GigaOM discusses Second Life trade shows and asks “Should my catwoman avatar wear a business suit at the virtual interview with Microsoft?”. Big business is taking to Second Life like a duck to water - and as virtual business moves towards the top of the adoption curve, I predict that there will be fewer “this is cool” buzz posts and more “this is how we do it around here” information.
I don’t have a catwoman avatar on Second Life - rightly or wrongly, I chose to use my own name, so my avatar is relatively conservative:
I wished that I still had that much hair in First Life 
That said, I am fairly conservative, but I do need to lose those sandles.
So what does dressing for success mean in Second Life? According to Iris Ophelia,
They likely won’t care if you wear a prim tie, or even if you should up in a default newbie avatar. However, imagine representing that company to the population of SL as an unfashionable newbie avatar. How well would that reflect on them, and on you, to the naturalized SL residents they want to appeal to? “Show up badly dressed at a corporate event,” Shiryu tells me, “and your audience will think, ‘Look at that corporation, it’s represented by noobs’.â€?
Now that is a concern - my appearance is, rightly or wrongly, straight out of the stock avatar library and within the limits of the available customisations. Hmm. I am not representing anyone but myself on Second Life currently, but that may not always be the case. I’ve added “Second Life business fashion makeover” to my todo list.
The company that I work for, SMS Management and Technology, has a very clearly defined dress code. For male consultants, it is easy - shirts in any colour (as long as they are well cut and white), suits in any colour (as long as they are well cut and black, preferably devoid of stripes), ties of any style (as long as they are structured and tasteful), shoes of any style (as long as they are conservative, well polished black leather). It is easy getting dressed in the morning - no matching differing stripes. We look good in black and we know it
So how does the SMS dress code apply itself to Second Life? For me, the comparison is easy - we dress for success because it is expected of us, regardless of the environment. If that means a black suit in First Life and a black custom suit in Second Life, then that is an acceptable cost of doing business. It’s a bit like Stephen King’s admonition to “Write to your audience…” - give people what they are expecting and you will excel.
If you are interested in dressing for business in Second Life can heartily recommend reading the Iris Ophelia article.
Interesting timing Andrew.
I got on to SL only a couple of weeks ago for a look because someone asked if were interested in doing 3D stuff on SL.
After running around the practice island for a bit. I decided I was tired of the silly default fox/cat costume. But I could not work out immediately how to create/swap clothing - everything seemed greyed out except Remove All Clothing. So I did. Thinking that might ungrey the other clothing related commands.
There I was, starkers in the middle of the street. And someone came and stood right next to me and just looked. It was so weird. I even had a brief moment of panic, just like in one of those dreams where you go out in your pajamas or naked.
I thought it was interesting how quickly I identified with the generic avatar as “me”, and how unconscious the process was.
Yes, I eventually worked out how to make clothes.
Hi Zern,
thank you for your comment
There is a lot of buzz around SL as a virtual business environment - I really think that it has moved up the left hand side of the adoption curve from innovator well and truly into early adopter land. I’m working on an electronic meeting concept for a client at the moment and demo’ed SL to the Design lead and one of the senior BAs yesterday. SL has started to replace commercial telepresence systems in board rooms.
I’m still looking into the clothing thing - I love that moment when the avatar appears and there is a little network lag and you see the “downloading clothes” thing - I can’t wait to see that happen in a virtual board meeting
It is a natural identification of avatar-as-self. It doesn’t help that I named my avatar Andrew Boyd - I thought I should snap it up before one of the other Andrews got in first.
Being brilliant and a gifted designer, have you ever thought about doing some SL corporate design work? The building blocks and coding are there for all to use (just like the web, in that respect) but there is a need for someone to design the SL universe - at the moment SL corporate design is mostly the equivalent of “my nephew knows how to use FrontPage, he is doing the new corporate site” or “we don’t know what the heck we’re doing, if we spend a million bucks on it, it has to look good”
Cheers, Andrew