Second Life

A few years ago, I jumped into the virtual world known as Second Life. I created an avatar that was much thinner, much prettier and decidedly more exotic than I am (she looked a lot more like Angelina Jolie than she did me), and I gave her a cool name. The fact that I don’t remember what it was should tell you where this is heading. When I finished the creation stage — voila! — there was Margelina (we’ll call her, in retrospect), tall and beautiful, and standing completely naked in this weird, other-wordly place that was rather dark and just a little menacing.

“[The American Cancer Society] started Relay for Life events in 1985. Today it conducts events in 4,600 communities in the United States and in 23 countries worldwide. … It applied these years of organizational experience to create and operate a successful Second Life initiative, demonstrating that real-life expertise can be effectively applied to virtual world initiatives.” — Ben Rigby, in his book, “Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0 Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage Youth”.

“The promise of the Internet wasn’t ever really capitalized on. But for every deluded or misguided marketer thinking about clicks and conversions, there’s a marketer using the Web truly as a transformational tool. That means harnessing the Web’s network capabilities to build partnerships through conversations and shared experiences in virtual worlds like Second Life and Cyworld.” — Joseph Jaffe, author of the book “Join the Conversation,” quoted in “Start the Conversation,” an article by Samar Farah in the March issue of Deliver magazine.