Web Worker Daily recently published a nice summary of the key elements needed to set up a virtual world event intended to happen simultaneously with a real world event. Aliza Sherman, the author, is familiar only with Second Life, where she has held two events.
There are eight key points that Sherman recognizes:
1 - Get Virtual Help: Sherman suggests help from talent in both the real and virtual worlds
2 - Know the Lay of the Land: In other words, co-own an island in Second Life. This helps immensely when clients come to you lacking their own SL land.
3 - Think 3-D and Interactive: Offer 3D notecards (in addition to the standard billboards) that avatars can pick up and stick in their pocket. Er, inventory.
4 - Think Promo Items (Freebies): Give away things like virtual t-shirts, or, if the promo is for a food company, virtual food that the avatar can eat. Yay freebies!
5 - Show the Virtual Event in the Actual Conference Location: Self-explanatory, really. Set up a few laptops and if possible project onto a large screen.
6 - Stay on Message Virtually: As in the RW, staying on message applies virtually as well. Hosts can keep avatars from being distracted by the novelty of Second Life or other virtual worlds by communicating key messages.
7 - Hire Security: “It is so easy to build and create objects in Second Life, and it is just as easy for a troublemaker - or “griefer” - to do the same at your event,” writes Sherman. Security can eject griefers quickly and effectively.
8 - Spread the Virtual Word: Playing on the advent of SL bloggers, an event can attract decent word-of-mouth through SLers writing about it in-world.
Finally: “Don’t skimp on your Second Life event or treat it as an afterthought. Virtual world events are valuable to, and attended by, people from all over the world. You can expand your reach quickly and exponentially when you hold a virtual world event.”
You don’t need to hire consultants and fancy security companies, you just need to put on autoreturn to 1 and make sure that you have given permissions to someone in the group to eject avatars and return non-group objects. It’s not rocket science, it’s like putting a filter on your email.
I used to have a more detailed help list of events organizing on my blog, can’t find the link now, but I had at least one point that is HUGELY important, and that is provide very clearly visible instructions inworld, and vocally, as to how to get the movie screens and sound working. This vexes people no end, and you have to spell it out in baby steps with troubleshooting tips.
9. Hope that SL will work at the time of the event.
While the grid / logins are down fairly rarely, Murphy dictates that it will happen exactly when you want to have an event. Happened to me twice..
Very interesting stuff. Personally, I’ve taken a completely different approach to producing a mixed reality event (or being an aspect of one).
For me, getting the right people was my top priority, and pretty much all I think about.
Having the right RL staff and the right virtual staff in place, where everyone “gets it”…. that is what has made my mixed reality events successful.
We’ve partnered with a number of groups now to bring RL conferences into SL. You offer some good advice in your column. We handled much of what you describe above, the in world parts that tend to be mysterious to the RL group. The RL group doesn’t have to learn about things such as in world security or how to distribute conference materials in a virtual world. We have that all set.
The potential weakness, though, tends to be the connection to SL. Not all conference facilities have wired in internet, instead relying on WiFi and the wireless system can be stress by the number of conference participants using it. You can do any number of trial runs/tests of your set up, then as the event starts and the audience members start connecting via WiFi to check their email and you start having issues.
Having hosted a few more social than conference events, I must agree with both Doubledown, on staff issues both inworld, and organic, and with Sioban on the Wifi issues.
Have not yet found solution for supply, of WiFi for Organic users in venue, as the last meetup my system slowly came to a crawl after I could not refuse password for punters to hook up.
But like all things we plug away by trial and error till we strike a balance that works.