Opening Day

Yesterday, I posted office hours and today marked the opening of STA SLI. I will be working 3 hour shifts for the rest of the week, as we start to build on the fact that we now have a live staff with office hours operating on Second Life. As we haven't made any press releases yet, not too many people showed up....well none.

On the Orientation Island, we started today with STA Travel's SL greeters. When the OI first opened we briefly used some ESC greeters but they proved to be far too expensive and we had to seek alternatives. This week, I have two staff members who will familiarize themselves with the job of greeting people, what's involved and how best to do it. Mostly, it involves having fun, so it's not a bad job at all. Next week, I hope to start building the staff, adding people and hours to the schedule. I've also hired an assistant manager whose job is to help me build the SL staff that STA will be employing.

It's a huge job that I've undertaken. But I absolutely love it. There's just so many different aspects to it. Tomorrow, I have a meeting with a class in Houston who are studying marketing techniques on Second Life and the internet. They were all asked to prepare questions to ask me, I feel like I may've signed up for a shooting gallery. However, the more people with whom I talk, the more ideas and suggestions that I get. In simply talking with the professor who is arranging the meeting (he teaches the class from Paris, mind you), I've already learned a great deal more about what my job is and how to do it.

After the class, I've got a conference call to try an establish a virtual tour for a client who is interested in hiring a tour guide for SL. If this goes well, it may lead to a sustained business of tours of SL, which would be a pleasant surprise. It hadn't initially occurred to me that we could actually make money through virtual tourism, but it may prove to be a source of revenue.

The next major step for me is once the office is wired into STA Travel's computer network, which will allow me to make bookings and check live air fare. Once this happens, I will be able to offer virtually all of the travel services that a RL travel branch currently has. Right now, I can make bookings but as I'm working through another agent, I can't provide the same quality of service for check live fairs. I'm more of a consultant at the moment.

Anyway, that's about it from the weird world in which I now work. I definitely had less naked people at the office today, though the one's that I did get were dancing. Somehow that makes it a bit better.