Mixed Signals: Issue No. 3 - January 2007 | Social Signal

Welcome to the third issue of Social Signal's e-newsletter, Mixed Signals. We think you'll find it a useful round-up of news, ideas and upcoming events.

If so, please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone else you think might find it useful. You can also point people to the online version if you like. (And if you'd rather not receive further issues, you'll find instructions on unsubscribing at the end of this message.)

We welcome your comments and suggestions. Please feel free to send us your feedback and ideas. And thanks for reading Mixed Signals!

...Plus: an invitation! We're hosting a virtual-world reception to welcome our newest employee, Catherine Winters (see below)... and we'd love to see you there. It's happening Wednesday, Jan. 3 from 2-4 pm Pacific Time (that's 5-7 Eastern) at the TechSoup office on Info Island in Second Life. You have to download the software (it's free, but there's a few dozen megabytes) and register (also free), but what better way to check out one of the most intriguing new online communities to come along in ages?

We're growing: meet two new additions to the Social Signal team

Pravin Pillay and Catherine Winters (aka Catherine Omega)

Everyone has their own way to celebrate the new year: fireworks, champagne, resolutions, offkey renditions of Auld Lang Syne.

Here at Social Signal, we celebrate by hiring brilliant people.

Please put your hands together for the two newest members of our team: Pravin Pillay, our new Chief Operating Officer, and Catherine Winters, our new Manager of Virtual Worlds.

Pravin has a long record of success bringing together innovative interdisciplinary teams – from artists to engineers. Two cases in point: he worked with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) to launch their presence in Canada, and helped Rediscovery International Foundation develop solid business practices and sharpen their youth-empowering mission. Pravin holds an MBA from McGill University, and he's already helping our clients find the entrepreneurial edge in their projects, whether social or commercial.

And Catherine is the acknowledged leading authority on interactive scripting in Second Life, where she is better known as Catherine Omega. Her willingness to share her extensive and growing knowledge of LSL, Second Life's notoriously quirky scripting language, led her to create the LSL Wiki – now the reference of choice for the LSL development community. Catherine is a co-author of the just-released Second Life: The Official Guide, which broke the Amazon.com top 500. She blogs regularly at Omega Point.

If Catherine's hiring leads you to believe we're launching a Second Life practice, you're absolutely right! Click here to read all about it. (And if you're wondering what the heck Second Life is, download our hot-off-the-virtual-presses white paper, Second Life: What it is and why it matters.)

And if Pravin's presence makes you think we needed a hands-on visionary to help us chart our way through the rapids of a protracted growth spurt, you're right again. We have some exciting things planned for 2007, and we're looking forward to sharing them with you.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy working with Pravin and Catherine as much as we do – and that's saying a lot.

7 reasons your organization should consider Second Life in 2007

by Catherine Winters (aka Catherine Omega)

I'll remember 2006 as the year when people stopped staring at me blankly when I mentioned my involvement in the virtual world of Second Life.

Sure, I still get plenty of questions, but more and more people have heard about this new space where you can create a digital body that walks around and chats with people and buys stuff. Maybe they read a newspaper article describing it as online game, or maybe they read a business story that called it the next big marketplace. But 2006 was the year that blank stares turned into vague nods.

2007 will be the year those vague nods turn into people saying, "yeah, I just logged in!" At the rate Second Life is growing -- from 100,000 registered users a year ago to one million in October, and now all the way up to two million -- it may be over thirty million a year from now. At thirty million users Second Life is no longer a sideshow, but is something everyone has heard of and many people are experiencing for themselves.

What does that mean for organizations who are trying to stay in touch with customers or supporters -- people who are more and more likely to be in Second Life, and spending more and more time in SL once they get there? It means 2007 is the year those organizations have to figure out Second Life for themselves, and in many cases, establish some sort of Second Life presence.

So, why should your organization think about establishing a presence in Second Life this year? Let me give you seven good reasons.

1. Tap into immersive marketing

2006 saw Second Life emerge as a cutting-edge communications and simulation platform. Just as the web is already replacing and extending the capabilities of traditional print media, Second Life is likewise extending the capabilities of broadcast media and chat. Second Life now surpasses the intensity of broadcast advertising at an even more favourable price point than print. So shake out that ad budget and consider where your dollars are best spent.

2. Earn media coverage

When you invest in a Second Life presence, it's not like you're just advertising to people in Second Life. At this point, simply being a real-world organization with a presence in Second Life is enough to guarantee media interest. However, we’re already seeing a shift away from that, to one where media organizations are not simply content to report on yet another company entering Second Life, but rather, are interested in talking about truly novel uses of virtual worlds. 2007 will see a shift towards media coverage of SL being limited to applications that feature interactivity and community networking. But if you're one of the organizations smart enough to do something interesting, a Second Life presence is still a great way to get free media coverage.

3. Get in on the ground floor

While it's becoming harder to catch people's attention in Second Life, it's still much easier now than it will be in another year or two. As more people and more organizations get into Second Life it's going to become harder -- and more expensive -- to catch people's attention. But by establishing your presence now, you create a profile that will grow as Second Life grows -- the same way that early bloggers have grown into massive audiences as blogging has taken off. As Second Life grows, more people want to use it, and more people want to do business with the organizations who have been around a while.

And don't forget the grandchildren factor: don't you want to tell your grandkids that you got into SL before it got massive and commercialized?

4. Make your web site work harder

A Second Life presence is a great complement to an existing web presence, marketing site or online community. By creating an SL space for members of your online community, you give them a meeting place where they can cement the relationships they're establishing on the web. A Second Life presence also gives your users a chance to directly experience the things they're talking about on the community site. A Second Life simulation can illustrate or elaborate on ideas or information you present on your web site.

5. Amplify your live events

Live events are very popular in Second Life (sometimes TOO popular: a Second Life can actually get filled to capacity during a popular event). Holding an event in Second Life is a great way to make a real-life event accessible to people who can't join you in person. You can hold an event simultaneously in both real life and a corresponding SL space, allowing remote guests to participate and feel as if they’re actually there. You can make your real-life meeting reach further by holding a parallel event in Second Life, or even hold your event in SL entirely.

6. Conquer new markets

I sometimes like to describe Second Life as being like a grown-up version of Lego and Barbies; it's a playful space, where people spend a lot of time building things and dressing up. They spend real dollars on all this fun: hundreds of people are now making a full-time living by selling products and services in Second Life, and thousands more are making something between latte money and a second income. If you sell virtual versions of your products in Second Life -- or run a virtual version of a fundraising campaign -- you can earn Second Life Linden dollars that convert into real-world money. This is more than just a new market and revenue stream: it's a great way to demonstrate your real-world products or message.

7. Play a leadership role

Second Life grew quickly last year, but these are still early days compared to the role it's going to play in our lives in another five or ten years. Maybe the virtual world we end up living in won't look exactly like today's Second Life, but as the biggest virtual world out there (by far!) Second Life is going to have a big impact on how our virtual lives evolve. By getting involved with Second Life now, you have a chance to shape the market, culture and politics of an important online space -- an online space that will become the face of the Internet in the years ahead.

Don't be a YouTube rube

A few quick tips for using viral video

2006 is already going down as The Year of YouTube (no wonder Google bought them), with businesses, political campaigns, non-profits, Hollywood directors and PR firms trying to elbow aside the teenagers and film geeks for few moments in the viral video spotlight.

But many of their efforts sink without a trace. Without trying to understand YouTube's culture, they shovel thinly-disguised self-serving TV ads onto the site, and then wonder why their efforts haven't become the latest online craze.

There are no guarantees that your video will go viral, driving thousands of people to your organization's donation page... but there are some solid basic starting points. If you're trying to use YouTube, think about these factors first:

• You're starting a conversation. Are you prepared for that? How can you make the most of it?
• Think about value for viewers. You've probably thought through what your videos will do for you... but what they can do for a viewer is even more important in a viral era. Ask yourself, why anyone would want to pass your clips on to a friend?
• Apart from any intrinsic value - useful information, for example - is your video interesting? How about to someone outside your organization?
• If you believe your video clip is interesting - and especially if you believe it's funny - have you asked others? Have you checked it out with a few members of your target audience? It may be side-splitting to you and your board members, but mind-numbingly dull to the 18-year-old you're trying to reach.
• What about your video is authentic, and gives voice to something genuine and vital about your organization?
• Is YouTube the right video-sharing service for you? Spend some time there, but visit some of the others. Get a feel for the kind of content that rises to the top, and - just as important - the kind of users who visit. Is this where you'll find your audience?

Read Rob's case study of an oil company's venture onto YouTube here.

Tracking tasks with Remember The Milk

Dairy delight or lactose intolerance?

This is the summary of a longer review Aaron and Rob wrote. You can read the full version here.

October saw the Social Signal team hunting for some new task management software. We'd been using (or not using, as the case may be) Basecamp for quite a while, but it made task management an almost unmanageable task.

Enter Remember the Milk, a free web-based to-do list service. RTM is an incredibly slick task management application that comes jam-packed with great features. Adding lists and tasks is a snap, you can sort tasks by tag, share lists and tasks with other RTM users & groups, and you can upload task lists by email. As if that wasn't enough, there's Atom, RSS & iCal feeds, integrated geo-location, and email/IM/SMS reminders.

But there are places where the milk curdles - especially for a team. The interface sometimes feels counterintuitive, with crucial feedback messages and dialog boxes appearing unobtrusively when they should be working harder to grab your eyeballs. Sharing and assigning tasks relies on a pull-down menu and, while we were testing it, had more than one glitch show up.

At a glance:

• The sweet: Tagging, Atom & RSS feeds, iCal integration, nice interface, GREAT help section, bookmarklet, smart lists, notes, geo-location, email, IM & SMS reminders, list sharing, email upload, keyboard shortcuts
• The sour: task assignment/sharing is weird, categorization is tricky to manage, notes are tricky, no 'overall' view of all the tasks on all my shared lists, feels 'isolated' -- no 'team' feeling, à la Basecamp

Update: ChangeEverything.ca launches... and warms up a cold snap

What could be better than having your site launch covered by TechCrunch? We found out.

When Vancity's ChangeEverything site officially launched in September, we were thrilled. (Quick refresher: ChangeEverything.ca is an online community we built with Vancity, Canada's largest credit union. People in the Lower Mainland & Victoria can use it to find and share information, tools and connections to inspire change in their own lives, their communities, and the world.)

The buzz was terrific, and to cap it off, the hugely popular Web 2.0 news site TechCrunch called it "a nice alternative to the user generated advertising model". Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote:

I think this is a great example of a company making use of Web 2.0 tools to promote themselves in a way that places the balance of the impact on providing value to users and incurs promotional benefits for themselves as a consequence of that. Though this model may seem less immediately lucrative, it’s also much less likely to face the kind of anti-corporate backlash bubbling up in MySpace and YouTube.

Which was great. But something much better was to come.

In November, when the weather took a dangerously frigid turn, site moderator Kate Dugas offered to pick up any spare warm clothing members might have, and take it to Vancouver-area homeless shelters. She dubbed her appeal "Got Hats"; the response was immediate and overwhelming.

The Cooperative Auto Network agreed to provide a vehicle. Her blog post was flooded with comments from dozens of participants. Kate and two other volunteers collected over 4,000 items – filling more than 70 large bags – from all over the Lower Mainland inside of 48 hours.

The ball kept rolling. One member launched a drive to collect supplies for animal shelters. Another began collecting personal care items for the homeless of Vancouver's Downtown East Side. And today ChangeEverything.ca is abuzz with great ideas for helping people.

Hats Off attracted a flurry of media attention: local radio coverage, a front-page article in a Vancouver daily newspaper and a national TV news story. Every story mentioned Vancity – associating the credit union with a successful community initiative.

But the real payoff for all of us was the knowledge that we'd helped to make a difference – not earth-shattering, but measurable, concrete and positive. Which is why we're in this business to begin with.

Alert: The Social Signal podcast is live

Episode 1: Alex and guests on team structures that promote web innovation

Does your organizational structure support web innovation or inhibit it? Learn how to make the most of your own team's structure from the web strategists at two very different nonprofits: Corrie Frasier, Online Communications Manager for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Jed Miller, Director of Internet programs for the American Civil Liberties Union. In this, the first edition of the Social Signal podcast, Corrie and Jed talk about everything from how to get senior buy-in to your web strategy, to how interdepartmental cooperation helped the ACLU respond effectively to NSA spying.

Listen directly from the player below. If it doesn't load in your e-mail program, you can also click here.

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Social Signal is hiring!

We're looking for a new web services consultant

Social Signal is excited to announce that we're looking for an energetic, detail-oriented technology enthusiast with a social conscience to join our fabulous team as a services consultant. Be sure to tell your geeky, progressive friends! Find more information at SocialSignal.com

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