Virtual world population: 50 million by 2011

Think you don’t need an effective Internet presence now? Wrong.

Within 4 years, Gartner Chief of Research Steve Prentice reports ‘80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 companies) will have a ‘second life’, but not necessarily in Second Life’ by 2011′

From Wagner James Au at GigaOM my source on this post:

The statement was meant, says Prentice, as ‘a wake-up call to the CIO and CEOS out there that this is not a game, just sort of messing around. It’s interesting [and] we think it’s going to big.’ By ‘active’, Gartner is referring to ‘people who are heavyweight Net users.’ And by their definition, all of them are broadband users. ‘They’re my kids, to be honest, back from school, right onto MySpace.’ That in mind, the estimate is actually that 50-60 million Net users will participate in a virtual world by 2011.

For law firms to succeed in the future, it’s critical that they empower younger lawyers who already live in a virtual world. Why reign these young lawyers in to your style of old-school marketing when the CEO’s, in-house counsel, CIO’s, and other exec’s are going to be active in the virtual world we call the Internet?

Technorati Tags: blog research, Gartner