After holding our first weekly learning event in Second Life, it’s easy to see why this virtual world is heralded as the videoconferencing and webinar killer. This “metaverse” takes interaction and collaboration to unprecedented levels. And it’s redefining branding, from targeting consumers to interacting with engaged minds in an immersive 3-D environment.

Our last public meeting drew some 25 visitors plus some five poor souls who had to participate via WebEx because their IT departments didn’t let them access Second Life. Feel free to visit our “Train for Success” in Second Life every Thursday, noon-1:00 PM EDT. If you don’t have a Second Life account yet, you need to take a few minutes to open a free account and create your own avatar, before you’re ready to learn first hand why virtual worlds is all the rage.

Consider these facts:
* Gartner Group estimates that 80% of active Internet users will be in non- gaming virtual worlds like Second Life by the end of 2011.
* IBM is investing millions of dollars in 25 SL islands, and Sun, Dell, Intel, Adidas, Toyota, GM, and more are all there.
* Hundreds of universities, including Harvard and INSEAD teach classes in Second Life for credit.
* My native Sweden just opened an embassy in Second Life.
* Second Life has seven million residents and growing exponentially.

After a few minutes in Second Life you’ll find any regular web site to be just a collection of flat pages. As the Second Life experience becomes richer and the application diffuses more widely, it’s hard to imagine why any company would wait until it hits 100 million before they start branding in “Web 3D.”

A new study from the Consumer Electronics Association indicates that there are many more women gamers in the 25-34 demographic than males, largely because of the popularity of the casual games market, with card games like solitaire (pictured) and puzzle games like Tetris. Meanwhile, legions of elementary school kids are busy supporting families, balancing their check books, finding jobs and getting lives - all by playing SIMS.

Clearly, gaming has finally come of age as a mainstream form of entertainment. However, most people go from a Jetsons home to a Flintstones workplace each day. The frontline ambassadors of most leading brands receive their training and communications on how to represent the brand via faceless, formal, one-way, artificially objective decrees from the top.
If your seven year-old child can learn to fly an airplane or build a profitable entertainment park with a video game, why couldn’t the same kind of engaging technology be used to teach your sales staff to sell consultatively and understand their clients’ business? If 24 million Americans are carrying their iPods everywhere they go, why can’t they listen and learn more about their jobs through those devices? If the average American is spending 40 minutes of work time a day reading blogs (as one recent study suggests), why can’t they use that time to blog about work-related issues with their colleagues?

The brand experience starts and ends with people. It’s the people on the phone and in the store who are the voice and the face of the brand. In many respects, training and internal communications to improve brand performance are the last frontiers for organizational improvement. For a function that’s largely responsible for customer-interface performance, it has received remarkably little executive attention or investment. The emerging phenomena of blogging, podcasting and game-based simulations might just be the engines required to drive a consistent brand delivery across all human touch points.

It’s hard to be a command and control communicator these days. The new frontier of Web 2.0 and the open-source workplace is opening the floodgates of communications within the firm, empowering the real brand ambassadors of the organization to communicate on their terms. The internal blogs and Podcasts we’ve set up for clients have proven to be tremendously effective forums for free-flowing conversations. They’re engines for sharing experiences from the front lines across the field organization. Employees can read the musings, rants, raves, insights and opinions of their peers and weigh in on conversations about pressing issues that will help them better serve customers and deliver the brand promise.

You can already hear the excuses to resist this development echoing in the hallways of communication departments around the land: “What if corporate executive bloggers misconstrue the corporate message?” “What if employee podcasts don’t toe the company line?” “What if disgruntled employees blow off steam on an internal blog?” “Our IT system is not set up for that!” “Our lawyers are scared of blogs!” Their denunciations smack of the 1970s IT mainframe minions who didn’t want employees to use PCs. Yet, I hear them every time I give a speech on the topic.

If internal blogs and Podcasts make command and control communicators uneasy, external blogs are their worst nightmare. External blogs written by employees and executives is the new unedited public face of forward-looking brands. This new channel speaks to partners, customers, prospects and other stakeholders with authority, passion, and credibility. There are well in excess of 2,000 Microsoft employee bloggers, for instance. They are no doubt contributing to giving the company a human face and allowing it to engage with customers and development communities in a dialogue. Bill Gates has been the first to acknowledge that the many Microsoft bloggers are making it difficult to get a uniform brand message out. And herein lies the creative challenge for brand leaders, to harness the power of discordant voices of their employees and leaders to communicate consistent brand messages. This may be a scary prospect for old-school corporate communications, brand and marketing professionals who are used to being in control of the message (and who get itchy as their control slips). Rather than doing the communication themselves, they now face the prospect of facilitating employees and senior executives who are increasingly charged with the heavy lifting of brand communications with key stakeholders. Sure, there needs to be guidelines for employee bloggers, but they don’t have to be longer than a sentence, or less. Microsoft’s blogging policy is two words: “Be Smart.” Wikipedia’s policy for contributors to its online encyclopedia is even more blunt: “Don’t be a dick.” If you insist on something more detailed, Yahoo’s employee blogging policy is a good example.

Giving up control is a scary thought for communication professionals who are steeped in the command and control view of corporate communications.