Text 100 Hosts Successful Boston Social Media Club Event

Text 100 brought the metaverse to Boston on May 17 with a highly successful networking and educational event, where we hosted a crowd of more than 85 people in real life at the Harvard Club – as well as several dozen avatars on Text 100 Island – at an event called Get a (Second Life) with Text 100 – Marketing and Communications in Virtual Worlds.  The event was the May meeting of the Social Media Club Boston, and was one of the best yet in the series.

The crowd gathered together to hear a tremendous panel presentation, hosted by Ken Peters, a VP from Text 100’s Boston office.  The panel included myself as well as Mike Askew, Senior Vice President of Technology at Fidelity Investments, John Lester (aka Pathfinder Linden) head of the Boston office of Linden Lab, Drew Stein, CEO of Infinite Vision Media and John Rodzvilla, professor at Emerson College. 

The panelists talked about the need for companies to ask themselves “why” they want to launch a presence in Second Life before jumping into the metaverse.  Mike Askew talked about the long process that Fidelity went through before deciding to start with a B2B presence in Second Life for Fidelity.  And the panel agreed that companies need to do more than just recreate a virtual world version of their real world presence if they expect to capture the imagination and attention of the Second Life community.

In addition the panel discussion, there were three great breakout sessions.  One was on public relations and community building in Second Life, hosted by me (aka Smiddy Smails in Second Life).  There was also a Second Life tutorial from Pathfinder and a session on Web development in Second Life led by Drew.  The Text 100 Boston team offered tours of Second Life during the networking hours before and after the event, helping to introduce virtual worlds to the Boston PR community. Greg Peverill-Conti has a pretty comprehensive write-up on his blog and Topaz Partners discussed the event in their weekly podcast as well.

It was a great event.  If you’re in Boston, check out the Social Media Club Boston’s calendar for more educational events.

[UPDATE: You can now watch a video of the event (minus the breakout sessions) by visiting the amphitheater on Text 100 Island in Second Life.]

Comments

[Weirdharold]

I tried hard to see the video of the event at Text 100 Island, but every time I attempted to watch the video my Second Life browser was crashed. Would it be possible to get the url to the stream outside SL?

[Doug Haslam]

I crashed after a little bit too-0- are you posting the video elsewhere? YouTube (too long I guess)? This blog?

Great event, thanks again for hosting, and it was a pleasure to meet Smiddy in the flesh.

[Aaron Uhrmacher]

Thanks for your comments. I didn't have any problems playing it in SL but if both of you did, then we'll try re-encoding it at a lower bit rate. Working on a URL link as well.