You might recall that I have written before about Unisfair, which supplies private virtual worlds to companies that want to create a more immersing event than WebEx, but with more privacy and measurement than Second Life. I’ve told the story of Unisfair’s ROI, but I caught up recently with Sarah Tonzi, a publicist working for Unisfair, who updated me on the company’s progress. I thought you’d be interested in hearing what’s happening, too.
Sarah was eager to tell me about Unisfair’s recent 2.0 release that added professional networking and multi-language capabilities, but I wanted to hear about what customers where doing with these features. After writing my previous stories about Unisfair, I heard from other vendors with similar technologies, but each time I asked them about what customers are doing with their technology, I never heard back from them.
Sarah was happy to provide me a couple of customer stories that help us understand what this technology can do. Cisco is one of Unisfair’s customers, and they are the ones who instigated the addition of the professional networking features. Like with a public social network, attendees of a Unisfair event can upload publish their profiles, allowing Unisfair to match people of similar interests together. Cisco has been using this feature in its Partner Exchange virtual world, so that business partners can locate each other based on expertise. So, in the past, your draw to an event consisted solely of information, but now, over time, you might be able to create a real community where other members are part of the draw of your event, just as with an in-person conference, where networking with fellow professionals is as important as the sessions themselves.
Sarah also described to me how Unisfair has added support for 15 national languages where they started with just English. A Swedish company that organizes virtual events, expoIT24, created the Nordic Virtual Business Fair, a year-round virtual world that has attracted Microsoft, SAP, and other IT vendors to participate. More than 1500 IT decision makers have taken advantage of the free online fair to begin their purchase process.
I believe that this virtual alternative to trade shows is becoming more and more important. Do you have any success stories to tell? I’d love to hear from more folks using virtual worlds to reach customers more effectively and more cheaply than through traditional road shows.
