I won the idea generation competition at Hej Världen event by my “Virtual Sales Representatives” project. The topic of the event was “Virtual Reality” and its effects to our daily life and future. I think the virtual reality is something that we try to understand all together and make some assumptions. When ever i talk about Second Life or any other virtual worlds, i can not create very innovative ideas. I guess, it is because we don not know a lot about the topic yet. You can find the project proposal here and i hope, i will have a chance to work in a project about virtual worlds

Virtual Sales Representatives
I like traveling and shopping. Every time when I go to a shopping centre, I have to face with a sales representative who is trying to sell as much as possible to me. If you are in another country and trying to buy something, from an eager sales person, without knowing the language then everything is even harder.

Imagine that you are in China, Zimbabwe, Turkey or in Singapore and go in to a shop, then there is a three dimensional sales representatives, in fact a hologram, who can speak your own language. Then everything would be so easy and fun. You just select the language, gender, physical appearance of a sales representatives and he/she will help you during your shopping experience.

Unlike usual photo, the holographic image can reproduce exactly three-dimensional copy of the original object. Such image has amazing realness and often looks like the real object. A hologram can create everything your eyes see – size, shape, texture and relative position. However, if you try to touch a holographic image, all you will find is focused light.

All in all, holographic sales representatives, can be next generation of sales and marketing. I am sure it will be a win/win/win situation and will add so much value to the shopping experience wherever you go.

For Photos of the event: http://flickr.com/groups/hejvarlden08/pool/

For videos of the event: http://alpha.bambuser.com/channel/socialclub

Last week, in Global Entrepreneurial Leadership course we made a small virtual team work assignment. We divided in to 4 teams and each team had 10-12 individual participants. The goal of the exercise was, building a bridge by the materials that we had been provided, on the second life and improving leadership and communicational skills through virtual teams. Here you can find my opinions about the session, exercise and Second Life.

Virtual Teaming & Real Life

Working in virtual life was almost the same with real life. Trust, communication, efficient teamwork and coordination are some of the basics while working with a team.
To begin with, face-to-face communication is crucial in real life experiences. On the other hand, communication was quite difficult in the second life while working with other 4-5 people. Every body was talking during the experiment but none of them was listening. Because of the fact that, there was no boss or coordinator; every individual participant was acting like a boss.

Even if all the participants were from the same class, sometimes trusting each other is not easy. Working together in a team and being friends are very different things. In real life, it would be easy to trust or not to trust. Nevertheless, in second life you have to trust your teammates.

Next, efficient teamwork was not satisfying in the Second Life. Because of the communication problems and lack of commission plan it was really time wasting while working in the Second Life. In order to increase the quality and productivity on teamwork in Second Life, communication problems must be solved in advance and then working in a virtual team can be easier and faster.

Lastly, coordination was a big problem. In real life examples, there is always a boss, coordinator and there is level of responsibility. However, as we were all in the same level and we all had equal responsibility; sometimes coordinating the people was so difficult. Two people were trying to do the same job even if only one person was enough.

With all these in mind, virtual teaming still has some problems to solve. In order to improve the quality and efficiency in virtual teams; building trust is very important. However, we believe that virtual teaming can be beneficial while creating distributed teams spread around the different locations. Meeting face-to-face can add value to the virtual teams, and let them know each other better.

We can apply virtual teaming in business development branches or to new employees to make them understand the basics of job and organisational chart in real life.

Most important factors in building team

It is important for all the team members to understand why the team is created and have the same understanding of the objective and goal of the project and they should commit to the purpose of the project and shape it if necessary. Team need to develop a common approach or method on how they are going to accomplish to their purpose.

Team members should feel the team mission is important and in order to stay motivated and committed they need to know what they will get by participating in the tem work. What is in it for them?

We think the problems in our exercise were:

• People did not take the exercise seriously because nobody knew who was who and team members were not supposed to get any credit for the project!

• Communication problem, not using same communication tool

• Not familiar to the communication medium

• Not have a clear vision for the exercise

• Tasks were not divided among the team members (communication problem)

• They cannot use body language such as shaking head to show understanding and approving each other or raising hand to have attention etc.

Feedback on teaming exercise

We believe that, one of the most enjoyable aspects of this exercise was the ability to be someone else. In Second Life, you can be anyone regardless of your real physical appearance. In addition, when you mix “being anyone” with “being anonym”, just like in this exercise, it is more fun.
Because you know that, the person who is next to you and in pink t-shirt and long hair, can be anyone in the class. This also breaks the barriers between people. For instance, you can talk and work with someone in this exercise, that you are actually offended in real life. That way, you can see how cool that person is and then you can build relationship with him / her. There may be some people who you do not talk just because of your prejudgments about his gender, race or anything, but in this game, everybody is a combination of bytes and bits so everybody is same.

This ‘edutainment’ activity which mixes education and entertainment teaches people how to work in a team to achieve a specific goal which was building the bridge in this particular exercise. Yet there was no clear definition of how a bridge looks like, teams were able to have a common sense about this. Therefore, we also learned that, definitions change from person to person. That is why, we have to make things clear before we expect the others to do it.

Another thing that we learned from this exercise was the different approaches those can be developed against different situations. We saw that every team had the same goal but they had different approaches. This shows that there is not only one truth in the world. Besides, keeping an eye on what the others in your business are doing is an essential part of managing your team better.

We learned that, leadership skills are so important to control the distributed teams. In addition, not only being a leader but also being a team member is crucial to succeed in the team. While there is no level of responsibility, still acting like a team and try to listen the other’s opinion are basic of being a successful team. It is somehow very similar to the real world teams. Always listen the others opinions and suggestions and make a goal and do it all together.

Content of the exercise was good, but the process was a little confusing for us. Before starting the virtual team, we could meet in face-to-face and see who the others in our team are. Talking and defining a work process or an action plan could be better.

All the members in the virtual team should use the same communication tool as the real life communication, in our exercise some people were chatting while the others were talking and I think it was a big problem in communication. Talking over one another should be minimized to be able to follow the conversation. As a suggestion, you should buy 20 cheap headsets and loan them to the participants.
This would greatly enhance communication, which was the primary issue in our group. Also; you could specify preparation tasks more in detail so people really do them and are more familiar with the system when starting

In a nutshell, we know that this was the first time for the experiment. Here are our humble advices to make it better.