Influx

Last September, Grant McCracken wrote a great piece on the dismissal of MTV’s Mr. Freston by Viacom’s head honcho, Mr.Redstone.

McCracken’s thesis was Freston was fired because he wasn’t sufficiently in-tune with contemporary culture.

Others speculated it was because he failed to buy MySpace, which is the same sort of the thing.

If anyone is scared about being fired because they don’t know the wonders of WOW (World of Warcraft) or Second Life, they should fret no longer, because there’s a virtual tour agency ready to take you around both these worlds.

So the next time your youngest employee asks you about these new environments, you can sound like you know what you are talking about.

Synthtravels, has tours available for both Second Life and World of Warcraft and they have avatars ready and waiting to show around. Quite where they take you, we aren’t yet sure, but we plan to take a tour and report back.

Anyway, it’s a smart idea and there should be other tour guides taking the uninitiated round the worlds of Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and Delicious.

At Influx, we offer this kind of service, but for the real world. Influx’s unit EMERGE runs what it calls “cultural tours”, where it takes brand teams out to meet with the faces and places that comprise emerging culture.

If you are interested in doing this anywhere in the world, please let us know and we will help you out .

If we were smart, we would be adding virtual world tours to EMERGE’s list.