I attended a Realtor conference a couple of weeks ago – which is partially why I’ve been fairly silent on the site over the past few days…busy. But anyway, back to the point: At the conference there are a lot of sessions to help Realtors and Brokers improve their business. As an I.T. professional for a Real Estate firm, I am sent to try to pickup on any new technologies and see if I can bring back some good advice for our agents. I decided to attend a class on social networking expecting to hear all about Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the like. What I was a little surprised to find out is those weren’t the main subject of social networking. Games were.
The session started out with some info about social networking in Second Life. As SL is a social style platform to begin with, I wasn’t all to surprised really. Okay, maybe a little surprised that they were telling agents to spend their working hours playing a game looking for contacts to buy or sell something to. But it didn’t end there, they had games up on the screen like World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, etc., etc. Anything with a huge audience of people in one place was making these social networkers druel with anticipation of closing another deal.
I came out of that session feeling honestly a little dirty. Business was creeping into my pleasure realm and I’ve never seen that as a good idea. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it wasn’t really such a big deal. The fundamental principle of social networking is building contacts through building relationships. So these would be people trying to make many friends in an MMO just in case they ever decided they needed to move. Not really what I pictured when I first walked out of the session. I kind of had in mind an image of walking through my favorite capital city and watching a shouting match of Gold Farmers and Realtors trying to peddle their services like some guy on a New York street corner trying to sell a fake watch.
So this started to make me wonder, have any of you ever used contacts you’ve met in game to help influence your business agenda? Is this really something that is a viable idea of a time sink?
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2 comments so far
Well, I am sure if I had never gone on SheezyArt I would not have met Kangaroo and seen half the sites he’s started, so I can answer in the positive there. True, SheezyArt is more of an art networking site than a game, but Kangaroo was using it more like a social engineering game (aka trolling) than as a serious art site. For some reason I caught his eye and he started IMing me, and it all went from there.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Ironically most of the people I’ve known for years through the internet have come from FPS’s. Not MMO’s or IM. But they’ve all been good friends and most of them I have met IRL on more than one occasion.
The Delta Force Legends, whom I’ve been a member of since I believe 1999 have had several get together’s over the years.
November 25th, 2008 at 8:40 am
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