Yesterday's Metanomics event was part of Metaversed's experiment in working with Event Partners to syndicate live content in Second Life. While we locked Metaversed Island down to a 40 avatar limit, around 140 people were able to participate in the event as it happened. Let's get into detail here about how we're doing this, what we've found that works, and invite feedback on how to make the whole process even better for partners. It's our hope that we can help establish some "best practices" by picking up this conversation and hearing other groups experiences. Scaling events in Second Life is not easy, but we're finding that it's not as hard as we thought either.
Event Partners In Practice
Becoming an event partner is an open-enrollment proposition. If you want to become one, you just join the "Metaversed Event Partners" Second Life group and you're in. We've been able to use this group to update everyone on what media URL to use, send out care packages with paraphernalia, and make sure that detailed instructions are handed out to everyone. A special notice is usually sent out a few days ahead of time as well to remind everyone of an upcoming event.
Separately we have the "Metanomics" group which we encourage all audience members to join at all locations. When the event begins, everyone watches the same streaming video at the various locations around Second Life, and a unified discussion takes place in the Metanomics group chat.
What Works
Event partners who treat the event at their venue as their event do really well. They keep an eye on the Metanomics Event Calendar, post to the Second Life Events Listings, and send out several group notices to their respective group lists in-world. Greeting visitors and helping them with media controls when they arrive makes a difference too.
Many are running pre and post-events as well, engaging people in further discussions, workshops and presentations. This helps the audience engage with the venue's brand better, and encourages return visits. One location is even taking the direct links to the Quicktime videos and running separate events for people whose timezones didn't work for the live events.
Website promotion has been a powerful tool for some, so starting this week we've made a number of graphics available for event partners to use outside of Second Life. We're very mindful of suggestions event partners make and expect to have a number of new tools available to them in the future.
Taking The Next Step
Competition is healthy, so to cultivate a positive and competitive environment among event partners we'll be rewarding those who were able to draw the biggest crowds. This means that the top few venues will have their SLurls and logos appear in the event posting on Metaversed the day of the event, and we'll be rolling out a number of other rewards as well.
This works for a lot of reasons. It encourages people to put more effort into their events and find something to give themselves a unique edge. It also helps us with statistics gathering, as our open-enrollment process makes it a bit difficult to track where all the venues are in the first place. Overall it just encourages people to tell us more about themselves so that we might learn more about them, and stimulates positive discussion about how we can make the Event Partner process work better for everyone.
Our next event will be on Monday, November 5th at 11am where our guest will be Gene Yoon (aka. Ginsu Linden), Linden Lab's Vice President of Business Affairs. He was previously the company's general counsel and provided leadership for finance. He'll be talking about the economic policies that influence Second Life and hopefully will provide us with projections on the virtual world's financial future. We'll be announcing the top 3 venues for this event on Monday and you can usually find others on Second Life Events Listings.
If you'd like to be an event partner this Monday, join the "Metaversed Event Partners" group in Second Life and stay tuned for upcoming notices!