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It’s official! We are expanding into Reaction Grid for college and university customers, and for corporate meetings and event needs.
We have assembled a team of key people to make offerings that are effective and efficient.
Colleges and universities have embraced virtual worlds (thanks to library scientist in large part) and are now at a point where more economical (higher ROI) and less political alternatives to Second Life are desired (Microsoft moves from Second Life to Reaction Grid).
For meetings and events, think Webex, but with the added interaction of a true 3D virtual meeting. IBM embraced virtual worlds early on and discovered an unforeseen benefit. People would arrive early to a meeting and stay after a meeting to collaborate and build on new ideas with each other.
The synergy of “impromptu” meetings is well known and companies such as Pixar ensure that their real world spaces present opportunites for people to cross paths and bounce ideas off one another.
Some of the best ideas come from “water cooler” moments.
A virtual world meeting option does not mean a replacement for meetings. Linden Lab does a good job touting that with their IBM white paper. But truth is, there are, and will always be, times when real face-to-face meetings are needed.
Having a virtual venue as an offering, like any other amenity, is an added value to hotels and convention centres that they can include as an option to their clients.
After a wonderful and educational teleconference with Kyle Gomboy, Reaction Grid CEO, and Chris Hart, Reaction Grid CTO, we have been offered a wonderful opportunity to become a reseller.
What does that mean for iliveisl?
It means I am out of Ener’s hair (isl anyway) and won’t be “donating” any estate land to educational purposes (read: Ener won’t get mad at me for my elearning freebies!).
It also means that iliveisl will be offering Reaction Grid (OpenSim) land in addition to Second Life land. Thus fulfilling our mantra of “i live in simulator lands”. The additional offering will help even out economic ups and downs of Second Life and will help the iliveisl Second Life estate grow.
Stay tuned as we develop the supporting website and look for our Reaction Grid info so you can come visit and experiment on our OpenSim land.
As the driver behind the social networking strategy of the iliveisl estate (Second Life virtual real estate), I look at various analytic tools to measure what are the best “fits” for these efforts. The iliveisl estate has a presence in many social networks, including LinkedIn, Youtube, blip.tv, CafePress, Urban Dictionary, Threadless Tees, Gravatar, Ning networks, Google and Yahoo profiles, various Second Life forums, and so on.
An easy analytic tool to use is grader.com. It’s a nice and easy tool for benchmarking your efforts.
The relatively new Facebook Grader does not have a large dataset yet, but can sill be used to measure your growth from a week to week.
Here we see the Twitter grade for the account updated by Ener Hax, the spokesperson of the social campaign. Secondly, the Facebook page of Ener Hax for the estate, and lastly the iliveisl blog.
Twitter and Facebook drive traffic to the blog. The blog posts automatically update the Twitter account and that updates the Facebook page.
Why does any of this matter? How does it apply to eLearning?
Effective social networking is vital if you want to promote your educational efforts and share your lessons learned with the eLearning community.
Individuals will post comments to our iliveisl blog posts on the Facebook wall and carry on a conversation with each other about our posts. That was a suprising and pleasant discovery.
What a great new feature (in limited Beta) for Twitter. If you have a large following like our very own Ener Hax, lists can be very useful! Log in and see if you have an invite to use Twitter Lists, it shows up rather prominently!
Way to be in 7 lists already Ener!
Me and my numbers. Actually, “our” numbers. And very nice Ener on your post about me pimping you out* (nice bikini btw). =D
iliveisl blog statistics dropped this week and I should have suspected a possible error on my part. We added Feedburner to our strategy this week as well as changing a few SEO and traffic plugins.
Since we look at multiple traffic indicators such as the stats in Flickr and Blip.tv, as well as things like grader.com, we feel pretty comfortable with the accuracy of any of those numbers. If traffic is a steady 1,000 visitors a day on the blog, you would also expect supporting stats for our sites that point to it to stay steady.
Some of those “organic” indicators are Facebook friend comment activity and Twitter reach (see below).
If blog traffic suddenly goes down and you have not changed your efforts (such as blogging frequency, content, authors) then digging into other stats are warranted. The iliveisl blog is hosted on the bullet-proof servers of Media Temple which come with Urchin statistics.
Once I pulled those numbers, all was right with the world (and actually higher than before the drop – what a geeky world I live in!).
So what does this have to do with Second Life?
Promoting ourselves is obvious, but we also encourage in-world businesses and venues to use the many free social networking tools out there to achieve greater success.
I do consulting for individuals and small businesses in the real world on social networking and use iliveisl as my “living” example. Ener does a great job in-world with encouraging residents to use these tools as well. You can see those efforts with some of the links in the iliveisl blog’s sidebar.
So be smart, don’t let social networking become a “time suck”, and have fun with it (maybe don’t get so obsessed with traffic numbers!). =)
nice chirping Ener!
so this and 4 cents will get you one snapshot isl!
* Look for a possible offering of virtual world space for meetings, functions, and eLearning providers. We host a few corporate meetings on the iliveisl estate for free. However, there is a need from some of our clients to have “tighter” virtual space that is more business-like and less expensive. Enter what Ener mentioned below – Reaction Grid . . . stay tuned.
One of our silly images gets air time in a French political blog!
Sometimes we get so serious that we can lose the joy of what attracted many of us to eLearning. Creating interactions, graphics, and 3D environments is something I love to do as part of teaching. Fortunately, it’s also the way I unwind.
I count myself lucky that my vocation is also my avocation.
One of my hobbies is dabbling in social networking and I use iliveisl.com and our spokeperson, Ener Hax, as the focus of these efforts. Part of that strategy is using Flickr for images to help in SEO. Since Flickr is owned by Yahoo, it’s impact can be substantial. Especially with our 5,000 Second Life images!
Take a moment and let your inner child come out and play, it’s rather refreshing! =D
See the blog post on deregulation in French or in English.
everyone loves good poutine!
