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The Corporate Push Into Virtual Worlds: Page 4 of 8

"It's a big space, and there aren't a lot of people there at once. It can be a very lonely experience," agrees Nicholas Ducheneaut, a researcher into virtual worlds at Xerox PARC. "And you really have to wonder whether these big companies are putting the cart before the horse: they're hoping to get attention, and perhaps even sell their products, yet their stores are empty."

A major challenge is figuring out a way to adequately measure success in virtual worlds. Simply measuring foot -- or flight -- traffic alone isn't adequate. After all, a conventional Web site can benefit from the "long tail" phenomenon: although not getting a lot of traffic at any given time, the total number of hits eventually adds up to significant numbers.

"That's simply not a useful metric in Second Life," says Giff Constable, vice president of the Electric Sheep Company, which developed the Reuters and Starwood Hotels virtual properties. Since an essential aspect of the Second Life experience is the interactivity -- both with objects in the world, and with other users -- simply recording how many avatars showed up for a look and then teleported away is meaningless.

Traffic would have to go far beyond just the number of people who came to your site, but include how long they spent there, what they do, what they look at and who they interact with. Some measure of the community aspect of the experience will have to be measured as well, says Constable. "The Web is a solo experience. Second Life is a shared one, and the metrics have to reflect that."

What We Have Here Is An Attempt To Communicate
Echoing virtual retail halls notwithstanding, initial attempts to use Second Life as a communication and collaboration platform look promising.

Cisco has built an auditorium for holding press conferences and executive briefings on its massive virtual campus, but when no event has been scheduled, the space is deathly quiet.

Cisco, which entered Second Life in December 2006, is testing the waters by doing executive briefings, technical support and product training in its virtual campus there. "We're basically extending our use of existing technologies for interacting with customers into Second Life," says Christian Renaud, senior manager of business development for the Cisco Tech Center, which is the firm's technology scouting and incubator research group. "We're finding it extremely useful for communicating and collaborating in a way that you simply couldn't do over the telephone, or using the Web, or through a combination of the two."

A case in point: Renaud is based in rural Iowa. One day in mid-January, when an ice storm had shut down the physical region, Renaud went for an early morning walk in the Cisco Second Life campus. Recognizing him by the oversized name tag that hangs above the head of all Second Life avatars, two customers stopped him and quizzed him about a recent Cisco announcement. "We had a very productive 'serendipitous' chat, just as you would around a real water cooler," says Renaud, who says such a meeting would be very difficult even in the real world. "If I were walking across our San Jose campus, they wouldn't have known who I was," he says. "And we would have missed an opportunity to get some valuable feedback."