MBA1929 What Does Facebook’s Metaverse Mean For Your Business?

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The best way to understand the Metaverse is understanding two things. Number one is virtual reality. Virtual reality is real. If you haven't tried virtual reality yet, it's one hell of a trip, man. It is very eye opening. I remember when I tried it for the first time, I immediately thought to myself, this is the future. You totally forget you are in a virtual world. Your mind thinks it's real. I remember the first time I tried virtual reality, I played the game Fruit Ninja, and I was cutting up Fruit fruit with my virtual swords, but they were just controllers in my hand. But after about five minutes of playing, I totally forgot that the controllers were not swords and just controllers. And when the game was over, I just put down the controllers on the virtual desk that I saw in my headset. But in fact, the controllers just dropped to the ground. My mind totally was convinced those were swords and that was a real table. Now, virtual reality and its technology has improved a lot in the last 10 years, and it's only gonna get better. Now, the Metaverse is basically virtual reality combined with social media. So think of social media the way we kind of talk on social media. We post, we comment, we look at pictures, all that kind of stuff. What would that look like in a real world setting? That would look like me sitting on the couch with somebody having a conversation, or showing some photos of on my phone or in a photo album, like in real life. So they're going to combine these two, basically making social media even more real and creating a virtual world where when you put on your headsets, instead of just talking on a Facebook wall, you're actually talking in a cafe or in outer space or anywhere you'd like. Because it's virtual, you can do whatever you want. So now that we've established what the Metaverse is, you're probably thinking, wow, the opt and the opportunities are endless. You can literally build a virtual store where you sell virtual merchandise. You know, we're going to have avatars, and you can walk down the street wearing a special T shirt that I sold you in my virtual store. Of course the seizures are real, but in the Metaverse, it is just as good as real. Now, I want to stop here for a moment because I know that many of us are thinking, okay, this has gone too Far this is too much. I'm not into this. This is crazy. The real world is real. The virtual world is just some sort of video game. I don't know how I feel about this, and I will be honest with you that when I looked into this early on and I looked into virtual reality in the Metaverse and all that kind of stuff, my gut reaction was this, was, was that resistance. But you got to have an open mind as an entrepreneur. You got to look at what this means because it's coming. And whether you like it or not, whether you decide to participate or not, you got to know what's in front of you. You got to know what opportunities that you're going to pass up and what the trade offs are. Now you can disagree with it, you can not like it, but you just can't ignore it. You got to know that exists so you can adapt and change and modify your business knowing that something new exists. This is like pretending that there's no credit cards, right? Like you have accept credit cards at some point. That's just the new wave of technology. So approach it with an open mind is my advice, number one. Number two, you don't have to participate fully. You could participate partially. You can see what's good and leave the bed. It's not an all or nothing thing, you know, at least that's what I think. Okay, so if we can create these virtual worlds and there's going to be all these opportunities, what opportunities are we talking about exactly? Well, Facebook, well actually they're called Meta now. Did not actually reveal all the opportunities that will be available. They had a short demo. But Facebook makes its money on advertising. So there are going to be some advertising opportunities for you and your business and some of that was displayed in the demo. If you sell physical items, you have an E commerce store. This is going to be an incredible opportunity for your customers in the Metaverse to, to experience your products and your services even before they buy it, even if they're buying it for the real world. But even if you are just advertising to bring them to your website, that's going to be totally doable. And based on my research, what it looks like is that Facebook is trying to create its own sort of corner of the Internet. Facebook's gotten a lot of backlash and a lot of people are not playing nice with Facebook in terms of ad tracking and integrations and things like that. You know, Apple's really been the leader at this because, you know, right now a lot of people are not running as many ads because they can't track conversions on iOS devices. What the Metaverse is going to do is it's going to keep everything in Metaverse, right? So you're going to browse everything on the Metaverse, you're going to see everything in the Metaverse, so they'll be able to get around this, and you're basically using their device, their world, to view your products, and it's going to be super simple for them to track. So I really believe that when this becomes mainstream, it's going to be a gold rush for advertising. It's going to be a gold rush again. It's almost like Facebook is reborn. Just like when it first started out. It was like an amazing time. You can get really, really good value for your dollar in terms of advertising on Facebook. I think the same thing will happen with Metaverse. The other thing that will help you get prepared is understand that the Metaverse is going to love rich content. They're going to love great content in terms of videos, images, audio. They're going to incorporate all of this in their virtual world. So the more content you're going to have already that you can transport it into this world is going to be even better for you. It's going to really help you have a leg up when you are entering the Metaverse and starting to put up your flag as a business in that world. Now, you might be asking, when is this all happening? How much time do I have? Well, Mark Zuckerberg has already mentioned that they have a couple of hurdles they need to get over. Number one is, in order for this to be mainstream, people have to be able to afford and be able to comfortably wear the virtual headsets for long periods of time. This means they're going to have to innovate with the headsets. They need a little bit more time to keep them lighter and keep them more comfortable. They also mentioned that they're going to subsidize the price of the Oculus virtual headset, meaning they're going to lose money just so they can get people to get this headset and wear it and use it regularly. The Metaverse itself as well, is going to need some advancements and updates. They're still working on all the logistics. This is a massive project, probably one of the biggest things that's going to happen in terms of technology in our lifetime. But Mark has been quoted to say that it will take up to 10 years for this to be mainstream, for it to be as common as people being on social media. But 10 years is not a long time Think about how the last 10 years just flew by. So how can you prepare? Number one, I would highly recommend you subscribe to Facebook's Facebook channel as well as their YouTube channel. This will update you on any new keynotes, any new updates, any new information they're going to be revealing to people about the Metaverse. People might be invited to be beta testers to learn a little bit more about advertising by setting up shops. As the coming months and years roll by, they will reveal more and more and need people's help to make sure that they can roll this out properly. If all this kind of intimidates you in terms of technology, well, you got plenty of time to learn. And trust me, it's actually not that hard to learn the basics of what this is all about. You don't need to learn how to code a virtual world, but you need to understand how it actually all work in terms of what would mean for your business. So do your little research, do your Google searches, watch some videos on YouTube. You'll be surprised how quickly you'll learn about virtual reality and what's in store for the Metaverse. Lastly, the best thing you can do to prepare for this is the Metaverse is going to make things seamless for customers. It's going to make it feel like the real world. It's going to seem like an easier and better version of the real world. And I say better, I don't mean like actually tangibly better, but I mean in terms of convenience and seamlessness of the buying process, of the marketing process. This is going to be a huge step forward. This is like another Internet. Remember when we used to advertise before the Internet and we used to put flyers up and, you know, advertising the yellow pages and we didn't understand who's, you know, reading our ads and we couldn't, you know, attract conversions and now we can think about the next level of that. So start thinking about how you can already make your buyer's journey seamless on your website, in your business, how can you make it even easier for them to sign up, make it easier for them to pay, easier for them to ask questions, easier for them to experience your onboarding series. How can you make it a no brainer? Fewer steps, fewer clicks? This will just get you trained on the fact that, hey, I need to up my game to make sure that when the new technology is available, I can transfer these principles to that new technology. This is something we've been working on in our company for the last 24 months. How can we get our customer to get to where they need to go faster. For us, it's creating a webinar, running a webinar, making sure they get new leads and new sales. That's the end goal. And we literally count. How many clicks does it take to get to that goal? How many pages do they have to go through? How many steps? Can we shorten those steps? Can we make them faster? Can we skip a few steps? Can we combine them? Can we time how long it takes? Can we cut down that time? We became really, really obsessed with trying to get our customers to their goal faster, easier, more efficiently.

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Listeners. The metaverse is a whole new world. It's a new frontier. And there's a lot that is coming, but it's not gonna all come at once. Remember, Facebook had a version one. It was ugly. It didn't do half the things it does today. Heck, the first version didn't even have the. So the metaverse is not going to be the vision of the metaverse from day one. It's going to allow us to adapt to it. And in that process, you're going to learn what is best for your business. What are the opportunities that you can take advantage of. I personally think the advertising and branding opportunities that will be there are going to be like no other. This is going to make it easier and easier for small businesses to grow, to scale, to find their ideal customers. Now, I have to say this because it's just the truth. Facebook has not had the best track record recently in terms of privacy. It's been in the news for a lot of breaches, has been in the news for how they affect elections, how they affect politics, how laws are even passed. They also have had a lot of influence over public opinion. So there's a lot of gray area around Facebook as a company, and for them to take this leap into this whole new world, there's a lot of question marks I have. I am tentative, I'm not gung ho. And thinking Facebook is the best thing in the world. They have their flaws. And with this great new world and capabilities, you know, it's even more important for us to be a little bit worried about our privacy. There are some rumors that Facebook is going to try to combat this with some more transparency, with having the code be open source, with using the blockchain and in their technology. But those details are still not public or confirmed. So I do want to say that in this lesson, I wanted to say in today's episode that, hey, you know, look before you leap and make an educated decision. Yes, there's going to be opportunities, but I for one am going to definitely take a look at what does this mean for my own information, the information that I share and the information I gather. But you can't deny it's an exciting time to be in business. It's going to be interesting, to say the least. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode. In tomorrow's episode, we have Q and A Wednesday where a listener asks the question, how do I tell my spouse I want to start a business? We get into that in tomorrow's episode, so make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Whether it's the Metaverse or anything else that's new, change can be scary for businesses. Because we don't want to rock the boat. We want what's working to continue to keep working. It's kind of scary to think that there's something coming down the line that might force you to change the way you do business. My advice is, no matter what it is, don't be afraid. You never make great decisions out of fear. Instead, embrace it, learn from it, and find out how you can take advantage of it. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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