BusinessWeek covered Diageo’s presence in SL this week ‚Äì a campaign that began back in March with a St Patrick’s Day pub crawl. That promotion involved the installation of virtual bars (tied to Diageo’s TheBar.com property) in top Second Life pubs, with various animations and avatar moves programmed into the drinks on offer, including Diageo brands like Guinness and Johnnie Walker. The interesting challenge here was translating the fun, spontaneous character of social drinking into a virtual world where alcohol had no effect on avatars. Another intriguing wrinkle was the need to comply with strict regulations that govern the marketing of alcohol to minors; age-verification functionality was essential.

Beyond the initial promotion, SL bar owners have reported that their patrons enjoy playing around with the drink scripts (the funny actions associated with each beverage, for example toasts or dances), and that TheBar.com units have been successful in drawing additional traffic into their venues.

This story was back in the news after Robin Dargue, Diageo’s CIO and business process director, spoke at a Forrester conference in Scotland. At that event, Forrester’s Bill Nagel sought to contextualize much-ballyhooed concerns about the use of Second Life and other Web 2.0 social tools on corporate networks: “not all information needs to be protected. Only put high levels of security around data you cannot afford to lose. Consumer technology is very useful and is not going to go away.”

In other words, protect what you really have to protect, but encourage employees to interact with customers using today’s most innovative tools. This mirrors larger discussions about the benefits of transparency and openness in many areas of business and society. The days of hiding behind corporate data-barricades appear to be numbered. Wasn’t it FDR who said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself? So offer that high-minded argument to your boss when you amble down to your (virtual) corner pub with a prospective client at 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon…

The first phase of any of our engagements involves what we call “Brand Translation”. During this phase, we examine a real-world brand and create an experience that is suited for Second Life, that captures the sentiments and emotions of the real world experience.

I’m really proud to announce te launch today of our project with Diageo (and Thebar.com ). Developed in partnership with our friends over at Bite Communications, this has been one of our most challenging (in a good way) and hopefully creative projects.

The big problem we started with was: “How do you translate drinking in an environment where alcohol has no effect?” We chose to focus on the social aspects of the drinking experience. The result is a virtual bar kit, available for free for any Second Life bar owner (provided you’re over 21 and located on a Mature sim without explicit content). Within the bar kit are a wide variety of Diageo’s brands including beer, wine and spirits like Tanqueray, Captain Morgan, Johnnie Walker and Guinness. All the bottles have been programmed to provide a variety of cool social networking features, including toasts and other animations. We hope everyone enjoys it and look forward to watching it be used and develop.

To launch, we’re having a Bar Crawl — please join us to celebrate.

What Thebar.com Virtual Bar Crawl — Make a Toast in Second Life!
When Wednesday, March 21st
Time 3pm-6pm Pacific Time / (6pm-9pm Eastern Time)
Where Second Life

LOCATIONS:

– ASpiRE! Isle, ASpiRE! Magazine and Modeling Agency
http://slurl.com/secondlife/ASpiRE%20Isle/144/165/26/
ASpiRE plan to have a trivia contest and great prizes.

– The Witch’s Brew
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Evalua/223/226/28

–The Blarney Stone
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dublin/80/106/26/26/
“Real world” Irish band Callaghan will be playing live at The Blarney Stone.