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:

1. 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).
2. 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!
3. 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.

We’re now through, finally. It’s been a tough week, I’d say a tough period in order to prepare a proper press launch. Both Maurizio Monteverdi (Gabetti Group CEO) and Leandro Agro’ (Italian Second Life main guru) rocked the stage, the machinima and our contents have done the rest.

I’m about to upload In the forthcoming weeks I’ll upload You can find the press video (Italian only, and had to cut it down to 10mins in order to be accepted) on You Tube, the photos are coming up on Flickr accounts.

The results, Geez, are further over our brightest expectations: we knew we’d have been perceived as (as Marcello says) “zupa cool” in Italy, but never expected that Reuter immediately translated a news tha has then been published on the Washington Post, Scientific American, Wired, eWeek and the Financial Times (DE version) just to name a few.

Just a sad point: I’ve asked our PR agency to invite bloggers. Well of the 30 and more invited, just two of them actually came and enjoied the free wi-fi network dedicated to live posting. Guys: what are your daily-life chances to interview a public company CEO, have the answer and even eat for free? Damn: you loose it!

In these days, using mainly Technorati, Google News and Google Blog Search I compiled a list of interesting articles about the entrance of Gabeti Property Solutions in Second Life. Here it is:

International Selection

Gabetti joins Virtual Land rush in Second Life (Washington Post)
“Second Life” jetzt auch mit realen Immobilienmaklern (Financial Times)
Buôn bán nhà đất trong thế giới ảo, kiếm tiền thật Dantri (can you get it ? )
Gabetti eröffnet als erste RL-Immobilienfirma virtuelle Dependance SLinworld

Italian Newspapers/Magazines

Gabetti: affari reali nel mondo virtuale MacWorld Online
Gabetti vende case anche in Second Life Excite
La Gabetti e i suoi agenti sbarcano su Second Life La Stampa
Gabetti, l’affare-mattone si fa virtuale Corriere della Sera

Selected blogs

Gabetti@Second Life (Live Report of the press conference) Infospaces
Gabetti va Inworld! ma il vero punto è il brick’n mortar che fa innovazione Leeander
Gabetti su Second Life: è l’innovazione che conta Infoservi
Gabetti apre una sede in Second Life Tecnozoom News
Pondering The Pond Ambling in Second Life