider their carbon footprint. The decision became clear for Virtual Expos New Zealand Limited – build a virtual event to “showcase and sell the best of New Zealand to a global audience and to enable people everywhere to get a taste of what New Zealand is all about.”

The virtual environment was named ExpoNZ and configured as a 365 dayper year online community – with live events scheduled throughout the year. Marie-Claire Andrews, ExpoNZ’s Vice President and Head of Sales notes, “Through our expo, New Zealand businesses no longer face the tyranny of distance – the costs and inconvenience of reaching markets a thousand miles away. A year round schedule of live events, B2B opportunities, huge support from the dedicated team in New Zealand and round the world, plus a half million dollar marketing budget all make this a pretty compelling way for NZ to face down the global credit crunch and do more business.”

ExpoNZ neatly segemented the event content into halls – allowing visitors to select their desired activity: Trade, Learn, Visit, Live, Invest, Work:

This provides an intuitive entry area – it clearly highlights the available exhibition areas and encourages visitors to determine (on the spot) their objecctive. If I want to visit or live in New Zealand, then I’ll visit those two halls – perhaps returning at a later date for investment opportunities.

The virtual event platform for ExpoNZ is powered by US-based Expos2 – via their partnership, ExpoNZ is an authorized reseller of the Expos2 platform in New Zealand. According to Andrews, the sponsorship cost to exhibitors is “$12,000NZD per year or $2750NZD for seven weeks around a specific live event and we’re also signing up sponsors for the halls, the lectures and supporting infrastructure.”

Like many virtual event organizers, Andrews belives in the power and value of social media integration, but notes that “it’s all about consistency, relevancy and immediacy”. Andrews has leveraged Twitter to uncover potential sponsors and clients – and for generating buzz around launch events. She also reads a number of industry blogs and finds connecting via Linkedin Groups to be particularly valuable.

What were some of the technical and logistical challenges faced by ExpoNZ? First and foremost, Andrews notes that “it has taken a while for internet bandwidth here to catch up with the rest of the world.” As such, she had to “be creative” with media servers in the U.S. to support North American visitors. Secondly, ExpoNZ faced a perception issue – business is done in a very personal fashion in New Zealand, so “there’s a belief that face- to- face is generally best. We have to demonstrate that business can be done virtually – and with our integrated video conferencing you do get face to face – if only digital.”

Live Event – July 16, 2009

Registration is now open for a Live Event on the morning of July 16, 2009 (which is July 15th in the U.S.). The start time for the event:

7AM NZT
12PM PDT (July 15)
2PM CDT (July 15)
3PM EDT (July 15)

According to ExpoNZ:

You can’t enter the Expo before the day, but visitors can pre-register at http://www.exponz.co.nz and we’ll send updates about the show.

All the information including presentations and job listings will still be available afterwards because ExpoNZ is ‘always on’ 365 days a year round the clock. So visitors can come back as often as they like after the event; to make appointments to talk to exhibitors in their booths, to re-view presentations at leisure.

We’ve a cohort of over 15 ICT companies and supporting organisations (eg Immigration) and eight speakers lined up so the live conference will run till around 11am NZT. We expect to have several hundred job seekers from the UK, US, Canada and Australia primarily.

For New Zealand visitors, Andrews’ personal recommendations are as follows:

On the web, you can’t go past the virtual Encyclopedia of New Zealand (http://www.teara.govt.nz/) or our beautiful tourism site (http://www.newzealand.com/) where you can book your next trip.

Best places to visit: A wine tour in Marlborough, diving in the Bay of Islands, ski-ing in Wanaka, hot pools in Rotorua and culture, coffee and creativity in my fantastic home town, Wellington of course!…..

Related Links

ExpoNZ’s home page
Follow ExpoNZ on Twitter
Read the ExpoNZ blog

3 Comments | Virtual Tradeshows (VTS) | Tagged: ExpoNZ, Expos2, face-to-face, Linkedin, New Zealand, social media, Twitter, Virtual Events, virtual tradeshows, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Dennis Shiao

Real-Time Search For Virtual Events

June 15, 2009

Among its many uses, Twitter has become an indispensable technology for event planners – whether the events are physical, virtual or mesh/hybrid. Just about every event today defines a Twitter hashtag, which allows Twitter users (“tweeps”) to associate their tweets with the event. If you want to follow comments about TWTRCON SF 09 (which is now over), just search for the hash tag “#twtrcon” in the Twitter client of your choosing. Here’s how it looks for me in Tweetdeck:

The great thing about Tweetdeck is that the “search view” updates in near-real-time, which means that as new tweets are posted with that hashtag, I see them appear in this particular search pane. Periodically glancing at a hashtag search in Tweetdeck allows me to keep my finger on the pulse of a live event that might be occurring hundreds of miles away.

Similarly, I’ve attended physical events where I’ve spotted Tweetdeck running on attendees’ laptops – clearly, they’re tweeting about panel discussions, keynote presentations, etc. right there from the event itself. Those who left their laptops tucked away are likely sending status updates from a Twitter client on their smartphone.

The beauty of Twitter is not just in its capability for organizing a global discussion around particular events – it’s also great for tracking what’s being discussed around a topic. For a b-to-b marketer, you might want to know what’s being said about your products and services. For a salesperson, you might want to know how the competition is positioning themselves. Twitter allows you to search for that chatter in real-time – and, third party services (e.g. tweetbeep, twilert, etc.) allow you to set up agents to send you search results via email.

Now, let’s consider a virtual event. With all due respect to great White Papers, Case Studies and Product Collateral, I find that the most interesting content at a virtual event is the group chat that occurs in booths and lounges (e.g. the Networking Lounge). If microblogging content occurs in the statusphere, then I think of a virtual event’s chat content as the chat-o-sphere.

In a very active/engaging virtual event (e.g. lots of activity, plus a number of interesting Webcasts/Videocasts), it can be hard to keep up with all the interesting discussion in the chat-o-sphere. If I’ve attended a 50-minute Webcast and return to the Lounge, I’ll often find 100 chat entries added since my last visit – it can be challenging to read through what I’ve missed.

Virtual event platforms may need to consider Twitter-like capabilities to search the chat-o-sphere in real-time – and, provide Tweetdeck-like widgets to keep real-time views on specific tags or search terms. Exhibitors at a virtual event may be interested in real-time searches on the following terms (within a Lounge chat):

Mentions of my company’s name
Mentions of my own name
Mentions of my competitor companies’ names
Mentions of my products
Mentions of my compentitors companies’ products

An exhibitor tracking these search terms can quickly send a product marketer, sales engineer, etc. into the Lounge to quickly address questions being posed – or, simply participate in the discussion.

What do you think about the chat-o-sphere in virtual events – is there value in real-time search against it?

Four Ways To Make Virtual Conferences Better

June 9, 2009

Nick Morgan, on the Conversation Starter blog at Harvard Business Publishing, wrote a recent posting titled “Three Ways To Make Conferences Better“. To summarize, Nick’s suggestions are:

Tell a unique story
Make attendees active participants, rather than onlookers
Leverage the gathered group to give something back to the community in which the conference is held

Nick’s blog posting served as inspiration for me – I’d like to cover ways to make virtual conferences better. Virtual conferences (along with virtual tradeshows, virtual job fairs, etc.) do allow attendees to participate – in fact, some of the more interesting “content” in a virtual conference is the free form text chat that occurs in areas like the Networking Lounge.

And by its nature, a virtual conference gives back to the community in the form of carbon emission avoidance, time savings, convenience and productivity gains. As for telling a unique story – that’s something I have not seen virtual conferences achieve. But at the same time, I don’t think physical conferences do a good job of this, either.

Without further ado, here’s my list:

Leverage a Requests For Proposal (RFP) Tool for attendees – in a b-to-b virtual conference, you often find that the exhibitors offer a common set of products and services (they’re direct competitors). As an attendee, the virtual conference affords me with a convenient and efficient means for comparison shopping. So if I’m in the market for blade servers, I might want to spend time visiting numerous booths, downloading product collateral and chatting with some booth reps. Instead, what if I could fill out an online form (within the virtual conference) and tell prospective vendors what I’m looking for? Perhaps I need 1U blade servers with redundant power supplies and are remotely manageable. I fill out my RFP form, check off the exhibitors that I’d like to receive my request and click “Submit”. I then receive responses within the virtual conference environment from exhibitors – and start to create my short list, based on those responses. As one can imagine, such a tool could greatly benefit attendees and exhibitors.
Play some games – making games available within the virtual conference creates a sense of fun, which increases attendee satisfaction – this, in turn, increases retention and session time (attendees remain in the environment longer). And of course, you’re not hosting the game solely for the sake of fun – you’re forcing participants to perform desired activities (e.g. visit a booth, view a Webcast, etc.) in order to advance within the game. Again, win-win scenario – attendees and exhibitors benefit.
Incorporate social media – attendees at physical conferences generate lots of Twitter, Facebook, etc. updates from their PDAs. In a virtual conference, it’s all too easy to remain well-connected with your social networks. That being said, don’t force attendees to leave the virtual environment – instead, provide interfaces for them to post a status update directly from the virtual conference platform! They should be able to tweet directly from the virtual conference, update their Facebook wall, etc. This provides a convenience to the attendee and generates no-cost “PR” of the virtual conference across social networks.
Embark with an Aardvark – a new service that describes itself this way — “just send Aardvark a message through IM, like you do when talking to a friend. Aardvark figures out who might be able to answer, and asks on your behalf — Aardvark is the hub.” While it might be interesting to consider an integration directly from the virtual conference to the Aardvark service, it’s the concept that most interests me. And that is, tapping into the collective wisdom assembled at a virtual conference in order to help attendees answer questions. After all, most b-to-b virtual conference audiences login to the event with a common set of business or technical challenges.

Source: Aardvark (vark.com)

Related Links

Blog posting: Three Ways To Make Conferences Better
Blog posting: Virtual Events And The Power Of Social Media (authored by me on my company’s blog)
Blog posting: Cisco has integrated Twitter into their Cisco Live Virtual event
About Us page: Aardvark

1 Comment | Virtual Tradeshows (VTS) | Tagged: B-to-B, Facebook, RFP, social media, social networks, Twitter, virtual conferences, Virtual Events, virtual tradeshows | Permalink
Posted by Dennis Shiao

A Second Look At Second Life

June 3, 2009

Source: San Francsisco Business Times

“A lot of Silicon Valley has written Second Life off. The tech world will have to revisit Second Life as a phenomenon in the next six months or so.”

Thus spoke Wagner James Au, noted virtual worlds author and blogger in a San Francisco Business Times article on Second Life (note: the full article is available to paid subscribers only). Au, who blogs at New World Notes about Second Life, notes in the article that Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon has renewed the Second Life brand that was created by founder Philip Rosedale.

While the revenue model for Twitter is slowly coming clearer (judging by the accounts in the business media), Linden Labs’ strategy under Kingdon is becoming quickly self-evident with the announcements of the past few months. From my perspective, Kingdon’s growth strategy is around a few core pillars:

Enterprise use of Second Life – makes sense, as enterprises and corporations can be monetized at a higher clip than individuals, artists, hobbyists, etc. Enterprises (in the former of marketers) were a big portion of Second Life during its initial peak – and it seems the current focus is to bring marketers back into the fold, along with complementary uses in non-marketing disciplines (e.g. training, enablement, collaboration, etc.). In the past 6 months, Linden Lab has hired 25 marketing and product people as part of their push for enterprise clients. In addition, the company recently hired Amanda Van Nuys as Executive Director of Enterprise Marketing, signaling a further endorsement of the opportunity in the enterprise.
Nebraska – an on-premises software version of Second Life (compared to their Software as a Service model), which enterprises can run on their own servers behind the firewall. IBM has been an active partner with Linden Lab on behind-the-firewall integration – the telltale sign will be how many other large enterprises opt for the Nebraska model. For “behind the firewall” use, I have to think that we’re talking less about marketing and more about collaboration.
Voice – not mentioned in the Business Times article, but Virtual Worlds News covered it well – Linden Lab is poised to go after the Skype market with capabilities to bridge voice calls and SMS messages between the real world and Second Life. In the Virtual Worlds News article, Linden Lab Vice President of Platform and Technology Development Joe Miller notes, “The opportunity to monetize at a significant added value for our business is there”, regarding the opportunity in Voice.

IBM marrketing executive Karen Keeter notes in the San Francisco Business Times article that nearly 100 IBM’ers are “working on virtual world tools for commercial sale in Second Life and on other platforms”. As such, IBM stands to achieve commercial gain from increased use (by enterpises) of Second Life and related virtual worlds.

In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to see IBM leverage virtual worlds to generate services revenue. Two things come to mind – IBM Global Services and IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative. IBM Global Services could assist enterprises on their virtual worlds strategy (e.g. build me a virtual world representation of my data center, so that I can run heating and cooling simulations) – or, IBM could go in-world to enterprise’s private virtual worlds to provide traditional consulting services within the virtual world.

So a manufacturer who’s replicated their factory in a 3D world can have Global Services visit (in-world) to optimize their factory floor workflow. Then, of course, Global Services could help facilitate the parallel action in the real world. On the Smarter Planet project, IBM might create 3D models of the next generation power plant to show utilities how to become more energy efficient. In a virutal world, I’m sure the possibilites are limitless.

Finally, Dan Parks of Virtualis is featured in the article. Virtualis created a compound in Second Life with 34,000 square yards of meeting rooms. Quite an interesting model – an event producer that leverages a re-usable area (virtually) to host meetings for corporate clients. Companies who have done events with Virtualis include Deloitte, Oracle and Trend Micro.

I’d be interested in your thoughts – what do you think about the potential of Second Life for enterprises?

Reflections Of A Virtual Events Blogger

May 27, 2009

In the 6+ months that I’ve been blogging about virtual events, virtual tradeshows and virtual worlds, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned from the research that I’ve done in this arena, I’ve learned from insightful comments left here by readers and I’ve learned a bit about blogging. I decided to skim through the nifty historical charting provided by WordPress and thought I’d share some insights into what’s worked well here. Let’s start with the most obvious one – the top 5 blog postings (by page views – listed by top post first):

Review: Lenovo’s eLounge Virtual World – what I learned here is to create timely blog content that associates with major events. Lenovo unveiled their eLounge virtual world (powered by Nortel’s web.alive) at CES 2009. I decided to download it, try it out and review it. Because my posting was a relative first (in terms of eLounge reviews), it got the lion’s share of search engine traffic. I saw this both in referral data and by tracking relative rankings on the search engines themselves. Additionally, a large amount of traffic was sourced from a popular blog about Nortel (allaboutnortel.com).
Interview With Nic Sauriol, Venture Lead on Nortel’s web.alive Platform – if you strike a chord with an interesting posting, ride the momentum and generate follow-on postings that provide more information (or additional insight). Nic Sauriol provided me with a virtual tour of eLounge (for my original blog posting), so I followed up later with an interview, asking Nic to provide new information on web.alive since the eLounge launch.
Insights And Experiences From Virtual World Experts – here, I summarized a panel discussion for which I was an audience member. It featured top notch virtual worlds experts – and as a result, this blog posting received a great deal of referral traffic from related blogs (e.g. Wagner James Au’s New World Notes).
How To Use Social Media To Stay Current On Virtual Events And Virtual Worlds – this posting had the benefit of being posted on StumbleUpon, which generated a nice spike in traffic. Hard to say whether the traffic surge resulted in new, regular readers – or whether they were one-time, curious Joe’s. Regardless, I learned how powerful a single referrer (e.g. StumbleUpon, digg, etc.) can be.
Hey Kids! I’ve Got a Virtual World For You – much of the traffic for this posting is due to SEO – it contains terms that are popular in search (e.g. My Little Pony, Webkinz, Club Penguin, etc.) – while I did not write this with the intent to generate search engine traffic, it does demonstrate the importance of writing content with SEO in mind (if your goal is to generate traffic from SEO).

Here’s a chart that demonstrates the power of referrals:

Source: WordPress Data for It's All Virtual

Here are this blog’s Top 5 Sources of Referral Traffic:

allaboutnortel.com
StumbleUpon
Twitter – I promote new blog postings to my Twitter feed, which is kind of like RSS for all of my Twitter followers. If they’re not subscribed via an RSS reader, the tweet helps nudge them to come back here 🙂
WordPress Dashboard – very interesting – other WordPress bloggers are finding this blog by clicking on links promoted/suggested by WordPress in the blogger’s dashboard
WordPress Tags – tells you the importance of properly tagging your blog content

Top 5 Search Terms (that resulted in traffic to this blog)

Miscellaneous terms related to Lenovo eLounge
Virtual Calendar
Virtual Events
Virtual Worlds
All virtual worlds (I guess it’s good to have your blog name closely match a search term)

And finally, the Top 5 clicked-upon links (within my blog content):

Overview/download page for Lenovo eLounge
My Twitter page – shows the importance of a permanent/prominent placement [top right of this blog]
Facebook Group (Virtual Event Strategists) – shows the importance of a permanent/prominent placement [top right of this blog]
Project Chainsaw web page (for Nortel’s web.alive)
YouTube video on Project Chainsaw

What’s worked well for you and your blogs? Leave a comment below to let us know.

5 Comments | Virtual Tradeshows (VTS) | Tagged: blog, Facebook, referrer, SEO, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Virtual Events, virtual tradeshows, wordpress | Permalink
Posted by Dennis Shiao

Virtual Event Adoption By The C-Suite (CIO, CMO, etc.)

May 8, 2009

In my former role as a b-to-b media industry product manager, I developed product packages that utilized audio podcasts for delivering IT-specific content to IT practitioners and IT managers. The conventional wisdom at the time (early on, at least) was, “CIO’s will not download and listen to podcasts”. I wasn’t so sure about that – after all, podcasts made it easier for busy executives to consume content they wanted – when and where they wanted to consume it. So why wouldn’t a busy executive leverage technology to make her day more efficient?

Lo and behold, a CIO speaker at an event I attended was asked about the different content types he leveraged to get his job done. He mentioned that he takes a 30 minute ferry boat ride to and from work each day. While most boat passengers are reading the daily newspaper, this CIO would listen to IT-specific podcasts on each ride – and, he insisted that each downloaded podcast be 30 minutes long (or less), so that he could listen its entirety on the ride.

With virtul events, I’ve heard from event organizers and event sponsors who wonder whether the CIO (and her companions in the C-Suite) will adopt virtual events and virtual tradeshows. I think the answer is “yes”. First, let’s characterize some of the C-Suite occupants:

CEO – may be too busy to attend virtual events – but, will occasionally make the keynote appearance to kick off a virtual event. Many CEO’s do not use a computer, but most carry PDAs. This means that the path to CEO participation in virtual events may be via the PDA.
CMO – they see the value of virtual events as a marketing and lead generation vehicle, so one of their key roles today is in funding and approving budget. As for attendance, my feeling is that they’re interested in doing so.
CIO – like with podcasts, virtual events enable and empower an executive. The CIO can attend a virtual event to peer network with like-minded CIO’s and not miss a day in the office to do so.
CTO – intimate with technology, the CTO is virtually a slam dunk to participate (pun intended).
CFO – not so sure about CFO’s, but I will note that IBM Cognos produced a virtual event called Virtual Finance Forum 2009 that targeted finance executives. Cognos produced the same event in 2008 as well.

B-to-B publishers have caught on to the notion that CIO’s will attend virtual events, as past virtual events have specifically targeted the CIO. Two upcoming events are taking a similar approach:

CIO Virtual Forum: Navigating Through Dynamic Times (May 19, 2009 – CIO.com and Cisco)
CIO Summit: Driving Business Value and Customer Value in the Global Economy (June 10, 2009 – InformationWeek)

In my experience with technology focused virtual events, I found that of all registrants, 7-9% had senior IT titles (CIO, CTO, VP of Technology, etc.). So an event with 1,000 registrants would have 70-90 of them be CIO’s or CTO’s. Why would the C-Suite attend a virtual event? I think there are a few primary benefits:

Conveniently network with like-minded peers – one of the draws of attending an event is the ability to network with other attendees. With a virtual event, a busy executive can do so without losing a day outside the office.
Efficiently connect with partners and customers – an online experience can’t re-create the dyamics of an in-person interaction, but it does allow a busy executive to connect with many more partners and customers than could have occurred in-person.
Extend your social graph and social presence – some C-Suite execs have enthusiastically adopted Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. Industry-specific virtual events allow the executive to further expand the social graph. And of course, they’ll be tweeting about the event as soon as they login.

What has your experience been – has the C-Suite at your own company attended a virtual event?

2 Comments | Virtual Tradeshows (VTS) | Tagged: B-to-B, C-Suite, CEO, CFO, chat, CIO, CMO, CTO, Facebook, podcast, publishers, social networks, Twitter, Virtual Events, virtual tradeshows | Permalink
Posted by Dennis Shiao

Comparing Virtual Events and Virtual Communities

April 30, 2009

While virtual event platforms can certainly support a 365 day-per-year virtual community, my estimate is that 95% of the use case (today) on these platforms is for the single day or multi-day live virtual event. I’ve seen some pick-up in the “ongoing community” concept and I believe that by this time next year, the 5% share (for virtual communities) will be more like 15 or 20%. As I’ve written several times before, there are plenty of ways in which a virtual event platform can support a virtual community:

There are important distinctions to keep in mind when considering a virtual community. If you’re a veteran of virtual events and want to consider the community concept, I outline five key differences between the two – differences that will change the way you fundamentally plan and execute each one.

Outbound marketing vs. inbound marketing – with a live virtual event, 90% of your registrant and attendee base will come from outbound marketing. And today, most of that outbound marketing comes in the form of email blasts to assorted lists. With a virtual community site that’s available 365 days a year, attracting an audience is more about inbound marketing – such as search engine optimization (SEO) to attract visitors to your community from search engines. You’ ll want to complement the inbound marketing with some outbound promotion, but you’ll start to wear out your lists by promoting your virtual community site too often. One common tactic is to use social media (e.g. Facebook fan page, Linkedin Events listing, Twitter, etc.) to drive visitors and attendees to your virtual event and virtual community.
Local vs. global access – most live events take place during the course of a business day – and typically within a narrow timezone (e.g. the schedule is arranged around a US/Eastern or US/Pacific schedule for US-based events). While I’ve seen attendance at North American work-day events from visitors across the globe, it’s the middle of the night for these folks – so 60-80% of the audience participate from the local timezone(s). So for live events, the top priority of the virtual event platform is to support the local language at that timezone (e.g. English). For a virtual community, access is 7x24x365, which means that all languages can apply. As such, the virtual event platform ought to support rendering in as many languages as possible, both single and double byte.
Concentrated vs. intermittent audience – live events are great, because a large and captivated audience can result in valuable interactions between attendee and attendee, as well as between attendee and exhibitor. For a virtual community, a large, ongoing and engaged audience is nirvana – but, the more likely experience is that a few attendees will be in the environment at the same time you are. This places more onus on the community organizer to provide compelling content and useful asynchronous tools (e.g. blogs, message boards, etc.) to keep the visitor from wandering away and logging out.
Large staffing commitment vs. minimal staffing commitment – for a live event, you want an entire team of booth reps who can “man” your booth for the extent of the live show. For a 7x24x365 virtual community, it’s not practical to have booth reps online in the environment around the clock. Here’s where technology innovation can help – virtual event platforms that support an auto-attendant, for instance – a “chat bot” that engages visitors in text chat, which attempts to provide automated answers to common questions. Or, perhaps some auto-triggered notifications to booth reps. For instance, 5 visitors happen to be in my booth right now – so I receive an email alert that encourages me to login to the environment right away.
Intra-day support vs. ongoing support – for the virtual event producer, the priority is to provide support for the duration of the live event. For a virtual community, you want to ensure the service has 100% availability, but it’s not practical to personally monitor the environment at all times. Here, you might want to rely on automation to continually monitor key indicators and send you email alerts (or text messages) when exceptions occur.

Here’s a thought – do a little of both (above) – think of your virtual event as an experience that has a repeatable schedule. Once a live event has concluded, it transforms into a 7x24x365 virtual community. And when it’s time for the next live event, you simply “light up” the live features within the community. Then, when the live activities have concluded, you dim the lights and return to the community focus. Either way, make sure you think about the importance differences I’ve outlined. And have fun!

4 Comments | Virtual Tradeshows (VTS) | Tagged: engagement, Facebook, inbound marketing, Linkedin, Twitter, virtual community, virtual crisis center, Virtual Events, virtual tradeshows | Permalink
Posted by Dennis Shiao

How To Use Social Media To Stay Current On Virtual Events And Virtual Worlds

April 21, 2009

In 2009, I’ve seen a surge in the volume of content published around virtual events and virtual worlds – coverage in mainstream media, blog postings, videos, podcasts and even entirely new web sites developed to cover these specific industries. It’s all great – but with a rising volume of information comes the challenge of how to efficiently stay current. I’ll highlight a few social media services that I use to keep current on events, track emerging technologies and find relevant commentary on all things virtual.

Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) – I published a prior blog posting regarding some of the specific people I follow on Twitter for virtual worlds information. To stay current on virtual worlds, find the authorities in that space and start reading their blogs or articles. If you like what you find, see if they publish their Twitter handle – or, search for it yourself – and start following them. I can easily stay current on virtual worlds by following a few select experts. Their posts to interesting content serve as a virtual wire service for me (pun intended).
Tweetbeep (http://www.tweetbeep.com) – I follow over 300 people on Twitter. And as you may know, some of the A-level Tweeps obtain that status because of their verbosity. I tend to notice that a core set of 15-20 people (that I’m following) contribute about 80% of the tweets that I scan at any moment. What’s the downside to this? Well, that virtual events pioneer who only sends 2 tweets per day gets lost in the shuffle, as I’ll miss his tweets. That’s why I use Tweetbeep to set up Twitter alerts by email – it’s like a Google Alerts for Twitter. I set up search terms such as “virtual event”, “virtual tradeshow”, “virtual worlds” – and when I wake up in the morning, the alerts are there in my email inbox. Now, if that pioneer tweets about virtual events, I’ll know what he said. Also, I do have parallel Google Alerts configured, so that I learn about new content that Google has crawled on these same search terms.
Google Reader (http://google.com/reader) – I’ll find blogs and web sites that focus on virtual – and subscribe to them (via RSS) in Google Reader. This requires a bit more time, to skim through RSS headlines and determine what’s worth reading (similar to scanning an email inbox). So it’s not quite as efficient as Tweetbeep or Google Alerts, but very valuable nonetheless.
Friendfeed (http://friendfeed.com) – similar to Twitter, but also different – I find myself following a unique set of people on Friendfeed – and the neat thing with this service is that I can see not only their tweets, but links they’re reading via Google Reader and pages they’ve bookmarked with del.icio.us, to name a few. In addition, I’ll check in on a Friendfeed Room called Metaverse News, where Gaby Benkwitz posts links to interesting articles about the virtual world.
Facebook (http://facebook.com) – I created a Virtual Events Strategists Facebook Group – so I’ll check in there from time to time to see what’s been posted by group members (articles, images, questions, etc.) – and I’ll try to contribute to the group by posting articles that I’m reading about the industry. I’ve also noticed that virtual event producers are leveraging Facebook Groups to promote their event – which is neat.
Linkedin (http://linkedin.com) – I’ll use Linkedin to connect with folks I meet in the industry – and to keep current, I’ll check in on a few Linkedin Groups when I can (e.g. Virtual Worlds, Virtual Edge, Virtuual Events Forum, Event Managers, etc.). Some groups tend to be more “spammy” than others – so I’ll find those with the best signal-to-noise-ratio and receive postings via a weekly digest email.

All in all, this probably involves a bit more effort than it needs to – that’s why I think the future of staying current will be about services like Tweetbeep and Google Alerts – you configure what you want to see and an “agent” goes out, finds it and delivers it to your doorstep. Virtually, of course!

4 Comments | Virtual Worlds | Tagged: Facebook, Friendfeed, Google Alerts, Linkedin, Metaverse News, social networks, Tweetbeep, Twitter, Virtual Events, virtual tradeshows, Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Dennis Shiao

How A UC Davis Professor Leverages Second Life For Research

April 8, 2009

Professor Peter Yellowlees of UC Davis

Dr. Peter Yellowlees, professor of psychiatry at UC Davis, has done some innovative work using Second Life to help educate people on schizophrenia. I referenced Professor Yellowlees in an earlier blog posting about virtual worlds technologies that benefit the real world. I contacted Peter to get some more information about his research and his thoughts on virtual worlds, Web 2.0 and the future.

Tell us a little bit about yourself? I am a professor of psychiatry at UC Davis in Sacramento California, and I also run the UCD Health Informatics Graduate program, where we currently have over 40 graduate students enrolled in our masters and certificate programs. I trained in medicine in London, England, then spent 20 years in Australia, before being offered a position at UC 5 years ago. I am married to Barb and we have 4 grown children, and one “furry daughter” – a puppy called Lucy who thinks she is human.
Tell us how you are using technology (including virtual worlds) in your research? I use it to teach about the experience of schizophrenia. It is hard for students to imagine what it is like to hallucinate – to hear voices and see visions – and the capacity to have the avatar undergo those experiences is very helpful for the students and lets them understand about the lived experience of psychosis.
When you heard of the concept of a virtual world, what was your first thought? I have been working with virtual reality for more than 10 years – I started with a CAVE (collaborative virtual environment) in Australia and developed software applications for that type of environment, and then moved “downscale” to the much cheaper more available internet environment when I came to the US.
Besides Second Life, do you participate in other virtual worlds? Not currently, although I am constantly looking at other software systems, particularly the ones used by USC to model the Iraq war environment and treat PTSD.
What’s missing in virtual worlds technologies that could benefit your research efforts? In SL the main missing element is the relative lack of realism of the environment – it is still rather cartoon-like and can’t compete for “reality” with the very expensive VR games that are now widely available. I would also like to see the avatars being able to change more easily on the fly, although the creation of avatar bots is great.
What Web 2.0 services or social networks do you participate in? I blog regularly at http://informationagehealth.blogspot.com and am also on facebook and twitter. I have recently published a couple of ebooks at www.smashwords.com ( one of them is free) and have my own website at www.informationagehealth.com that is set up to both support patients that I see in the real world, as well as to promote my book on internet healthcare – “your health in the information age” published by iUniverse and available through Amazon and most online and f2f bookstores
Do you see benefits of social networks as they relate to your research interests? I am very interested in them and would really like your readers to comment on how they think that social networks could be used in healthcare – they clearly can be a support and information system for patients but I feel they should have more capacity than this and am looking at how they can be combined with mobile environments – I carry both a blackberry and an iPhone for instance, and am interested in how they could be used for monitoring behavior and symptoms.
What are related fields of science that could benefit from virtual worlds? Certainly the social sciences – also probably genetics, by allowing us to link with unknown family members better…and many others…
What does the future hold? Read my book!!!! – go to www.informationagehealth.com – the last chapter is all about the future of healthcare on the internet – lots of fascinating areas, and I think visualization of large data sets is particularly important – in 3D in virtual worlds – allowing scientists to literally get inside their data – amazing possibilities.

7 Comments | Virtual Worlds | Tagged: Facebook, Peter Yellowlees, Second Life, social networks, Twitter, UC Davis, Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Dennis Shiao

Identity And Access Management In The Virtual World

March 18, 2009

In the physical world, it’s quite easy and simple to separate your work identity from your personnal identity. Work is at the office – and for some, work stays in the office. Your personal life and family are in your home. Similarly, access rules apply within the same structure – you have access to work-related information in the office (even though we know that’s extended to your PDA these days) and you spend quality time with family members around the home. It’s simple, black and white. As we spend more time online these days (and virtual), our worlds begin to merge and what was once black and white becomes gray.

There’s no better example of this merging world than the desktop or notebook you use for work. Let’s list out the applications you run during the work day, segmented by business vs. personal:

Business

Email client
Instant messaging (IM) client
Browser tabs: Intranet, corporate reporting system, CRM system, ERP system, etc.

Personal

Email client (e.g. Yahoo Mail, Gmail, etc.)
Instant messaging (IM) client [possibly the same client you use for business purposes]
Browser tabs: Facebook, Twitter, eBay, NCAA picks, etc.

Now, let’s say I’m doing a desktop sharing session – I’m running through a demo of a virtual event and I’ve forgotten to sign out of my personal IM client. My mother, not knowing that I’m sharing my desktop, decides to send me an instant message. What happens is that my audience of ten gets to see a reminder from Mom to call Uncle Jasper to wish him a Happy Birthday. A bit embarassing, but all too possible when access to your business and personal profiles are enabled by a common resource (your PC).

To provide for a separation, one solution is to utilize virtualization – run one virtual machine (VM) with all of your business applications and a different VM with all of your personal applications. The hassle here is the need to toggle between the two – but hey, perhaps you get more work done.

Now, let’s extend things a bit – as the business use of social media and virtual worlds grows, I think the same need for separation (e.g. identity and access management) applies. For instance, many tell me that Facebook is strictly for friends and family, while Linkedin and Twitter are used strictly for business associates. So users are using a manual configuration to separate their social network identities (and access to those identities).

But perhaps there’s a cleaner way – something I think of as identity virtualization. Similar in concept to virtual machines, users of social networking and virtual worlds should be able to have a base profile (information that’s globally available and applies to all identities), along with specific identities suited for a defined purpose (e.g. business, personal, etc.). Perhaps your virtual worlds identity (for business) uses your real name, whereas your virtual worlds identity (for personal) uses a fictional name (a la Second Life).

For this to work across your social network sites, they’d all need to work together against a common standard (for profiles). In the meantime, this concept is precisely what Facebook was thinking, when they rolled out recent changes to help users better segment updates across their Facebook friends. So while I certainly don’t have all the answers, my simple thought is that, as use of social networks and virtual worlds grows, the identity and access management issue will become more and more important.

Leave a Comment » | Virtual Worlds | Tagged: Facebook, identity management, identity virtualization, Linkedin, Second Life, social networks, Twitter, Virtual Worlds | Permalink
Posted by Dennis Shiao

It's All Virtual

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