Slides on Gabetti Second Life project

Posted on 17/05/2007 by admin

I’ve recently spoken (together with Rita Tornari, the Marketing Director of the Gabetti Group) at an interesting event in front of a huge public of Marketing/Communication Directors here in Milan about social webs and user generated content.

Our speech generated some feedback from bloggers and I’m trying to keep track of all the posts and replying to them when possible. To do so and track the discussion I’ve fired up a brand new coComment subscription (I’ve met Laurent Haugh at LIFT06, just before he started-up the company): you might want to follow the (mostly in Italian) discussions on my coComment public page.

And obviously you can take a look at the slides on Slideshare (Rita’s slides are written in Italian, mine aren’t written at all: but you might enjoy beautiful photos .

Should you have any question or inquiry on the Gabettipresence in Second Life just drop a line using post comments.

Interviewed by SLNN

Posted on 10/04/2007 by admin

I (actually my Second Life avatar Matteo Quadrifoglio) have recently been interviewed by Mariam Bubulate (yes, another avatar ) on the entrance of the Gabetti Group (disclaimer: the company I work for) in Second Life with the creation of the Gabetti Island. The interview has now been published by SLNN under the title “Italian Real Estate firm takes slow and deliberate approach to growth” and then reprised by other SL newspapers such as The Second Life Insider.

Mariam’s questions were really entriguing (I’ll ask her permission to publish the whole interview here on Yellow Line) and some points published in the interview really deserve an highlight:

Me: “It is not important whether or not we make money. Like all the research and development projects, what really counts is what we learn by doing it”
Me “Competition [in real estate] is tough, so we bring Real Life expertise to the really big world of Second Life.”
Jeremy Flagstaff (Our Electric Sheep Project Manager): “Matteo Quadrifoglio sent satellite images of a location he wanted it to look like. Chosen Few, one of the best creators in Second Life, made it happen.”

The SL Insider states another interesting open question:

So – let’s assume they [Gabetti Property Solutions] make a go of this [going break even by the end of 2007], they certainly seem to be – how will the existing barons cope?

unfortunately – for the moment – the answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind.

What business in Second Life means (for me)

Posted on 25/03/2007 by admin

I recently managed the entrance of Gabetti Property Solutions (Note: the company I work for) in Second Life, the hype-living buzz-making online metaverse. In this post I’d like to share some of the back ground/back stage activities and the results.
We had a really short term (near real time) communication objective to use the premiere as a marketing/communication coverage on our group activities (obviously for free).
This objective were surclassed in a way nobody of us expected: not only we gained top of the notch italian press coverage (the Corriere della Sera homepage and the Milano Finanza first page are just some examples) but we landed great articles on foreign press too (note that we are a company known almost in Italy) such as the FT, Scientific American, Wired, The Washington Post (I was particularly happy for this last one since the company who built the Gabetti Sim, Electricsheep, has its HQ in DC).

But marketing, has I said before, was just a very short term, short duration goal to be achivied. We’re now developing different activities usefoul both to experiment, to learn and to gain new skills:

Virtual Business: I’d wanted to say Virtual real Estate, but as you’re going to read in a few lines that wouldn’t be the truth. Thanks to the press coverage there’s a lot of people (mostly Italians) visiting the Gabetti Island and they’re talking to their friends and relatives, their asking us info and they’re starting doing business with us: the Bright Five team.
The VERY interesting thing is that not only avatars are coming to the Gabetti Island to buy/sell/rent virtual properties but we yet have some cases of SL avatars looking for a property in Real Life: so that they’re treating the virtual presence of Gabetti just as like a virtual Gabetti agency (with the quite obvious side note that in RL sales we speak of hundred thousands euros instead of hundreds OR thousands like in SL).
Virtual recruiting: we’ve started experimenting SL recruiting to fulfill RL open positions by placing posters in our HQ that points to the online recruiting application where candidates can insert their CV. That’s easy.
Something more interesting is that we’re about to conduct SL interviews to candidates who apply from SL, and that’s kinda innovative: the people won’t have to cross the Country just to conduct a preliminar interview since they can do this by sitting at their computer at home!
Co-marketing: it’s impressive the quantity and the quality of the brands that are contacting us to co-orgnize events on the Gabetti island and/or using our recently acquired expertise in virtual worlds. I cannot say more on these pages but – as always – stay tuned to read the latest news as they become unveilable.
Side note: we’re evaluating parterships and opportunities with furniture and leisure brands, contact me via Linkedin if interested.

As I said to a recent radio interview Gabetti Virtual is treated by us as a research and development project: known expenses, known objectives, partly-unknown results so that a lot of new stuff might come to light in the forthcoming months.