Gabetti, an italian real estate, is the first company of this kind in our country to enter in Second Life and the first one in the world to be both in SL and into the real world.

I’m blogging in real time from the presentation of this initiative from the Gabetti headquarters in Milan.

Among the speakers Leandro Agrò, SL expert and interaction design director at Kallideas Group.

Reporting Leandro’s words: Internet cannot be said to be the same thing as the web. Internet is a human network, a medium that connects real people sharing their experiences and time. Second life has a low access barrier and could be considered the perfect place for interacting with peers. Avatars can fly, talk and take with them all the knowledge and things they acquire. Second Life has a currency, ways to sell things and to visit places with others. So Second Life could be considered the Experience Network. Gabetti is trying to position itself through the concept of network (both physical/geographical and virtual).

Gabetti Cube is an incubator of new internal and innovative initiatives. Among these, the Second Life project that cost near 50K euros (100K will be the total initial investment).

Why Second Life? Gabetti sells physical buildings and properties, so what? Gabetti considers Second Life a new opportunity to create a different and additional kind of business made of virtual buildings, pixels and not bricks and mortar.

Which are the expected results? Surprisingly and as a side effect, thinking about launching something in SL, has brought by a better comprehension and consciousness about Gabetti employees and their skills. Some of them already had blogs, knew about SL and a large amount of this employees proposed himself to be among the first ones to experiment with the new medium.

The preliminary (but absolutely relevant) neat effects are:

• Innovation: Testing and evaluating new commercial offers
• Awareness: Improving the cohesion and awareness of the common values inside the company
• Branding: A new space to promote the brand globally
• Marketing: Marketing and communication (both internal and external)
• Extended Network: using SL to extend the physical commercial network (for example open points, i.e touch screens on the streets to search for buildings)

In a very concrete way, Gabetti is using SL to represent in high fidelity (to the very smaller detail) and sells real estates . They have designed more than 100 buildings to this goal.

Now the questions from the public:

• Buying islands and Building in SL is a form of trading? Yes it will be soon a real business. Gabetti calls it virtual investment. Posting traditional ads in SL probably doesn’t make sense, specific initiatives are more interesting to residents.
• How much will be the global investment? It will be 100K euros but it will be compensated by the first ROIs and finalized acquiring new islands
• How the ROI can be guaranteed? 5 sales people (named the “Bright Fives”) will follow a business plan with a profit by the end of the year
• Second Life is a bubble? No, it reduces the distance between atoms and bits, because people enters a metaworld of bits. What SL sells is an experience
• Which is the average cost needed to design a building (villa) in SL? circa 1000 euros
• How many people are working on this project? 3 technical officers and 5 sales people
• How different is the activity of virtual selling from real life selling? Their quite similar and actually the best target is entrepreneurs that are invited to the Gabetti Island from sales people. Gabetti is thinking about new specific offerings to guarantee credit to residents involving real life banks.
• What if Linden Labs ends inside the dead pool? The incredible value of SL is not produced by Linden Labs but by residents leveraging the platform. This is a source of trust and credibility
• Which is the relationship between Gabetti and innovation? Gabetti is relaunching and repositioning itself through innovation and new projects. The company is changing both internally and externally.

Good work, guys!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 11:15 am and is filed under Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.