Way to drive out any employee sufficiently skilled to get a job at any less psychotic company, imesho…
Dale Innis´s last blog ..Viewer 2.0: Another reason to love Imprudence?

I love the idea of individuals expressing the corporate brand through their personalised non-realistic avatars, though it would take some thinking through in practice. (How would I show ‘me representing Corporate Eye’ if I didn’t use an image of me?) I really like the idea of discovering more about the brand by doing so, even if only as an internal exercise.

However, my first thought was discomfort at the idea that an organisation might impose an inappropriate ‘look code’ – think of those call centres where non-British staff are given a brief training module in the mores of British culture and assigned a false Western name. This is far from authentic, and patronises both caller and called. How much worse if the company insisted that all avatars were (say) blond and fair-skinned because the corporate headquarters were based in a Nordic country? Or young and beautiful because the company dealt in beauty products?

We do need to be able to distinguish between individuals online, as we do in real life, and at the moment we’ve translated our millennia of face-to-face contact into the virtual world as our best way of understanding this. But it may not be this way in the future, and we need to work out a way of managing this – and of conveying the additional meaning of brand.

It would be interesting to know if there’ve been any studies of how people who meet in real life having first met in Second Life (or WoW, I suppose) manage the connection/disconnection between avatar and reality.
Lucy´s last blog ..Successful Investor Relations Communications on Twitter