pr-media-blog.co.uk

As relationships go in the wired world, it’s been a weird week.

Real-life husband and wife, Dave Pollard and Amy Taylor, of Newquay, Cornwall - who originally met in virtual online world, Second Life - divorced after Mr Pollard was caught having cyber sex (to be precise, his Second Life persona and avatar, Dave Barmy, was) with another virtual person. For those who haven’t experienced Second Life, divorce might seem a bit extreme, as amorous avatar-ing is about as physical as a saucy text message, if not less so.

As a reader of the story comments: “This has got to be the dumbest thing I have read in a long time.”

But activities in virtual worlds, like Second Life, are becoming increasingly a part of people’s lives. Think 3-D chatroom, which allows you to bump into a myriad of other virtual people seeking virtual fun. I tried it myself; got an avatar and wandered around trippy-looking animations wondering what on earth to do.

And- literally - whatever you want to do, you can in Second Life, without suffering any of the ill after-effects of First Life hedonism (or so Mr Pollard thought). But after a while, it just became boring as well as having some glitch causing my avatar to continually morph into a facsimile of Bee Gee, Barry Gibb. Suddenly, it seemed like hard work which had no link with First Life - and everyone needs a screen break sometime. 

But Victor Keegan writing in The Observer is clearly an advocate, having bought land in Second Life, launching a book of poetry there as well as an art gallery. What’s interesting in his analysis is that the adults of tomorrow now provide millions of participants to various virtual worlds. So, as weird as it might seem to the mainstream today, it could well be our mainstream future. And people such as online entrepreneur, Jon Jacobs are making real life money out of it.

Clearly doing business in Second Life has been a success story for some, but is it really a place for larger companies? There has to be a note of caution when companies are thinking of ways to engage with social media. Just because it’s there doesn’t automatically mean you should be in it. For it to stand a chance, there has to be a meaningful and relevant connection between the organisation, the social medium and that medium’s users. A survey into the better performing larger companies on Second Life suggests it can be done, but (and I apologise for this) the data on these developments are now so old it’s difficult to tell whether a. corporations in SL are quietly getting on with the business of making money or b. it’s such a flop, everyone’s keeping their virtual mouths shut.

The United States presidential election has been the first major democratic process anywhere in the world where the use of social media has played a significant part in communications.

Of the eighteen candidates running in the primaries for the two main parties, nine had blogs, including both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.   Involvement in social networks was significant from the earliest days. Republican Mitt Romney was the first prospective candidate to launch a Facebook profile,  Democrat John Edwards set up a campaign headquarters in the cyber world of Second Life.  This resulted in a bizarre web 2.0 event when it was vandalised by the avatars of his political opponents.  Clinton used her web site to launch her campaign.

It was Barack Obama though who was the prime mover from the outset.  He engaged with most of the high profile social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  On the day that Barack Obama announced he was forming a presidential exploratory committee in January 2007, student government co-ordinator Farouk Olu Aregbe created a group on Facebook called “One Million Strong for Barack”.  The social web was critical to the Obama campaign in another fundamental way.  It played an important part in the funding of his bid for office.  In a campaign video directed at his supporters he said “Instead of forcing us to rely on millions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs, you’ve fuelled this campaign with donations of $5, $10, $20, whatever you can afford, and because you did, we’ve built a grassroots movement of over 1.5 million Americans.”  Obama’s success raising money via these small donations was achieved in a way never before possible as part of a U.S. presidential election campaign.

The 1960 election of John F Kennedy was thought to be point at which television became central to the democratic process.  2008 may well be the year that sees the critical intervention of the social web