Marketing in the Metaverse

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced his plans to shift Facebook into a "metaverse" company, bringing alive a vision of an online world populated by avatars and accessible by Facebook's Oculus VR technology. The idea of a "metaverse" was coined by Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash and various proto-metaverses have emerged over the years: arguably Second Life, Minecraft and even immersive games like Skyrim, GTA V or shared MMPORG environments reach towards an idea of a persistent online world that we not only visit, but live in.

Zuckerberg's vision is a little different because it aims to be a place we work, play and meet with avatars representing our real selves, and given that we now find ourselves working remotely more and more, there is a something seductive about the idea that we might be able to gather together virtually in an online environment that is sufficiently immersive that we can be as productive in such a space as we might have been in person.

At it's heart though, Facebook is an advertising company, so although Zuckerberg leads with a work/live/play utopia not subject to the limitations of geography, there's no question that this utopia is about marketing and advertising. The Social Dilemma illustrates how we companies like Facebook have developed algorithms to capture attention, to sow that attention with the messages and solicitations of advertisers, and to absolutely maximize the amount of marketing messages that can effectively be delivered to its users without turning them off completely. 

The metaverse is an extension of that idea - maximizing the amount of time that a user spends on Facebook's properties in order to market to that user. Imagine a platform, in which you live and play for most of your day, where every surface, every item you interact with, was rendered by Facebook technology and therefore able to support marketing messages ad infinitum. A Facebook owned-metaverse a la The Matrix would give Facebook the opportunity to own digital marketing channels far in advance of anything its competitors could offer - giving Christof-like powers to the curated Truman Show experience of its users.

More:

• What is the metaverse and why does it matter?
• The Metaverse is a clean slate for the ad-industry post cookies

Business Anthropology in a Digital Age

“All of these problems at the end of the day are human problems, I think that that’s one of the core insights that we try to apply to developing Facebook. What [people are] really interested in is what’s going on with the people they care about. It’s all about giving people the tools and controls that they need to be comfortable sharing the information that they want. If you do that, you create a very valuable service. It’s as much psychology and sociology as it is technology.”      
                                                                           

These are words of Mark Zuckerberg who studied psychology and computer science at Harvard University and went on to create Facebook whose initial IPO listed the company at a market cap of $104 billion.

  

Today there are many well-qualified anthropologists working in business. Companies increasingly hire anthropologists to design new technology, to learn more about their customers, and to improve their business. Increasingly, business anthropology is a preferred approach for business executives to understand why and how people around them do what they do, as well as why and how consumers choose to purchase the goods and services that they prefer.

Companies hire anthropologists to measure how customers like their products and what they can do to improve them. Companies like social gaming developer Zynga and web search company Yahoo hire people with anthropology degrees to do user research. These anthropologists use anthropological methods to collect information from game users and analyze it to help game designers make the games more attractive and fun for users. 

Intel is another company that has hired anthropologists. In particular, Director of Interaction and Experience Research, Genevieve Bell, is credited with changing Intel’s business plan. She has done research on the way people all over the world use computers and the internet and has helped redirect Intel into the smart phone and internet TV markets, both of which are non-computer-based ways of using the internet. She says that for large parts of the world, the Internet is, and will continue to be, mostly text on a phone. So Intel is pursuing that market with its Atom chips, which are cheaper and consume less power than, say, Intel Core i3 or Celeron processors. Bell has also been key in helping Intel move into the smart-TV market, studying how people behave when they are entertained by television in a living room, and how that experience is distinct from sitting in front of a computer.

Other tech companies have social scientists on staff. Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard  are some of the corporations that have anthropologists and ethnologists working alongside systems engineers and software developers. 

Xerox  is credited with pioneering this practice when its Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1970s hired an anthropology grad student to help engineers build copiers with an easy-to-grasp user interface. This easy-to-grasp user interface was then adopted by Steve Jobs to create the Apple computer which revolutionized the PC industry. 

You Would Unfriend Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook made history in April when it briefly passed Google as the most visited website in the world. On one hand, this is discouraging. Our appetite for all knowledge on Earth is exceeded by our lust for mundane status updates and boozy party pictures. But on the other, this is uplifting. It shows how much we crave a manicured, gated-online picture-sharing party where you’re the real you. Leave MySpace to the creepy uncle or Indie band. Ironic because:

You Would Unfriend Mark Zuckerberg
You wouldn’t like Mark Zuckerberg in person. At Harvard, he was brash, obnoxious, and wont to quote lines from the Iliad. As he tells it, he thought up Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, buzzed, and dejected after a girl broke up with him. Zuckerberg wanted a way to compare ugly Harvard student pictures to barnyard animals.

Ask Harvard classmates and they have a slightly different version: Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea entirely. Three classmates offered to pay Zuckerberg to build a dating site for them called HarvardConnections.com. So Zuckerberg took the idea, stalled on that project, and churned out theFacebook.com. There’s even an instant message conversation where Zuckerberg boasts to a friend he would “f--- them, probably in the ear”. Zuckerberg later paid $65 million to settle.

There’s more. Zuckerberg may have committed a felony. When he caught wind that the Harvard Crimson planned to write about his HarvardConnections.com imbroglio, Zuckerberg hacked into reporters’ email accounts back in 2004. Or, in 2010 terms, he pulled a China.

Thief, felon, ear-violator, whatever you want to call Mark Zuckerberg, you also have to call him the youngest self-made billionaire in human history. He’s our generation’s Bill Gates, except much raunchier. Gates gave us Windows, a stable platform for computers. But he completely whiffed at the Internet: Do you know anyone that uses Hotmail anymore? Mark Zuckerberg gave us Facebook, the stable platform for the Internet. He chalks Facebook’s exponential growth up to the “social graph” phenomenon. Basically, the longest you’re in a social network, the more you will want to share with your friends. You get more social. Some would say too much…

Dear Girls With The Intensely Personal Facebook Status Updates,
Stop! You have 642 friends, and you really only know 50 of them. The rest are of the random, met-you-at-a-party-once variety. I see a girl rant about some boy or betrayed by a friend in the News Feed and all I can think is: you realize other people can read this right? Become A Fan of: “Wanna not say that in front of everyone? Kay, thanks.” (nearly 600,000 strong). We don’t want to read this. It’s uncomfortable, awkward, but unavoidable when it’s right there at the top of the News Feed.

Mark Zuckerberg raised the ire of many when he said the Millenial Generation doesn’t care about privacy. He’s largely right though. I love the “Jersey Shore” and occasionally drinking with my friends. You really got me! I’ve heard the argument: Facebook has already extinguished every American’s political prospects born between 1981 and 1992. Every potential 2032 Senate run is undermined by Spring Break pictures. These fears are unfounded. Barring seething racial diatribes or “For All In Favor Of Clubbing Baby Seals” membership, we probably won’t care by then. We almost already don’t. Barack Obama admitted he inhaled weed (“That was the point!”) and snorted coke at Columbia.

Obama sobered up, hired Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to revolutionize his social media campaign, and raised over half a billion dollars online. Over 5.4 million (mostly college age) users ticked the "I Voted" button on Election Day. Our more audacious parents stormed school buildings and marched on Washington. Facebook is ideal for Generation Y’s sleepy political activism. We can just click the “Like” button, join the “1,000,000 Strong For Same Sex Marriage” group, give money, and don’t even have to leave bed.

We have mostly snoozed since Election Day, but Sarah Palin has rabble-roused Republicans to “not retreat, reload” on the heels of health care reform. The half-term-former- governor-of-Alaska-turned-wanna-be-White-Oprah posted a map with vulnerable Democrat seats circled in cross-hairs. The grandmother has refused to apologize for the loaded gun analogy.




Our Parents Took Facebook From Us
Our parents used to make fun of us for Facebook. “Quit spending so much time on that picture-thingey!” is an exact quote. But then they wouldn’t get off it. Our parents took it over. The 35-54 user demographic exploded by 276% in 2009. They got over high school grudges, didn’t get Twitter, and loved to share our embarrassing baby pictures (Thanks Aunt Ellie. Those Cape Cod beach pictures of five-year old me are quite the conversation-starter.) Scan the NewsFeed and your Tiger Woods spoof may have 2-3 comments and a like. Your dad’s girlfriend’s biking picture? It only racked up 17 comments and 20 likes. Having your mom on Facebook has created some disconcerting run-ins:

What’s the quickest way to turn us off of something? Turn our parents onto it. It hasn’t happened yet. But Facebook has been a lightning rod of pop culture riffs. South Park pilloried not so much Facebook but our addiction to it in last week’s episode: “Your friends shouldn't be a commodity for status.” Seth Rogen ranted “F--- Facebook … in the face!” in Judd Apatow’s unheralded movie “Funny People”. The site Lamebook.com attracts nearly a million Facebook foes a day hilariously compiling our worst Facebook moments.

Cartman tirades are more testament to Facebook’s sheer scale than any veritable threat. Twitter is not the next Facebook. Teens don’t tweet and 60% of Twitter users burn out within the first month .Meanwhile, Facebook hosts 400 million people, or the combined population of the US and Mexico. Recent valuations peg Facebook between $11 and 17 billion. The Oxford Dictionary named “unfriend” the 2009 Word of the Year. Entertainment Weekly rated Facebook as one of the best inventions of the 2000s, asking: "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?”

Facebook is our collective fridge door to magnet birthday reminders and what’s for dinner. It’s our constantly-updating reminder that our friends and families care. The genius of Facebook is not so much that we like the “That’s What She Said” group or adorable dog videos. It’s that our friends like that we like them.