Task 5 Addendum

Task 5 required me to research how different organizations implemented their presence within Second Life (SL). Throughout this course this semester, I gained a new interest in Web 2.0 technologies and what they could do for me. After an earlier discussion on social networking sites, I logged in to my LinkedIn account, and spent time updating and sending out invites to people I knew. One person who happens to be an acquaintance I know through mutual friends accepted my offer. She also happens to be an IT Applications Manager for Manpower, one of the companies I was now investigating for Task 5. I sent her an message through LinkedIn to say hi and explain my assignment to her. She thought it was great and forwarded my request on to the Second Life development team. I finally got a response back from her with some information but unfortunately, it was past the due date for my assignment. I learned a couple things from their email:

• Manpower is using SL Life specifically to target tech-savvy people in the 24-44 age groups.
• Using SL to remain competitive and to explore new communication and marketing methods.
• As a company they want to demonstrate the collaborative technologies and their applications in the way people work and play.

Interestingly enough, the SL team, did not run in to many issues starting up except of the hectic schedule since they wanted to create the site quickly. Since their initial launch they have had more than 10,000 visitors and plan to increase that number during the 2008 phases.

Manpower is actually using SL to recruit people for positions in real life. They have conducted virtual job and career fairs and plan to continue to post those positions along with those relevant to the audiences of virtual worlds.

All of the above information was learned through an email (personal communication, May 8, 2008). I thought my own personal experiment in the usage of a social networking site to contact someone for information worked quite well. While I did not get this in my original writing for task 5 I feel it really exemplifies what technology allows us to do.