Fear of missing out on business contacts is real | Cardinbox Blog
Fear of missing out, more commonly referred to as ‘FOMO’ brings to light the irrational anxieties of a generation that has grown up on the internet. It’s a millennial term, floating around in the same pool as TBH, SMH, TBT, YOLO, OMG, etc. These abbreviations, their meanings already hold a strong foothold in our daily means of conversing and have now seeped into our thought processes as well.
Being a millennial I too use these words ‘on the reg’, but there’s one that caught my attention more than the others. FOMO is the anxiety caused due to the inability to attend an interesting event taking place elsewhere, usually aroused by social media. It revolves around people feeling left out, but it’s more so about the fear that everyone else is doing something while you’re unable to. If you really think about it, millennial lingo and it’s meanings aside, fear of missing out is a concept that has been around forever, commonly known as ‘opportunity cost’.. Online marketers picked up on the importance of FOMO and before long it became the central strategy for many marketing firms.
Now I want to share a slightly less obvious and not so literal relation between FOMO and business contacts. I joined Cardinbox a few months ago. Cardinbox provides seamless sharing of business cards and enables users to manage, store, search and make the most out of their business cards. Now at the start of my job I never thought FOMO and business cards would have anything to do with eachother, but as I worked with the product and really understood why customers would want to use this product I made an interesting observation about business cards, contacts really and FOMO.
I learnt that people exchange cards with anyone and everyone, often with people they have never met before. It’s hard enough to keep a tab of the cards of people we know, then why do we keep collecting cards when we don’t land up using many of the contacts we acquire ? It’s the policy of- ‘Better safe than sorry’. What if I want to get in touch with one of these people in the future, even if i don’t necessarily need to right this second ? This is just an another way to describe FOMO. Cards translate into business opportunities, so not collecting as many as we possibly can is comparable to losing out on business. It’s like the fear of the unknown, we never know what contacts will land up being hits or alternatively misses.
To conclude, the word ‘Fear’ might be extreme to use at times, but all in all FOMO is applicable in more situations than you or me have ever thought of. Is it good to give into FOMO ? Depends on the situation really, if it’s to be better safe than sorry like in the case of business cards, then yes! If it’s used as a marketing gimmick to get us to buy products and services then we need to be smart about it. So here is an observation turned testament to the fact that FOMO exists in more forms than just social media and millennial jargon, it can get us to spend unplanned money and also collect things we don’t require presently.
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