BusinessWeek.com has a good roundup - "The (Virtual) Global Office" - of company efforts to use Second Life (the virtual world where you too can be two people or three...) by Rachael King: They hold meetings that are simultaneously face-to-face and virtual, they recruit new talent, they collaborate, and sometimes things get out of hand:
Cisco is among companies that recruit in Second Life. "My extended team uses Second Life primarily to recruit new talent," says Andrew Sage, a marketing vice-president at Cisco, adding that Second Life is good for finding workers under the age of 25. Yet even for an executive as tech-savvy as Sage, using an avatar in Second Life can be challenging. Early on, during a recruitment seminar for resellers, Sage accidentally caused his avatar to fly away while making a presentation. "Needless to say, it wasn't ideal," Sage says.
I hope he made it back to terra firma, so to speak.