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DOING BUSINESS WELL RELIES ON TRUST

• I want to talk about having an IT Strategy

• Meet our Business Consultant

• How can I have a Virtual Office?

• HR and Psychometric Testing for Employers & Employees too

• Meet our Travel Agent

It seems impossible sometimes to run a business and stay sane at the same time, but much of the stress comes from not having enough word of mouth recommended professionals to outsource to. An experienced Business Consultant can be worth their weight in gold, and phone answering services from our Virtual Office team can really take the pressure off. A well thought out IT strategy can also save on future headaches (and costs).

These days it just isn’t worth employing anyone without checking out the latest employment legislation and I certainly don’t have time to search for good travel deals on the web - so I use our Travel Agent who finds excellent deals so much quicker than I would. Which reminds me. I could do with a holiday……

It seems crazy that anyone would want to have a business meeting in second life - or at least, that’s what I used to think. Of course, like most people I know, I haven’t really experienced the place for myself, but that makes the idea of using it as a meeting place for professional concerns even more unlikely.

But then I read Susan Reynolds posts about sharing office space, designing the right online environment, and why she prefers to have meetings in Second Life to other online alternatives. And I began to think again.

Maybe this wasn’t such a crazy idea after all?

Perhaps it is because I have started using Skype and IChat for friendly business-oriented conversations and just NOT liked it. Only audio means you can’t read their body language, and on camera, I find myself staring at the backgrounds and wondering why they don’t invest in a new pot of paint.

Why go to so much trouble to look nice at a meeting in real life, and then on Skype look like something out of a B movie with bad lighting and an awkward, stiff body stuck in front of a screen?

What really pulled things together for me was catching Chris Brogan’s blog via Twitter talking about the Starbuck’s phenomenon. He asked where that relaxed atmosphere of being in a comfortable place to work and socialize could be replicated in the virtual world.

It was then I realized that if I could have a good quality audio conversation with a business colleague in Second Life, where they would look exactly how they want me to see them with the freedom of that not being necessarily in a conventional business suit - or even in a conventional body - that would indeed be a cool place to have a conversation.

And taking my fantasy even further, what if I could order a latte in that comfortable quirky online meeting place which resulted in a real-life latte arriving delivered to my door? That would be even better.

The reason I use Skype and IChat is because they are easy. But even now that the psychological barriers for me to use Second Life as a place to have genuine business conversations have crumbled, it still appears relatively inaccessible to most of the business people I talk with who may not yet even have used Skype.

If anyone out there knows how to make it easier to become part of Second Life and has a chilled out place where I can order a good latte that delivers to Forest Row, England, I wont just be popping in - I’ll book a table.