Virtual business

Hello, this is Brent Arslaner, I am the Vice President of Marketing at a company called Unisfair. And what I am going to talk about today is Virtual Business.

Many of you have heard of Second Life and some of these other virtual worlds that really predominantly have been successful for social rather than business purposes. So what we are going to talk about is how virtual environments for business can help various divisions and organizations in your company.

So firstly there is marketing. What is marketing's goal? Marketing's goal is to generate demand or a funnel of leads for their organization. Secondarily, sales. Sales is about driving money into the business. And lastly, there is HR, they are focused on bringing highly qualified and talented people into your organization.

So how can a virtual environment or a virtual business help these different divisions within your organization? So what I am going to first go through is the components of what is a virtual environment and then we will walk through some of the benefits.

So the components are in four major areas. The first area is the actual virtual venue. Virtual venue is your building, could be a bank, could be a hospital, and could be a convention center for that matter; it is the 3D representation that you are going to be using.

Secondarily, there is the rich multimedia. Rich multimedia could include audio, could include video, and could include power point and even animation.

The third piece of the puzzle is collaboration. Collaboration could be via text chat, it could be actual voice communications, or we could use other Web 2.0 type of technology such as RSS and Forms.

Last component is professional networking. ALA, LinkedIn, Facebook and some of the other social networks, you can use professional networks in which you build a profile within a community and be able to find other like minded individuals within that community.

So now let us talk a little bit about the benefits of virtual business. There are four main benefits. The first one is reach. And there is increased reach because you can meet with and interact with people in hundreds of different countries at a single point in time.

Secondarily, you can increase ROI. Virtual business is a fraction of the cost of business in the physical world. And in turn because it is combined with the reach ratio, you can generate more leads, you can recruit more candidates at a fraction of the cost, which gives you solid ROI.

Thirdly, productivity. You are at your desk, you are not in an airport, taxi, jumping between meetings, you can conduct real business and then go back to your regular business life.

Lastly, there is increased intelligence. Within a virtual environment, you can learn about everyone that is in this environment. So an example being from a marketing perspective you know what white papers were downloaded, what webcasts have been viewed, what different types of collaboration took place, if that means voice or chat types of communications? Or from an HR perspective, you can use this intelligence to actually rank candidates based on how they replied to different questions and also the way that they really have an interview within the virtual environment.

So to tie back together, virtual business allows marketers to increase more demand, sales people to be trained to be more productive, and HR people to recruit more talented people for their organization.

Thank you for your time.