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SL_empty.jpgBesides the sale of YouTube, nothing’s been hyped more this year than companies, from IBM to Starwood Hotels to ad agencies and PR firms, opening in Second Life. Visit them and you’re likely to find yourself alone, or maybe find one or two other people there. The biggest problem: everyone’s jumping in because everyone’s jumping in. They’re often not bothering to visit Second Life first, let alone learn the culture.
The second biggest problem: you have to download software to enter the metaverse and big corporations generally won’t allow anything downloaded on their servers. And once you do download it, the software is clunky, slow, and hard for newbies to grasp.
Greg Verdino has a great article in MarketingProfs today, with some warnings and guidelines for marketers. He says:

“The best—maybe the only—way to understand the metaverse, is to join as a resident before you join as a marketer.
Big changes are coming fast, and as marketers we would be well advised to learn some lessons about metaverse marketing now, lest we be trumped by more nimble competitors.
But we need to be smart about our approach, realistic in our expectations, and consumer-centric in our executions. Doing it just to do it isn’t good enough.
On the other hand, neither is waiting to see what happens.”