Analysts: business avatars should dress well

Jake Widman
Saturday, 10 October 2009 05:59

Your IT - Home IT

Technology research and analysis firm Gartner has released a paper advising businesses how to get the most out of their employees' use of online avatars. Among the recommendations: dress codes and separate avatars for business use and personal activities.

The advice is contained in "Avatars in the Enterprise: Six Guidelines to Enable Success." (Gartner describes avatars as "two- or-three dimensional objects that most often resemble a human and are often animated and controlled remotely by a person in a virtual or 3-D Internet environment.")

Gartner vice president James Lundy said, "As the use of virtual environments for business purposes grows, enterprises need to understand how employees are using avatars in ways that might affect the enterprise or the enterprise’s reputation."

To that end, the firm boiled its advice down to six key guidelines:

1. Help users learn how to use their 

2. Let users "own" their avatar and use it to express their personality. At the same time, Gartner recommends a dress code for doing company business online.

3. Educate users on reputation management -- this is where having separate avatars for business and personal use comes in.

4. Extend conduct guidelines for blogging and social media that may already be in place to cover avatars as well.

5. Make sure to exploit the business uses of avatars, such as for training or holding virtual meetings.

6. Encourage early adopters to use avatars for trial purposes, such as for online meetings.

The full report is available for US$95 from the Gartner website .