If your employer came to SL.

Okay the Open Letter thing has been talked to death. But I haven't seen this angle, forgive me is I am rehashing. But just suppose LL is successful and all those "MAJOR" corporations who have spent years pointedly ignoring them showed up in world, including yours (for those of you that are self-employed/retired/own-the-company just indulge me and pretend).

If your employer showed up in SL and wanted you to be a part of the company presence, how would that affect you? Would you:

Tell them 'no thanks' SL is for fun not work?

Jump on the bandwagon full tilt with your current avatar?

Make an alt to be your corporate face and keep the two separate?

Leave SL because it's becoming 'work'?

or something else?

For me, it would be "No, Thank You" I'm here to have fun not to be a drone.

Just curious,
Patasha

they'd have toshake some monies loose or else!

I would make a corporate avatar.

Just like RL, I keep my work life and personal life separated.

Put me down for a "No Thanks"

Yes, me too. If the pay was right, I'd be happy to spend a month or two helping them find their feet. I wouldn't want to do it as an ongoing thing though. That would spoil the enjoyment for me.

Fortunately I have my own RL-business. But if I were asked to make the corporate clown ava here as an employee, I would say a strict: No!

Running my own corporation allows me to make that decision and it's a decidedly emphatic NO WAY unless I truly see a benefit (then I would make an alt just for the business face).

I am in SL to relax, not work.

I'm already doing this.
Working for a post-secondary institution, I've been asked to look into creating a presence for us inworld (mainly, I think, because competing colleges are doing so)
I also designed a workshop for newbies which has yet to have is inaugural run because of technical difficulties on our end (student lab hardware/bandwidth just not being up to snuff) as well as SL's (too numerous to recount here )

To this end, I have created an alt using my company credit card which is being kept well separate from my SL avatar. While I do use this one to research things, any personal interaction while representing my employer is done as that alt.

I'm not sure why you'd consider that to be a "drone". The process has let me see places and meet people I would not normally have. The idea of getting paid to be here has a certain appeal, as does accessing SL from work.

My employer doesn't even let the employees use the Internet during work hours except by special request and even all that usage is logged and reviewed.

But even if they did decide to do a corporate presence in SL, I would definitely create an alt for the occaision and keep them totally separate.

I'm 99.44% positive that they would take one look at me and decide it was a bad idea.

I still just can't see the purpose of any of it....what does a hotel company have to do with second life or a place thatsells food or beverage or any of the inane consumables that has become culture now a days and all this touting of virtual work place I mean we already do confrence calls and webcast so what new wrinkle does LL offer that we don't already have an acceptable program in place for?

Edit: but what I can't really understand is why LL doesn't already have it's own ad farm/bilboard system in place that would change textures on a flick of a switch and sell in world advertising across the mainland at info hubs and such....I know it's lame but if it was that or raise teir prices I would vote for sposorship but I have a feeling they would do both

I have read a couple of things recently about studies which showed that in virtual spaces employees paid more attention and retained more information than during a web conference call. Of course it's all probably complete propaganda, but that's the theory.


For inworld businesses, fine, but they'd probably sell the space to real world companies and I'd hate that.

In either enviorement virtual or traditional I feel that rentention or attention would have direct correlation to distraction and I must say my SL I'M box can be a hundred times more distractive than a busy workplace

An alt. And then it would be work, not SL. Approximately as much fun as installing new videoconferencing equipment, I suppose (which I've never done, but its appeal seems limited).

My employer is me. If I ever wanted to conduct my 'real life' business here, I wouldn't have to change a thing. Nobody would have a problem with Desmond.

Right now it's kind of pointless to have a presence here, insofar as:

a) 90% of my customers buy my designs from industry catalogs,
b) what little tech support I have, I can do with the phone and email highly effectively,
c) my customers generally don't have second life installed at their jobs.

It would be like a virtual tour... You can see images of food available.. see the deco.. I can certianly see this.

count me in the alt crowd, not because I wouldn't want work knowing what my main is up to, but rather I don't want to be bothered when I'm doing my own thing... that and i'd use whatever funds were available for it to hire other people.... there is no way in hell I'd saddle myself with that kind of workload even for a nominal pay raise (nevermind that it's a PITA to do it all yourself on any kind of a business schedule without some prebuilt back resources)

I don't have an employer in the accepted sense of the word. I am "free-lance with management at arms length" more accurately. I suspect many of us might fit in that category.

The management I deal with would prolly ask why I wasn't making more money. Then they'd go off and have a nosh at a slap-up bar and restaurant and charge it to my account!

My boss and my co-workers already know Immy. (^_^)

About the only thing I would do is probably demand that they don't leverage off of me for every little tech help detail they run into... As if they don't already... (T_T)

There actually was a blurb about a year ago on that very thing. SL was supposed to be hooking up with a company to develop targeted advertising inworld. But like evey other plan LL embarks on......

I'd have an alt to be the corporate clown. And he wouldn't even have prim junk

Since I work for city government, I could actually see some sort of presence in a virtual world at some time in the future - but more for things like the fire/police/sheriff training scenarios rather than any of my actual day-to-day duties. If at any time there was a reason for me to be here in a work-related capacity, it would most definitely be as an alt. I do not want them knowing my true SL identity and I do not want anyone trying to pull me in to work crap when I am here as Lil having fun.

I'd create an separate alt to deal with work, and never the twain would meet. They could have as much of my specialist knowledge of SL as they were prepared to pay for.

This.

Well, to an extent I have had this happen!

I work for a large corp that recently bought 8 sims. There is a small contingent of the company that is working on using that set of sims for work purposes. And after visiting with my alt, and giving them some honest and constructive criticism on their efforts, that team is looking at having me assist in the efforts.

What I did is I took one of my least-used and most "Vanilla Human" alts, and had that alt join the necessary groups to access and develop content for their sims. While I may tell some of them that Ceera is one of my accounts, it will be that alt that works on any Company projects.

By company policy, they can NOT hire Ceera to work as a subcontractor, via Fox and Ground. They have to hire my Player internally, paying for the work on an internal work order, at my Player's normal salary and benefits level for my full-time job. So, essentially, if they want to have me spending 20 hours a week of work time building for the Company, they have to pay my department a fee that covers not only my salary and benefits for those hours, but also a small profit for the department that I actually work for. My own salary would not increase, but my job security would, as there would be another paying client paying fees to my department for my services. And I would be "getting paid to play", since I enjoy building in SL for its own sake.

My other accounts and alts will not be involved in the Company work, except maybe to pass transferrable items to the working alt. I would keep both my playtime and my in-world business efforts completely seperate from RL work.

Right now, however, it's mostly hypothetical. They haven't processed the necessary internal work order. I suspect that won't, as my salary for my normal duties is probably far higher than what they paid the developers that they have on their own staff so far.