Issue #9: Layer 2 of the Metaverse - Discovery

“The metaverse is here, and it’s not only transforming how we see the world but how we participate in it – from the factory floor to the meeting room.”?????

Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

This statement by the CEO of the tech giant, Microsoft lays proof of the fact that metaverse is not going to be the next big thing – it is already the talk of the town and is slowly and gradually becoming an inevitable part of our lives, both personally and professionally.

The Metaverse will help us find new ways to perform all of our current activities, including commerce, entertainment and media, education and training, manufacturing and enterprise in general.?

For example: Metaverse will facilitate internal collaboration, client contact, sales and marketing, advertising, events and conferences, engineering and design, and workforce training in the enterprises.

August saw multiple large corporations and brands venturing into the Metaverse, including Taco Bell, Hell's Kitchen, Unilever and Netflix. In terms of funding in the space, Metaverse projects have raised a total of $158 million in capital, an increase of?137%?from July.

Now that we are all familiar with the multiple use cases of the metaverse and its wide reach, don’t you think it is also important to understand what constitutes it and makes the metaverse worth all the buzz?

Characteristics?like realistic immersive experience, user generated content, new regulations etc. form the basis of the unique existence of the Metaverse.?

What forms the core of Metaverse are its seven distinct layers that together converge to form its ecosystem. The first layer of ‘experience’ depicts that the idea of the Metaverse is not limited to a passively observable 3D representation of the physical universe, but will instead involve digital twinning for a more comprehensive depiction of spatial coordinates and distances.?

Now, it is time to dig deep into the next layer of the metaverse that has its own unique role to play in making the metaverse omnipresent.

‘Layer 2 of Metaverse - Discovery’?

As the name suggests, the discovery layer is about the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ that introduces people to new experiences. This is a huge ecosystem, and one of the most lucrative for many businesses — including some of the biggest in the world. This layer explains how consumers will discover new experiences or platforms via app stores, search engines, reviewing sites, and display advertising. It is a pivotal phase in the process of finding new technologies, protocols, and communities.

Exploration of the metaverse isn’t always a straight path. Discovering it is more than just looking around in a virtual 3D environment. Needless to say, this form of investigation is part of the metaverse’s larger experience. Many businesses and people relish the opportunity to be among the first to glimpse new vistas in the metaverse’s ever-expanding landscapes.

However, as reiterated before, the metaverse is more than just 3D surroundings. There will almost always be commercial interests looking for folks who share similar interests. Inbound discoveries are also an important part while the community-created content will frequently reach users.

In a broader sense, most discovery systems can be classified as the following:

Inbound

In this, the person is actively seeking information about an experience.?It involves a strategic approach to creating valuable content that aligns with the needs of your target audiences and inspires long-term relationships.

Outbound

Contrary to the former, this is the type of marketing that was not specifically requested by the person, even if they opted in. It covers all kinds of processes where a company initiates the conversation and sends its message out to an audience.

Inbound Discovery:

Now that you have skimmed through the difference between inbound and outbound, let us jump right into understanding the types of discovery methods in the inbound category.

i) Real-time presence

• A unique form of community surfacing is?real-time presence?features.?
• Instead of focusing on what people like, it is more about what people are actually doing?right now. It will hold a very high relevance in a metaverse where so much of the value will come from interacting with friends through shared experiences.
• For example: the various walled gardens for games make good use of real-time presence. When you login to?Battle.net,?Xbox?or PlayStation, you are able to see what games your friends are playing right now. Other than that,?Clubhouse?displays the power of this structure: deciding which room to join is largely oriented toward your curated list of people you follow.

ii) Community-driven content

• It is quite a cost-effective means of discovery than other forms of marketing.?
• When people really participate in various content communities and events, they’ll spread the word. Nowadays, content itself has become easier to exchange, trade, and share within more metaverse contexts and is eventually becoming a marketing asset.?
• One of its prime examples is?NFTs?– two of their key advantages are the relative ease with which they can be supplied to decentralized exchanges and the economics that favour more direct creator-community engagement. Odds are such that content marketplaces will become an alternative to application marketplaces as a means of discovery.

iii) App stores?(including various reviews, ratings systems, and categorization/tagging)

iv) Curation?— with the help of featured application listings in stores, taste-makers, and influencers

v) Search engines:?As the name suggests, it is more about people who are already searching for metaverse and its related keywords on the internet. Since, they are already interested in the concept of metaverse or discovering about solutions or platforms around it, they become an inbound lead.

vi) Earned media:?Earned media, or earned content, is any content material written or published about you or your business that you haven't paid for or created yourself. Easy to understand, this type of media is always published by a third party and there are quite some ways in which marketers can position themselves for earned media opportunities

Outbound:

The various types of outbound discovery channels are as follows:

i) Display advertising

It is a very common form of online advertisement that combines text, images, and a URL that links to a website where a customer can learn more about metaverse solutions and services.?

There are many ad formats under this category. These ads can be?

• static with an image
• animated with use of intriguing images, video, or changing text known as rich media ads

An ad campaign can have different goals –?educating about the product, entertaining and engaging through simple games or puzzles. Other ads are ‘Banner Ads’ that are a common type of display ads that are frequently used for awareness campaigns.

ii) Notifications

iii) Spam (email, LinkedIn, Discord)

This format involves an extensive use of social media wherein the metaverse companies and platforms can circulate various forms of content such as infographics, static posts, videos etc. on various platforms like LinkedIn, Discord etc.

The Amalgamation of Inbound & Outbound

Now that we?know about the majority of inbound and outbound discovery channels, let’s focus on other aspects of discovery that will elevate in importance in the metaverse.

Just as new developments are dematerializing physical reality, the metaverse is also digitizing social structures. The earlier stages of the Internet were defined by social media “stickiness” around a few indivisible providers; a decentralized identity ecosystem has the potential to shift the power toward the social groups themselves, allowing them to move frictionlessly across collective experiences.

For example:?

• Clubs pop up on the?Clubhouse and?plan a party in Rec Room
• guilds move between various?games
• a group of gaming friends jumps between experiences on Roblox.

All these are the marketing implications of the content-community complex.

Real-time presence detection that is spread across the multitude of activities in the metaverse is one of the greatest discovery opportunities for creators.

Did you know that Discord has a presence-detection SDK?that works across different game environments? Once this or something like it is adopted more frequently and surfaced more apparently, we’ll extensively transition from asynchronous “social networking” to real-time “social activity.”

In A Nutshell?

The huge number of discovery platforms may perhaps be classified as possibly inbound or outbound. And this discovery layer very well describes how buyers will find out new experiences or platforms via application suppliers, look for engines, reviewing sites, and screen promotion. This layer is an important part in the process of obtaining new systems, protocols, and communities.

While the discovery layer is just the tip of the iceberg, there are many more layers left to unravel.?Rising Capital?has been a torchbearer entity for businesses that offer a unique proposition to the domain of Metaverse.?

If you have something out-of-the-box that has the potential to revolutionize the Metaverse of today, apply?here?and we’ll be happy to back you through.