Forget Second Life: Build your own World!
Paul Dunay is an award-winning B2B marketing expert with more than 20 years’ success in generating demand and creating awareness for leading technology, consumer products, financial services and professional services organizations.
Paul is the global vice president of marketing for Maxymiser a leading web optimization firm, and author of four “Dummies” books: Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley 2009), Social Media and the Contact Center for Dummies (Wiley Custom Publishing 2010), Facebook Advertising for Dummies (Wiley 2010) and Facebook Marketing for Dummies 2nd Edition (Wiley 2011).
His unique approach to marketing has led to recognition of Paul as a BtoB Magazine Top 25 B2B Marketer of the Year for 2010 and 2009 and winner of the DemandGen Award for Utilizing Marketing Automation to Fuel Corporate Growth in 2008. He is also a finalist for the last six years in a row in the Marketing Excellence Awards competition of the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA), and is a 2010 and 2005 gold award winner in Driving Demand.
Buzz Marketing for Technology, Paul’s blog, has been recognized as a Top 20 Marketing Blog for 2009 and 2008, a Top Blog to Watch for 2009 and 2008, and an Advertising Age Power 150 blog in the “Daily Ranking of Marketing Blogs.”
Paul has shared his marketing thought leadership as a featured speaker for the American Marketing Association, BtoB Magazine, CMO Club, MarketingProfs, Marketing Sherpa, Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG), and ITSMA. He has appeared on Fox News, and his articles have been featured in BusinessWeek, The New York Times, BtoB Magazine, MarketingProfs and MarketingSherpa.
Paul holds an Executive Certificate in Strategy and Innovation from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Computer Science from Ithaca College.
Talk about opportunity for companies out there. Retail/Service industries are obvious early adopters, but what about internal departments within a company and B2B? Imagine a company intranet setup in a virtual world, or real-time product demonstrations of GE’s latest MRI machine in a virtual hospital. All of which could happen today, with existing technology.
Client-side software and consumer education could limit adoption on a wide scale; at least initially.
Interesting topic.
I attended a meeting of the Financial Services Club in London very recently where the head of experiential marketing for Wells Fargo described how they had started out with Second Life but then developed their own environment called Stagecoach Island.
The obvious drawback of multiple universes is the problem of having to set up an avatar and log in to each of them in turn. (Hard enough to remember all those usernames and passwords). There is probably a good living to be made for anyone who can set up an avatar central registry and then give each virtual world a good reason to sign up to it. The most obvious reason being that they would capture a critical mass of users that are already registered with other virtual world’s and give them ease of access.
Jon Oakes of L2 software writes in that Gartner just published this article on Second Life entitled
Gartner Says 80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A “Second Life” in the Virtual World by the End of 2011
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503861
nice find Jon!
pd
We started our on-line world with dabbling in Second Life but from a B2B perspective we wanted to leverage our target market’s appetite for on-line gaming. We partnered with a company that specialized in gaming and came up with telus.com/innovation. Just it out and let me know what you think…it is in it’s infancy and would appreciate some feedback that might help us take it to the next level.
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