I’m rearranging my virtual world interaction, blogging, and social media footprint, and physical connections this summer. Started this shift in the spring actually, but… this summer is the primary time when these shifts will become more evident.
Virtual Worlds
In Second Life® I’ve gotten out of the island business and am shifting my primary building operations to stand alone regions on servers hosted by Dreamland Metaverse owned and operated by a woman who is closely associated with both OpenSim and OS Grid.
Boot Camp, Macs, and Windows. This is part of the virtual versus native discussion that has nothing, or very little to do with virtual worlds. Although this does impact the running of virtual worlds.
Social Media Footprint
I have tested the waters on various forms of social media for the last couple years, I have an M.S. and extensive grounding in a field upon which theorists in and practitioners of marketing heavily draw. When I began blogging in the late 90s I helped to introduce the concept of vast differences of cohorts that actually made up the Baby Boom “Generation” with a site Late Boomers that ran for several years as late-boomers.com, a site that I’ve recently been able to reacquire, and which I will relaunch at some time in the future, as well as a companion newsletter and mailing list. I’ve set goals that I exceeded with Twitter and Facebook, helped a small private company survive the recession through SEO practices. So this summer I am launching launching my consulting business.
My service focuses on helping small businesses and individual proprietors determine their online identity and presentation needs, develop an appropriate strategy, and connect with fairly priced providers to help them implement, maintain and guide their online identity. This could be as simple as revamping a website to hosting virtual world seminars. Essentially I provide what marketers call branding services although I provide a more tech savvy, and culturally and linguistically rich, knowledge than most markets can bring to the table, and I help them to put together an online reflection of themselves that their clients understand and trust that is far more personal than an “ad campaign.”
Physical Space & Context
As some long time colleagues know, I have a home office that has been significantly impacted by unending remodeling by my husband, my college-age daughter who flits into and out of my home often enough, sometimes multiple times daily, to not allow me any sense of being an empty nester, and two large dogs who want to eat my two cats. Sigh. All is not quiet on this southwestern front. But the last touches to my office renovation are being completed and then will only need a couple more days to determine which of the blogs I’ve run over the last few years to axe, and yes I will be selling those domains, and how to network the remainder of my sites through with this one. I will be maintaining different types of sites (wordpress, typepad, ….) in order be able to show clients the best features of each system.
These are the three branches of my summer virtual reorganization, and I do have to say that I cannot wait to fully act from my new model, in my new space, with new and old clients.
