Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
Non-Profits Clean Up In Mixed Reality; Fortune 1000 Straggles
Sitting at Supernova 2007 two weeks ago, I heard my first new really interesting vocab word in quite a while: mixed reality. Susan Tenby from TechSoup was talking during the “Where’s The Innovation?” Session (Clara Peller, anyone?) about innovations made by non-profits in the social networking space, in terms of fundraising and awareness. And it struck me that non-profits are likely leading the way into mixed reality. They’re getting there faster than conventional brands of their size.
(To get an idea of where a company’s marketing or PR effort falls between “real” reality and virtual reality, take a look at Paul Milgram’s Reality Continuum.)
Tenby works for San Francisco’s Techsoup, a tech agency that provides technology donations, community and resources to all NPOs (non-profit organizations). She took TechSoup into the Second Life virtual community early in 2007, and the group eventually outgrew it’s initial free “office space” on Information Island. So, Tenby did what any virtual office manager and community advocate would do: she went to the Second Life convention in San Francisco in search of an angel donor to provide bigger digs and greater outreach.
A long story short: Tenby ran into the partner of first Second Life millionaire Anshe Chung, and a few months later, Techsoup is administrating the only non-profits-only sim (a space or acre of land) in Second Life - a completely volunteer-built community. Currently, the sim, the Nonprofit Commons, includes a diverse bunch of NPO and social-benefit organizations like CARE and Cheerful Givers.
“TechSoup, in real life, lowers the barriers of access to technology to non-profit organizations…it made sense to do that in Second Life as well,” Tenby said. “The parallel is that we want to be the portal to Second Life for non-profit organizations.”
So, here’s the rub: while it’s totally awesome that smaller NPOs like the Alzheimer Society of Ontario are able to make it in the virtual space, it’s downright puzzling that, out of the consumer-facing brands that ranked 900-1000 in the 2005 Fortune 1000, including:
* Coach
* Trans-World Entertainment (FYE Stores)
* Earthlink
* Monaco Coach
* PC Connection
* Wyndham International (Hotels)
* Smuckers (especially sad, due to a bulk of bloggage)
* Timberland (who are suffering a counterfeiting problem in Second life)
* Guitar Center
* Men’s Wearhouse (like it’s that hard to build a George Zimmer avatar?!)
only one had any prescence in Second Life: Domino’s Pizza. And yes, they’ll be getting there in under thirty minutes. (Note: I picked #’s 900-1000 to show the end of the Fortune 1000, where I figured some of the more creative billion-dollar brands would lie).
“I think, in general, a lot of larger corporations are slow to adopt Web 2.0. If you go to Web 2.0 Meetups, other than the Yahoos and Googles, they’re not there. These large corporations are not Web 2.0 because they have more to risk,” Tenby said.
Tenby points to a lack of understanding of the mixed-reality business model that NPOs thrive on: awareness marketing.
“I don’t think that people can think outside of the monetization model,” she said. “American Apparel didn’t see early success; it wasn’t about trying to pull people into Second Life - you have to redefine how you measure success.”
She’s got a prescient point: even as Second Life becomes a more mature (and seriously monied) community that, size-wise, rivals the city of San Jose, California, big brands still shy away. Heck, maybe Volvo will drag Ford Motor, kicking and screaming, into mixed reality; the Swedish embassy opened in Second Life two months ago.
A recent NY Times article profiling the Mac Arthur foundation’s entree into the virtual world of Second Life mentioned Tenby and TechSoup a couple of weeks back.
Linkage:
A Second Social Life: Social Benefit Organizations & Second Life (Smart Mobs)
Nonprofit Commons
TechSoup’s Second Life
TechSoup
Science Fiction’s Influence on Web 2.0 (podcast)
In this podcast, LaunchSquad’s Adam Metz and Stanford doctoral candidate Noam Cohen, author of the forthcoming thesis, “Speculative Nostalgias: Metafiction, Science Fiction and the Putative Death of the Novel,” discuss the influence of science-fiction on business, and especially, Web 2.0.
The podcast also features an in-depth discussion of the ramifications of Neal Stephenson’s 1993 novel Snow Crash, and its influence on virtual worlds like Second Life and There.
