IBM and SL: What’s the Point?
August 27th, 2007
This iMedia Connection article begins: “IBM sales representatives in Singapore, Malaysia and Australia have begun staffing the company’s virtual Business Center in Second Life, signaling the growing popularity of so-called immersive online worlds.”
The article goes on to claim that IBM’s Second Life business center receives 10,000 visitors. Annually. My guess is that many of those visitors wandered into the virtual Business Center by accident and many others are some of IBM’s 350,000 worldwide employees.
How many of those 10,000 visitors actually used the virtual Business Center as IBM intended?
Go ahead and make some guesstimates and crunch the numbers. Dollars well spent? From the customer service budget, probably not. From the PR budget, maybe. Either way, it’s a pretty pricey spend, especially with enthusiasm around Second Life on something of a wane.
I hope IBM’s real (and only) goal here is simply to have a virtual world presence and start to understand how virtual worlders interact with companies online, sort of an R&D playground. Any ambitions beyond that are probably overreaching way too far.
August 27th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Actually, part of the SL demographic are involved in IT operations in their organizations or have some career related to IT.
No studies of course, just observational data from conversations I’ve had with people who are active SL users.
So this isn’t actually a bad call, in my opinion, even with the hype of SL on the wane.