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xIn this episode of Ecoffee with Experts, Matt Fraser was joined by Shirley Whyte, Marketing Director of Mad4Digital. Matt and Shirley talk about the Metaverse and effective B2B marketing techniques in web 3.0. Watch now to gain some excellent insights.
The way it works is, you’ve got your NFT that you use within the game and within value. The more you win, the more valuable your assets become.
Thank you for having me.
I was very quiet, a bit geeky, wore glasses, wasn’t good at sports, and read a lot. I still read a lot, but I think I still managed to get the respect of the cool kids. Somehow, I didn’t get the ticket to the nerds Club, where nobody belonged. But I was a little bit geeky.
Yes, I think so, I have always been curious about how things work and the tech side.
Am I allowed to say both? Agency is a lot of fun because I got to meet a wide variety of people. And over the past years, I got to work on some great projects, from crypto blockchain to more traditional, so having a whole mix. On the client side, I’ve worked with some amazing marketing agencies in the world and top talent and learned so much from them and also traveled and experienced a lot of different cultures. So both have been quite good.
Rosetta Stone was fun. They were headquartered in the US. I was in the European office, which is based in London. And it was interesting because, at the time, Aston was a CD product. So I went through that transition and was suddenly on the cusp of moving from CD to a digital product. So for me, it was an interesting time to be part of that transition, and moving more towards an E-commerce business was very much part of my brief, which was central to that. So it was really exciting from CD to digital.
We certainly opened the door to new consumer segments with the CD products for two different consumer groups. Mainly corporates, digital products suddenly started reaching a much wider consumer group, including schools, kids, and teenagers. Some digital nomads were traveling and immediately learning about the country. It opened up a whole new segment. But at the same time digital, it meant there were other competitors. So a few other German competitors, whom I will not name, were aggressive in the market with their digital.
I think it solidified building the foundations of my E-commerce expertise and how I develop strategies moving forward. The main thing was not keeping still, it was constant testing and learning with Rosetta Stone. We design and redesign the site every year. How are people navigating the site, what were they doing, what pages are they using, and when did they drop out? And all that learning went back into developing and refining the site. So optimizing the website constantly. It wasn’t building a website, and off you go, it was constant change and updates.
I think large organizations like Rosetta Stone, British Airways, and all these other guys get that the smaller businesses haven’t quite got that yet. And it’s perhaps because they feel it’s a cost they cannot afford. The website is an organic being, you can’t just build a website and leave it and think that’s it.
Yes, we did. We used heat maps and tried to understand the attribution model because we have so many different channels, and we need to know which channel was driving the lead to figure out where those different channels act in the journey. So social media may not necessarily be a direct lead generator, but it contributed to brand awareness, which led to a PPC lead. So that was important because then we could allocate our budgets accordingly.
Well, we did lots of modeling. So we were working with the US team and did a lot of data modeling to figure out how to pull all the data from Google Analytics into other engines. Google Analytics, maybe the new version of Google Earth, could probably do better. The older one didn’t have the information we needed. So pulling the data from Google Analytics into other engines to figure out. And it wasn’t perfect because there were still a lot of gaps in our knowledge, but at least we had begun to understand how to allocate our budgets and optimize our activities throughout the month to track sales.
Yes, it did. It enabled us to track the digital asset at the campaign level. So yes, that was certainly part of it, and it was better standard practice for us, so we tagged them. So we were able to track.
It’s not talked about so much. Maybe about four years ago, there were probably more discussions around it. So I wonder if everybody gets it now, they’re doing it anyway, or they’ve just overlooked it. I think maybe it’s overlooked because no one talks about it anymore. So, for me, it’s standard practice. I would like to think most people are doing it, but I don’t know.
What if we go back? So you are right? We had you have a web one, and it was read-only. So it was published content, and we read it. That was all we could do. We then move to web two as you’ve said, it’s you read and publish. Suddenly, you had social media forms and all those other publishers now, you can publish content, and people consume it. But the publishers own the content. So anything you post on Facebook or other platforms is owned by those publishers. Web three, you read, publish and own. So what web three offers brings ownership to the market. So, as a consumer, the game changer is you own the content you publish; it’s your content.
Well, that’s possible for blockchain technology. So, in very simple terms, blockchain is using tokenization, all the tech and smart contract enables people to own their assets. So if I bring in LFTs, if we talk about an LFT is a non-fungible token, which you probably know about. Those are additional assets, which, through blockchain, give the individual who owns NFT complete ownership and are immutable because it’s locked on the blockchain.
When you’re looking at ownership of that image, there’s a contract, and ownership is allocated to you, and you can prove that image belongs to you.
You have proof that you own the rights, which is the contract.
I think NFT It’s a real thing, it’s going through a fad event. And that’s understandable because Bitcoin drives this sector. Everybody gets excited when bitcoin is doing great; this is the next big thing. When it goes through bumps, everyone gets a little bit scared, and it’s normal because this is new, and, normally, you will have fluctuations. But it’s not going away; it’s going to get better. A couple of years ago, no one was talking about NFT’s, but now there are many ways of bringing them to market and growing. So it’s still in the innovation phase and getting adopted quickly.
I think the main thing with web 3.0, because of this whole ownership and transparency, it’s all about building communities. So the focus is on you’ve got to build and harness a community. Social media is probably one of the key digital skills you need to build the community, but all the other digital marketing skills are still relevant. So other web skills, PPC, SEO, and SEM, are still relevant because you need to grow your market. And email is going to become very important because it allows you that one on one build. But, as I’ve mentioned before, at the moment, you may have a million fans on social media, but do you have a million with all of them? So that’s a challenge for marketers, you’ve got to own a relationship.
I think so. I think also, you’ve got to give your community some value. So it’s they’ve got to have a stake in that relationship. So it’s not a one-way with the communities currently publishing content. And occasionally, we get user-generated content, which is where you’ve got engagement of a small scale, with the communities in web three, you’ve got to give them value. So they’ve got to get something back in a fair exchange.
Well, suddenly, you’re getting something that holds, and it’s just more of a fair exchange.
The Second Life? No, I haven’t.
Well, you can if you’re looking at gaming. You can create your space on the Metaverse. I guess a good example of that would be Snoop Dogg. He bought a piece of land on the Metaverse, a space he now owns. And now everyone is buying real estate on the Metaverse next to Snoop Dogg’s estate.
He pays on the blockchain. So this is all on the blockchain.
I don’t think I am to do that.
I think he’s built a house on it and does events. The thing is, with the Metaverse, a virtual space allows you to do so much. So you can do concerts on the Metaverse, and many musicians do that. You can have virtual events, a shopping mall, and a virtual shop on the Metaverse. And people can go to a virtual shop and purchase as they would in bricks and mortar.
Yes, you can have a Google Ad billboard.
It’s unbelievable. It is. And that’s where it goes back to that individual ownership. Because with that, you can have a much more direct engagement with the individual.
No, no idea.
I honestly don’t know. The main point is that a lot of this is happening in the entertainment world because that’s where they can be much more experimental and capture people’s imagination. And as if you’ve read the book, WonderWorld. In it, the author talks about how innovation comes through play. When we play is when adoption occurs, which is why much of this happens in gaming and entertainment. If I remember rightly, the quote from the book is that innovation happens when people are having fun playing. And that’s so true.
It might be.
Wonderland.
I usually have the book next to me, but I’ve moved it. It is Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World. Steven Johnson.
Yeah, the book’s name is Wonderland- how play made the modern world.
It’s an interesting book.
I’ve seen some NFT games with outstanding quality. If you think about the film Avatar, it’s that level.
It is realistic, and there are some cartoonish. Some other types of games like x infinity are very cartoonish, and that’s right for that audience, but it can go as sophisticated as it needs to be.
They can go bowling, or as you said, they can be in their home at a conference.
Exactly, and no two people might see the same ads.
Is that permission-based marketing? It goes back to that community. What was the exchange? What’s the value you are giving? Why would they give you their data? What’s that value to them?
You know, I don’t know the technology behind that work.
But it will force some changes. Things will need to change. We saw that change in web two, with ease and everything else. It will need to evolve because of the KYC element, and your customer will be very important in that space.
Yeah, how that’s executed.
In terms of how the content changes if you are a content creator, the best example is, I’m sure you’ve heard of Gary Vee. At the moment, Gary Vee has the wake of V friends. And what he’s doing is pioneering this whole idea of tokenizing his content using LFTs. So he’s got Gary Vee tokens NFTs. And those tokens give his community access to all his content network if you like. It is like a membership. So a Vee-friends token gives to people who bought the V fence votes, and many people have. I believe it’s increasing in value because once you buy, the token is yours, and you can sell it to someone else. And the more valuable the token, the more money, so the more you can trade it for. So Gary’s token has different types of tokens, and some tokens give you access to Gary one-to-one. So you can have meetings and question time with him. So that’s a way of tokenizing NFT content.
I’m watching him with interest, but it certainly is possible. He’s taken the view in a Gary Vee way, making it very transparent. So his community is involved in how he’s building this. He does live bills, chairs any mistakes or anything that goes wrong during the process, and shares that. So he’s very transparent with his community, which is the whole point, it’s fair when you have a genuine organic community. It’s not businesses, and we’ll go back to B2B businesses, they are used to going away behind the scenes in the lab and creating a product. So they might push a beta or the formed product, but it’s all done when everything is done. So in a Metaverse world, engaging your community right through from the inception is possible. So you’re building, you could build live and transparent. And again, it’s that giving people a stake in what you build or create.
I think you’ve probably covered most things. It’s such a rabbit hole web three and blockchain.
Yeah. Yeah, it’s all engaged. And I guess I could talk just talk a little bit about gameplay. The gameplay is super interesting for several reasons. Firstly, it’s a marketplace for NFT play to earn games. The first platform brings together the best, and there are a lot of NFT plateaus and games in the market. But this platform brings all the best and most profitable ones into using smart analytics to allow gamers to discover games. So what it does is it connects the gamers, the guilds, and the gaming companies. So, in essence, a gamer can find the best games to play from the platform, a game developer, and that could be a game developer currently in the web two worlds. It can enable developers to transition to web three, get them to list their games, and create their teams. And the guilds enable them to connect with the top players, expanding their gaming community. So it’s the gaming ecosystem in NFTs tokens and their communities through one platform. But the most exciting part of this is the ability to empower underserved communities. So when you look at play-to-earn gaming, it’s for some communities with very low minimum wage; it’s a way of earning an income. And income in some communities, for example, the Philippines, parts of Africa, and America is underbanked. So they don’t have to have any means of generating an income, and playing to earn Games is a way where they can. And we saw that during COVID in the Philippines, a company called x infinity, a play-to-earn NFT game exploded because all these people who couldn’t work because there was a complete lockdown were playing the games and continued to make money. So for me, that’s exciting that we were able to empower people. And that’s just for gameplay, and it goes back to Wonderland. So how does gaming help to drive innovation? So there’s a whole community of people that could earn an income just by playing games. That’d be a good thing.
I appreciate those young people, their number one career aspiration these days.
So they’re getting rewarded for their time in the game. And it works because you’ve got your NFTs that you use within the game and that NFT was a value. So when you win, you play your win; the more you win, the more valuable your assets become. And that’s where you can trade and sell your assets and earn money.
You can get more love and play games all day.
They can find me on LinkedIn, and I’m currently hanging out on LinkedIn. I do other social platforms, but there is not enough time.
Thank you. It’s been lovely talking to you. Thanks.
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