Media Engineering and Panel Gymnastics

Yesterday was the very entertaining and informative New Media Summit 2007, as referenced in the previous post.  During the morning sessions, one of the speakers referred to the new profession of 'Media Engineer', which pretty much nails what many of us do these days.

Yesterday, as far as media engineering goes, was a prolific day:

1) Built three powerpoint decks for various reasons.  We REALLY need to find a better tool for humans to communicate.
2) Recorded a podcast
3) Had a few video conferences
4) Recorded a machinima tour of Cisco's Second Life campus
5) Transcoded about a dozen videos into different formats
6) Blogged on both of my two blogs and updated about three wikis
7) Chaired a mixed-reality panel with real and avatar panelists

Is this the technical equivalent of 'cross-training'?  I certainly slept well!

The Virtual Worlds panel went great, as expected given the list of speakers who were kind enough to participate.  The panelists were Dave Kamalsky from IBM, Mat Small from Millions of Us, Paul Steinberg from Intel, and Achim Muellers from BMW, and the guys did a great job.  The writeups and Flickr shots of the event are trickling in here and here, (man, is Jeremy on it or what?) and Cisco will be making the webcast of the event available as a download later in the week.

Thanks again to all of you who attended, and most especially to the panelists who were kind enough to share their insights yesterday.

Comments

[Lisa Amorao]

Thank you for the informative session yesterday.

I was wondering, do you think Second Life would be The Next Social Medium? Do you think companies will do their marketing on Second Life or do you see companies creating their own branded virtual worlds a la Wells Fargo's Stage Coach Island?

[John Earnhardt]

Christian, the video of your panel and all the panels is now available online here (free, of course):
http://tools.cisco.com/cmn/jsp/index.jsp?id=62851&redir=YES&userid=(none)

Nice job moderating yesterday...I enjoyed your panel.

[Christian Renaud]

Lisa,

This is a great question, and I'll actually write a blogpost to elaborate more on this answer, however I think that virtual worlds (in a broader sense than just second life) will be one tool in the toolbox for marketeers. Just as there are currently asynchronous (email, video on demand) and synchronous (telephone, live webcast) tools for different jobs, virtual worlds will provide another synchronous tool for ad-hoc gatherings of people. So, user groups, training, press conferences, etc., are things best done in person, however you cannot always get the people to the same geographic location, so this is where virtual worlds are a great tool. It allows us the intimacy of personal meetings without the geographic dependency. In that way, it is already a new social medium for conversations to occur.

As far as the second part of your question goes, I think this strikes at the root of what will be the development of these technologies over the next 5-7 years. You have companies that want to 'go where the people are' and will set up in Second Life or wherever. You have companies like Wells Fargo and MTV who need specific assurances (and in many ways, so do all major companies due to risk and PR) that the user experience will be defined within a narrow band. This is akin to the walled-garden service providers of years past, with AOL as the sole remaining vestige, versus the 'wild wild internet' access-only service providers. MTV, with Virtual Laguna Beach, needs to make sure that there aren't child-predators, nudity, profanity, and so forth, so they created a walled-garden virtual world with Makena. Wells, so the story goes, was in Second Life early and didn't see the protections embedded in SL that they needed to 'secure' the user experience and do real business, so they defected to their own walled-garden (in all fairness, some of their rumored concerns have been addressed, while most have not).

What I forsee happening, for what it is worth, is that you will see the creation of virtual worlds by a number of major companies (Google, IBM, others) as Second Life has put 'blood in the water'. So, you'll have a period where you have people attempting to generalize the market, with worlds similar to Second Life, and another sector that creates walled-gardens like MTV for their specific experience objectives. Over time, there will be attrition and consolidation in the market with some companies implementations winning out over others, and also the education of virtual world users that will drive the demand for 'avatar portability', which will ultimately result in a more browser-based approach to virtual worlds, where you can take your representation of yourself to the website/virtual world of whatever company you like, and they have crafted a virtual world (as companies do from a UI/User Experience perspective in SL today) that meets their goals and objectives, just as we saw the evolution of user experience emerge in web page design.

It will be a grinding 5-7 years as all of these competing implementations have to fight it out for market dominance, only to result in customer demand for interoperability and standards between the two/three leaders (like email, IM, web have done). My contention, and this is where the MTV folks and I would most likely disagree, is that users are not going to get as invested in an avatar or virtual world if it is constrained to a single brand, whereas a general standard that allows your avatar to traverse multiple domains would be more effective.

Obviously, this is going to be the flashpoint for companies who attempt to wall in their demographic and make it so compelling that no one wants to defect (the switching costs of losing access to your friends as you move from one social networking tool to another is a good example of this).

Ok, on that note, I'll go caffeinate so I can be more lucid and on-point in my next blogpost. Thanks for the great question Lisa!

[Dave_K.]

Hi Lisa, aren't blogs fun! :-) Here is my personal opinion (not unlike Christian's). Virtual Worlds (not just Second Life) are indeed the next social medium, and one I think companies need to start exploring to discover where it works and where it doesn't, but not only from a marketing and communications perspective, but also from a learning, collaboration, and work force perspective. Each company may draw different conclusions about how this social medium effects them publically, and as such, have different requirements for maintaining their brands. Similarly, companies that want to do real business in virtual worlds may have different requirements when its comes to confidentiality, trust, and security of transactions. So although there may be some advantages in the short term to closed systems with varying capabilities to suit particular needs, in the long term, standards and interoperability are going to become key for this medium to mature like the web, email, and IM has, bridging all these worlds together where people and content can flow (somwhat) freely between them.

[Leese]

Thank you both for taking the time to answer. It's definitely exciting to see this medium unfold.

I think it would be ideal if my avatar can travel across walled virtual worlds, kinda like OpenID across social networking platforms (which, btw has been disappointingly slow in becoming mainstream, IMO, but I guess that's another subject).