How about $320,000 - is that real savings?
That is what was just reported that IBM saved in a blog post over at the Virtual World News, titled IBM saves $320,000 with Second Life Meeting. The savings is net after an $80,000 investment that IBM made in holding a major international conference in the virtual world.
Here is how to save money on business travel and meetings. What if you could be at two places at the same time without ever getting on a plane?
Last year at our MDBIZEXPO, we featured John Zdanowski, CFO of Linden Lab "live" from his San Francisco offices to our EXPO floor in Baltimore via the virtual world of Second Life. Without getting on a plane he spoke to an international audience at our conference center on CPA Island (in Second Life) and our live audience in Baltimore and had both groups interacting with each other.
Who said you can't be two places at once?
In a recent podcast with John, he said this about saving money using Second Life for real meetings, "Second Life is more compelling than a conference call, less intimidating than a video conference, and a hell of a lot better than business travel."
Sometimes it takes a recession to force new and innovative ways of doing business. CNBC's Julia Boorstin recently featured a report about how companies are using Second Life to save money by hosting meetings, conferences, recruiting, and speeches. Read the article Virtual Meetings Get a Second Life or watch the short video clip below:
We have been "bullish" on these type of uses for Second Life for the past two years. See our post about our last year's activities, titled 2008 Year in Review - CPAs start adopting Second Life for training. That is why we will be offering 24 hours of free CPE to our members for the upcoming year -with at least 14 hours via the virtual world of Second Life (including webcasts out of SL). It is our way of helping them out during this downturn.
We have also held plenty of meetings like this already - XBRL, Increasing Business Transparency, Leading Knowledge Workers, Fair Value Reporting, Going Private to name just a few.
We will be hosting a series of meetings over the next year where we can bring in experts "virtually" through Second LIfe to expose our members to thought leaders, innovative ideas, and breaking topics without spending their money or our money. I think that is pretty cool!
What do you think? Are you ready to give it a try?
Resources:
Presentation to NE CPE Conference about CPA Training in Second Life
See our Youtube Video - CPAs in Second Life
CPA Success blog post - Accounting for Second Life
CPA Island blog post - First CPE in the Virtual World of Second Life
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