Nano-Marketing

The most important event dealing with Virtual World took place last week in New-York and Stephane was there cool enough to post this article into B-R-ENT http://b-r-ent.com/news/convention-virtual-worlds-2007-a-ny . These virtual universes can have the most advanced technology and processes... the key differentiator is the involvement of the consumer to create the environment they are evolving into !

So more insigths post translated by Stephane dealing with Virtual Worlds 2007 , Steve Prentice, Chief of Research at Gartner  Group, and the ones of IBM , Proton Media, Paul Ledak, VP of Development Digital Convergence IBM 

"Virtual Worlds 2007, the first business conference devoted to virtual worlds and marketing, took place last week in New York (March 28-29). With 600 attendees, the conference sold out 10 days before it opened, which is very unusual for this type of events.

On top of the 300 "usual suspects", the long time virtual world users and creators I'm used to meeting at these shows, the corporate world was there in force. Major corporations for the first time sent their top managers in marketing, brand and internet management to witness first hand what's happening in an exploding field.

The consensus: Everybody knowledgeable knows for a fact that these worlds are the early instances of tomorrow's web, and you just cannot overstate their importance. Yet, It's still too early to tell in which direction the market is going to consolidate, and nobody ventures a schedule or a list of potential winners. Most panelists compare the industry's current situation with the Internet circa 1993, before the web and Netscape (do you remember this time? Email then was a strange hip toy used by kids and advertised on cereal boxes by AOL).

We've already moved beyond pure R&D. Two of the case studies presented at the conference (MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach and Pontiac's Motorati, respectively on There.com and Secondlife) have a measurable and impressive ROI and constitute makor marketing breakthroughs. They don't have however the breadth or scope of big traditional media campaigns. I'll come back on both of these experiments in further articles.

On the enterprise front, the most sigificant statements came from Steve Prentice, Chief of Research of Gartner Group, and from Paul Ledak, VP of Development Digital Convergence of IBM .

Gartner stressed how the first community that can be federated by these virtual worlds is the enterprise itself. IBMers are trying just that on Second Life , on a set of private islands. One of Paul Ledak's remark intrigued me: Second Life could have been used to build simplistic prototypes of the Airbus A380 - not engineering grade stuff, just the equivalent of 3D "doodles" for communication between distant teams - enough to ease the sharing of practical issues. With a a blunder accounting for losses in the billions, is there anyone doubting the ROI of such a tool?...

Coming next: Virtual worlds done right, the Motorati and Virtual Laguna Beach case studies."

This is outstanding content: thanks again Stephane and Virtual worlds are bridging the gap bitween Web 2.0 Social Web associated to CGC and Web 3.0 of avatars part of the semantic web i.e. machines talking to machines...

ps: "Stephane Zugzwang is the second life avatar of a senior IT executive in a major worldwide marketing research company".