Jobs and Marketing on Metaverse – An Epic Need for Recruiting
Metaverse is no longer science fiction, and tech giants are betting their collective future on building, operating, and marketing on it. Such massive communal cyberspace requires people who understand the realm and can provide leading-edge marketing initiatives.
Participants must work with capable recruiters to source and hire the needed talent from the labor market. It is imperative to fulfill the increasing demand for these skills. It may be productive to pretend we are describing a new movie just to suffer through, much less accept, these observations. Let’s call this suspension of disbelief and consider the evidence.
Trillion Dollar Bet From Facebook, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Others
On October 28, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is now named “Meta,” a name derived from the concept of “Metaverse,” which has become increasingly popular.
Aside from Facebook,Nvidia CEO Jensen Amon and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have made similar announcements. Many leading tech firms are increasingly staking their claims to contribute to this shared future and likewise committing to helping build a “Metaverse” that will usher in a new era of online interaction.
To help understand what Metaverse means, I recommend a science fiction novel called Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. The book coined the term “Metaverse,” which describes a post-hyperinflation dystopian society complete with players and roles, each with a function and pecking order. This part may foretell our present economy more than we may realize.
If you enjoy movies, think The Matrix meets The Truman Show . If the digital world provides an operable framework for digitized society, distributed ledgers and blockchains could more easily track ownership and other claims to products and services. They can also better secure them to maintain integrity.
It is much easier to digitize in an online world. Metaverse is essentially its own operating system and is often referred to as web 3.0. At a more fundamental level, it is much more than a reboot or iteration on the past.
Because of distributed ledgers and the blockchains that secure them, much of what can now be done on Metaverse was impossible ten years ago. In the past, trust was assumed or regulated by third parties. Trust is now built-in.
Metaverse Will Empower, Enfranchise, and Help Diversify Workers Everywhere
The Metaverse empowers our interactions with products and services. Digitized assets now exist alongside their real-world counterparts, augmenting them and, in some cases, displacing or replacing them.
A few examples of digitized products and ideas include weapons and tools in a massively multiplayer online game (also called “MMO’s” such as World of Warcraft), and more recently, art and fashion where their digitized counterparts are also newly expressed as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs and iNFTs ). These are just some of the first products and ideas to crossover and find markets on the Metaverse. Potential applications are vast.
As described in the Snow Crash Wikipedia entry and noteworthy in the book, “Status in the Metaverse is a function of two things: access to restricted environments such as the Black Sun, an exclusive Metaverse club, and technical acumen, which is often demonstrated by the sophistication of one’s avatar.”
Thus, we live in a simulation, the product of our collective imagination, where we make up the rules by consensus and generate a functioning economic model.
Metaverse Will Recreate Marketing on Steroids
In the 1950s, people famously believed that the world would only need a few computers. In the 1980s, some thought that computer screens representing text and ideas would obsolete the use of paper and printing. Around 2000, many thought companies and service providers would never need a website or require the internet.
These failed prophecies lacked the imagination to adapt and grow. People failed to understand how technology would evolve and transform behaviors and alter and improve expectations and consumer interactions. So too, it would now be a mistake to believe that marketing and those that provide it will be displaced by this new technology. The truth is exactly the opposite. Metaverse will create much more marketing and, by extension, create roles and jobs for those who know how to do it.
The shift from the 2D dimension internet to the 3D dimension Metaverse fundamentally changes how we market and interact. As the Metaverse continues to grow, successful recruiting depends on how well we understand this new technology, what it can and can’t do, and how to find and recruit talent that can help grow and run it as it matures and expands.
The future of marketing is to immerse oneself in an idea that makes one want something instead of telling potential buyers why they need it. Metaverse delivers immersion and empowers participants with gamified digitizations of services and interests. Embedded technology such as distributed ledgers secured with blockchain maintains the fidelity and veracity of relationships between people or participants, products and services, and on a more fundamental level, the promises, behaviors, and claims that connect them.
Companies such as IBM, Pfizer, and P&G spend trillions bringing products to market (creation, supply chain, and delivery), with much of that spending on marketing and advertising. Marketing skills will not only remain relevant, but they will also increasingly deliver auditable and traceable value.
Combining recruiting, marketing, and tradecraft is where worlds combine to create value for stakeholders. From supply chains to demand chains – entire markets and product lines will fractionalize and focus on a more specific audience or demand. Does anyone imagine that this can be done without marketing and those that help guide it?
Marketers on Metaverse Will Serve as Our Tour Guides to a Brighter, Safer, and More Diverse Future
Marketing on Metaverse is a revolutionary progression still beyond most people’s view of present reality. We’ll need marketing professionals who know how to navigate the Metaverse to serve as tour guides and help bridge the transformation of our old economy into a new one. The benefits of the emerging Metaverse marketing will do much more than improve efficiency or lower costs.
Marketers on the Metaverse Will Help Deliver This Digitized Future
No business will continue to exist without understanding the Metaverse and how to use it.
The need to operate the marketing function of this “new” environment is already in high demand and will continue to grow exponentially faster than we may anticipate. Many frictions confronting societal and economic transformations don’t apply to a Metaverse where digital connections are quickly and costlessly formed. These connections are also then infinitely scalable with near-zero incremental cost.
For better or worse, supply chains have already collapsed much more than most would realize or accept. Shipping containers representing many months’ supply of goods are now stacked beyond our ability to digest them. A regatta of container ships sits alongside major ports, including the Port of Los Angeles and Port of New York & New Jersey. Companies awaiting delivery cannot meet customer demand. The revenues are at best delayed.
More importantly, many producers and shippers of these products as per their FOB shipping terms remain unpaid. These dollar-denominated payments quickly depreciate and cannot be recycled into producing new goods forcing many producers into extinction. Much of this takes years to rebuild. This situation is far from remedy and creates a void for new ideas and business practices, basically resulting in our economy’s devolution.
Metaverse is Going Into Hyperdrive, the Speed That This Displaces the Internet, and Older Technologies is Unprecedented
Silicon Valley types often refer to new technologies as “disruptive” with scant respect for what’s being displaced, ignoring the general hostility of incumbents’ reaction to changes that alter existing practices, relationships and the resulting jeopardy to their roles in maintaining them
Metaphorically, the physics and laws governing our real-world universe attest to how this works. Elon Musk’s and Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop can achieve such great speeds over their predecessors because the trains are propelled forwards in near-vacuum tubes. Since there is less air drag and air obstructing their movement, higher velocities within the tubes can be achieved. Similarly, the Metaverse is expanding into the void where present economic relationships and supply chains are breaking down, with some parts ceasing to exist entirely. Metaverse already occupies some of this void and will continue to expand to fill it.
It’s hard to believe that a sixteen-year-old gamer is probably more of an expert at multitasking and operating in a Metaverse than most college-educated adults. Perhaps the only friction is a lack of imagination, and stoicism is usually part of this process. Still, I am not prepared to write myself off as devoid of imagination and unable to embrace change. As nature dictates, change and adaptation are part of survival and evolution. Diversity of thought is an essential part of this. Ideas that lack these features will quickly wither.
Lastly, ask yourself, would you strive to write the perfect book, build the most incredible product, devise the most needed service, or instead, find and hire the best and most effective marketing person to sell a poor one?
With nearly all traditional frictions removed, the speed and expansion of this new Metaverse network and a new economy with it will unfold very quickly. Perhaps every job or function in our legacy economy will need to be redefined and re-hired. The Metaverse will continue to require marketing and recruiters. Marketing and recruiting on Metaverse are about to go into hyperdrive.
Warp ten, Mr. Sulu — fasten your seatbelts!
If you believe that Metaverse and NFTs should be used to help empower and enfranchise workers everywhere, please help by liking, commenting, or sharing this article on your social media. If you’re interested to see how recruiting operates on Metaverse as an NFT, click here. We will be building this together in the coming weeks.
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