By Nazz Lane
It’s late Friday afternoon my local time and I’m about to wrap up for the day, having sorted through a busy week’s list of to do’s. I clicked close on the several open notecards and am about to on the inventory window when an instant message arrives:
1 pm on Friday. Wrap up the week with some mingling and networking at B2P's Black Sun. Share with fellow business people the best (or worst) thing you have found, learned, seen this week. We'll share landmarks and anecdotes and keep learning from one another!
Drinks are on the house, of course!
With journalistic instinct piqued and the added incentive of “drinks on the house”, I took the ride over. Beta Business Park (B2P) is a project of Beta Technologies and had opened in mid September last year. B2P is “a community of businesses and the people who own, operate, and work at them”. The group charter goes on further to define the park community in that it “offers a different way to use Second Life … allowing easy connections between people, as well as convenient shared costs of common facilities”. I’d attended the opening event and wrote a short piece for my blog about it.
The session that Friday was facilitated by B2P’s General Manager Gayle Cabaret (Photo by Giovanii Fellini) who ably led the attendees through the hour long session where we shared, networked and learned. Impressed with the session and Ms Cabaret, I made arrangements to meet with her a few days later for a conversation about B2P and her second life. I arrived for the appointment early and was promptly greeted by a concierge when I did. While I waited for Gayle, several other avatars rezzed and were similarly greeted as well as assisted by the friendly and knowledgeable concierge.
Nazz: I’m impressed with the concierge service. Do you have 24x7 coverage?
Gayle: That's the goal, right now we strive for 6am to 6pm coverage ... and do a bit better than that. But with the call buttons, we at least know who to get back to in the morning. As you see, we are doing better than 6am already.
Nazz: What was it that brought you into Second Life?
Gayle: Oh goodness ... in short, knee surgery. I'd seen something about Reuters being here, then my partner came in poking around … and then I had surgery on my knee and was stuck at home in a recliner for weeks. I followed her in and almost didn't stay. I was not impressed, until I found the New England estate. The people there were an actual community and they showed me a bit of what this platform could really do … that, and they had beautiful sail boats all over the place. I don't think I left the estate at all for at least 6 months… maybe a shopping trip here and there.
Nazz: How was it then that you become involved with B2P?
Gayle: Well, in a living example of how social this platform is; after I found NE, I got a greeter job there due to my almost constant availability. I moved up quickly, within a matter of weeks I was helping the managers host events and started working on retail management there. Then the estate was sold to its current owner, Sudane Erato and she got me with the deal. I have been managing the village/commercial operations there for three years now. Sudane brought me to the attention of the partners of Beta Technologies, she works with them, too. They brought me in on early planning discussions for building the community here. They knew they needed someone with the event/community/estate management staff to do this and the rest, as they say, is history.
Nazz: As general manager, your primary responsibility is in managing the event/community/estate management staff?
Gayle: They have put this project pretty much completely in my hands. B2P has a mission of its own, of course ... the community and offering the office space with shared facilities. But this also serves as a sort of front office for Beta Technologies so, we are constantly working with people looking for help on virtual world projects. BT has a very deep bench, so I am comfortable telling our visitors "if it can be done in a virtual world, BT can help you do it. If it can't be done, we can tell you why and probably offer you an alternative."
Nazz: How many events are held here in an average week?
Gayle: Let's see … SL 101 every day, Grace is running her classes three times a week, my forum is twice a week and we usually have two mixers, at least and I've added the show and tell and then Metanomics … so sixteen and we're not done yet.
Nazz: That’s a good amount. On average, how many "new" to second life people pass through here?
Gayle: Well, since we are an official Community Gateway, that number is huge. I can tell you, if I open the report from LL, how many landed in our orientation area just through the gateway last month and, of course, there are many who find us other than the gateway. You're familiar with the program?
Nazz: The community gateway program, yes.
Gayle: Great … in December we got 1257 through the gateway program, alone. Judging from our metrics, the landing spot at the orientation area has already had 742 hits this month.
Nazz: That’s a pretty good clip. Do you query entrants on why they chose the B2P community gateway, if so what sort of responses are generally given?
Gayle: Well you really haven't experienced life until you've tried to wrangle newcomers. We are in the process of developing a short list of questions to get that info … those who are truly here for business purposes tend to move a little more slowly, they stand still and actually talk to us. Others find the 'fly' button very quickly and they are a completely different story. We know that many who come through this gateway simply picked something from the list and clicked, without considering. We try to help them all but the point is to be there as an option for those who are making a considered decision about what they want to do here.
Nazz: As a business park, what services do you offer to the businesses located here?
Gayle: Well, space, of course … but you can find space anywhere. We also provide tenants with the chance to share resources … meeting space, the auditorium, the orientation area, club… no need to build their own. Also the presence of our staff here ... it not only supports BT, but our tenants, as well ... built in estate management. But, really the most important thing we offer is service with the staff here, our community members can come to us with any question from 'how do I make my hair fit right?' to "I have this huge idea ... how do I make it happen?"I take the word 'concierge' very seriously if we don't have the answer immediately, we'll get it quickly and respond.
Nazz: What do you see on the horizon for B2P … let’s say in six months to year out?
Gayle: We'll be announcing the dates for our 2nd semiannual Leadership in Business conference shortly. It will be late April, and then planning for a third for October. We're going to be adding some wonderful tools to our office builds to assist with collaboration and we're working on the pilot of a new business show for treet.tv. We'll be adding more and more programming to our weekly schedule. I've got a long list of requests for professional development topics and I intend to provide as many as possible. What else ... continuing to build the community, because, as I keep preaching, we are each other's best resource networking and conversation are vital so I just keep trying to provide ways to make that happen.
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