Worldly Virtual

Converseon had the pleasure of receiving the OMMA Award on Tuesday night for the “Best Use of Virtual Worlds.” Hosted by our building brethren Mediapost, the event recognized the best and most breakthrough creative in online advertising and media.

Our Second Chance Trees project beat out some formidable competition, specifically Coca-Cola’s Virtual Thirst Project and Pontiac’s Motorati island. I admire both of those programs because they begin to tap into what we see as the real value of current virtual worlds — an open source platform to allow users to experiment, co-create and innovate in collaboration with brands.

The Second Chance Trees project was a bit more modest in scope (and likely budget), but fully dipped into what we see as among the most fertile areas for breakthrough innovation in social media – utilizing virtual worlds to impact the real world, and vice versa. In our view, virtual worlds are not meant to exist in isolation, but as an extension of our own world, albeit in a dimension where we can poke through to innovate, experiment and experience with tools and environments that extend beyond our mortal powers. We intend to dig more deeply into exploring the virtual-to-real world potential and, of course, continuing to utilize SCT to promote tree reforestation around the world. So more to come on that over time.

We would, of course, like to thank all our avatar and RL friends who have supported the effort including Andy Beal, Lee Odden, Peter Himler, Stephen Davies, Lee Hopkins, Luke Armour and Amalthea Blanc.

If you would like to learn more about the Second Chance Trees project and our approach to virtual worlds, please take a listen to the attached audio file of a presentation I delivered at WOMMA’s Learn It, Do It event in New York city last week. As always, your comments and questions are welcome.