Thursday, July 30, 2009

A Few Tips on how to continue working when Second Life is Overloaded

Today, literally in 5 minutes is the start of another Metanomics community forum (at Metanomics II in Second Life). Today's topic is "Getting Things Done: Effective Organization in an Overloaded World in SL". If you'd like to attend, I encourage you to hop on the SLURL... now: Metanomics II

I wanted to drop in a blog post about my thoughts and quick tips on continuing your projects and work during times of inworld technical hardships, borkery, and lagginess.

SL breaks down to the point of crawling speed often, and for days at a time... sometimes weeks... months? ... Has it always been in a broken state? No, but SL will always be in disrepair. The residents have come to accept that as a part of Second Life.

But even though SL is suckin' there are still plenty of people in SL, new accounts entering, and things occurring.

You may not be able to work on the custom build you've been wanting to do, or be able to give a good presentation at a business meeting... but you can use this sucky SL time to your business advantage.

1) Straighten up & tidy up. Use this time not to build and create, but more of a time to organize and consolidate. Use the time to straighten up your store, respond to emails, write your SL bio, write a business proposal, connect with others and offer up possibilities. Keep in mind that what is not working in SL is the graphic speed of things... so you can take care of other things on your plate without feeling the lag.

2) Focus on marketing and advertising. Even though your SL day is lagiful, others may not be.

3) Go out and party! Check the events, go to some popular and fun looking spots, and make some friends. You're not going there to explore, you're not really even going there for the event... you're going because there are other people there and you all have something in common: you all hate the lag. The best way to strike up a convo with like-minded business people is to talk about how the lag sucks and how it's affecting your business. Others will agree, and now you're networking. and this is all with chat and IM... so the event may be crazy laggy, but it won't affect your reasons for being there.

4) Spend some time promoting on 3rd party SL-related websites.

5) IM IM IM - You have a massive friends list. Send some people a personal "hi what have you been doing, here's what I've been doing"
They'll be happy receiving the IM.. even if you only ran into em once is some newbie center a year ago.

So yes, I say there's plenty of things you can do when SL is on the down-n-out that'll still keep your business active.

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