Virtual Worlds Groupthink Enters Phase Three: “It Could Work If ….”

As stories continue to filter out from the latest Virtual Worlds Conference, it’s clear that the buzz around virtual worlds as a business or marketing venture has entered what I call Phase Three of Media Groupthink, mainly that they can work if they’re done right.

The publicity about Second Life is classic of this three-phase arc of media groupthink. Phase One is “Coolest thing in the world!” Phase Two is, variably, “(Blank) is dead/overrated/a waste of time.” News stories that indicate Phase Three has launched usually have headlines that include the phrase “A Second Look at ….”

The benefit of being in Phase Three is that we get more clear-eyed new and analysis pieces like the one that ran this week in eMarketer, a respected daily marketing news and research Web site and email newsletter: “A Second Look at Virtual Worlds” reports statistics on in-world use in Second Life and virtual worlds in general, as well as what works and what doesn’t work for businesses trying either to gain a toehold in an established virtual world or to start their own. Definitely worth reading if you need bar charts for a presentation.