Creating a presence today puts you at the head of the class and is just the right thing to do
There was a time when the Xerox copying machine was a “technology” that not all companies needed — or understood. Something similar occurred with computers. I recall internet connections were reserved only for the “toppest of the top” management and company founders. It wasn’t until I became a Chief Marketing Officer that I became one of the connected ones.
Thanks to the internet, emails became a must-have for company employees, while company sites were one of those things that many organizations endlessly discussed: Was it needed? How will a site “help us?” We are a B2B company, so why do we need a site? Sites eventually became the first step many new companies would take by the mid-2000s.
It is 2023, and we are in the “era of the metaverse.” But are we? And if we are, what does that mean? Are companies creating their metaverse plans the way they did their “online push” back in the early 2000s?
The FOMO year
We all recall the year of the “great metaverse leap.” It was 2022, and thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s slightly naive and certainly over-enthusiastic tour into the future, way too many people, journalists, investors, and even some end-consumers came down with a case of FOMO (fear of missing out).
FOMO is the pump that inflated the crypto world into the next big thing, only that next big thing never happened. Crypto is still out there, making money for some and losing a lot for others. It’s teetering. The technology that empowers it, the blockchain, gets almost no press these days, meaning many good blockchain projects still need funding but don’t get it.
Something similar happened to metaverse projects in late 2022 and through 2023. Usurped by ChatGPT and other AI-fueled projects and bored by Zuckerberg’s premature prediction that it was time for everyone to buy a La-Z-Boy and become a nation of Wall-Es (from the classic film Wall-E), the air slowly seeped out of the metaverse bubble.
The thing is, and this is a credit to the foundational importance of the metaverse, other than the silly, misinformed noise created by…