Marketing tips for Virtual Reality Start-Ups

Great insights by Martin Shervington

Introduction 

We all know that Virtual Reality (VR) is on the rise. I’ve spent the past few years dipping in and out of the Silicon Valley scene for 6 months at a time, and it is (as my friend and VR storyteller, Sarah Hill says) like drinking from a Virtual Firehose.

The challenge is that until people have experienced VR, they are somewhat like the Square in ‘Flatland’, unable to see the next dimension until the Sphere appears.

(Watch it. I loved the book from Reverend Abbott that it is based one)

As such, if you are working with a VR start-up, or selling into that space, I think it’s worth looking at a few shared principles.

Operating Principles:

1. VR is the next platform – Mark Zuckerberg

Knowing this, it changes your view of what is being built, and it worth talking in terms of this not in terms of games, apps, headsets, processors and so on.

This is the future, and integral to Zuck’s plan for Facebook.

2. It is hard to sell 3D in a 2D world.(credit to The Next Web for that phrase)

You have to give people the experience of VR directly.
There is no other way to ‘bring people into’ that dimension.

As such, always be seeking to give people a positive experience. It is the only way for people to understand.

3. The battle is against 2 dimensions. 

You are seeking to take attention from existing platforms.
This is going to be interesting. Why? Well you simply cannot be in VR and be in this world. Unless businesses adapt and enter the VR space, they are likely to be left behind in time.

4. The battle is not against each other. 

I mean all you VR start-ups and anyone looking at supporting the industry.
There is enough room for everyone.
Ask yourself: How can you ally with your virtual neighbors?

5. Engage the senses

The more senses you engage, the more real it will feel.
Obvious, yet I would suggest you need to break down each sense and rate the level of immersion on a scale of 1 -5.
This way you don’t kid yourself when your story is a 5, but the sound is 1.
We can see this issue with underwhelming experiences of 360 footage. Some tips on filming here.

You need everything to be activated for it to be believable.
John Gower from Dialectinc.com says that ‘belief is the new sense’.
It is when there is doubt created (e.g. through poor sound) that a person stops ‘suspending disbelief’.

6. Novelty, surprise, and shock the senses.

This is the opportunity in VR – to have someone engaged, and then to create a new experience. Watch to the end of ‘Unicorn Island’ by Jaunt to see what I mean. I laughed out loud as ‘something happened’. You’ll see.

7. Create features in 3D to be shared in 2D

I loved Vtime’s selfie feature which allows you to take a snap and when back in ‘this world’, and share what you were up to on Social Media.
This helps pique interest in the mind’s of the curious yet initiated.

8. Culture is something you allow to form, it is not given

VR is new territory, and it is going to be very Social.
Whatever you condone becomes part of the fabric of the experience, and as with all Social experiences the ‘people will make the place’.

9. The rules have changed

You don’t have to follow the old approaches, you have to experiment.
In AltSpaceVR one time I manage to weird out my fellow explorers when I articulated how I should not have assumed a person with a pink avatar was a girl. Why? It is an old paradigm, but one that is deep in our culture.

10. Mindshare

Right now you have to be generous in sharing what you know, and for an older generation this may not ‘feel right’. It is moving quickly. 
Blog, create videos, run courses, educate people. The whole industry wins this way.

11. Think ecosystem

Understand it is an eco-system of businesses, working in the same space.
You really want to be networking with the right people to bundle packages or products, run events etc.
We can see this happening at Upload VR, with Robert Scoble leading the way.

I know this is already happening in many locations (including the UK), but having chatted with some VR start-up members there is still a feeling of competition – as such I am encouraging an alternative view, especially as…

12. Nvdia are creating the shovels

Look at how you can best help them sell more. Simple.

13. Plantronics are making a consumer play

Sound is going to be one of main ways to either increase immersion/engagement, or not.
And as 360 headsets make it onto the market, expect Platronics to be making a big play.
After all, the last time there was a giant leap for man (on the moon), he reported back on one of their headsets.
I learned this from one of their crew, Niven Miraj (based in South Africa) over breakfast whilst attending a conference last week.

14. Oculus has the shelf (for now)

Until Google brings out a higher end unit, Oculus wins. (keeping this simple, knowing there are other platforms too)

Google will win attention though.
It may only be Cardboard today, but we all can guess that new units will be announced by Google by year end, based on Android.
And that is just the beginning…

15. VR Livestreaming is happening on YouTube now, and will come to Facebook soon enough.
This will massively increase adoption rates.
Using certain cameras (Insta360 being one of them), you can do live 360/VR. But you need to ask ‘why 360?’ not just using a normal 2D approach.

Conclusion:

With the release of the Samsung 360 Gear today, we will see more people start to play with VR – but it is still very early days.

As such, we are planning to set up a community of VR evangelists, called The Metaverse, where they can meet and discuss.
Would you like to be a part of it?

Please apply here.
We are seeking a small number of sponsors (Level 1: $1000 a month, Level 2: $2500, Level 3: $5000) – all of which will gain a big boost in this space.
What will you offer?
Sponsors: will give members early access, discount vouchers, special events etc.
Members: will help spread the word

…and together we can take people into the next dimension.

A version of this post originally appeared on the Plus Your Business Blog

*********************************************************

Martin is a keynote speaker, author (business, personal development), marketing consultant and Official Google Small Business Advisor
Founder and community manager of 'Plus Your Business' he spends much of his time supporting businesses make the most of Social, Search and Spend, including Google+, Adwords and Reviews.

"When it comes to social media, Martin Shervington is one of the most clever and hard working people you'll find. He'll help you take your game to the next level."

GUY KAWASAKI

 "Reviews are the lifeblood of most local companies, and Martin and his team provide the wisdom and guidance you need to master this business imperative."

JAY BAER  - Best selling author of "Youtility"

"@MartinSherv...can help YOU grow your business. Smart guy. :)"

CHRIS BROGAN - New York Times best selling author

Written by

Martin ShervingtonSpeaker, Coach, Consultant

Challenge - let's build a sticky innovative platform for a transformational economy

An idea from Professor Caroline Wagner - Ohio State University

How to engage students, innovators to collaborate and grow

The Pain

• The diffusion deficit - A weakness exists in the local links between the University and innovative actors in the region, exacerbated by a lack of incentives to create these links. 

• The data deficit - Numerous events in the physical world leave “data traces” in isolated silos that could be useful to the knowledge economy--but, the data are at different granularities and they lack interoperability; paucity of knowledge access and flow inhibits the pace of research and innovation. 

•   The insight deficit - difficulty in processing and analusing the data into meaningful information - Add to this problem that over 80% of data analytics time is spent in time-consuming pre-processing tasks and we have an insight deficit.

• The attraction deficit - The Knowledge exodus -   Smart students leave the region to go to innovation-rich regions.  

How do we keep them ? In order to keep them in the region, we need to create local opportunities for them to be entrepreneurial – to solve problems and re-invent locally.  

A Potential Pain Killer

National service in an Altruistic Capacity  Right now, our pro-social students are overwhelmingly attracted to a year of service at Teach for America, City Year, Peace Corps, ViSTA –

• how can we harvest these altruistic vitalities towards building the local and regional economy—to grow the society they want to live in right where they live? 

• how can we link students with local enterprises that will simultaneously build the data we need, create the local links, give students a chance to create their own jobs/businesses/non-profit start-ups, all while making data-for-innovation available to larger groups and decision makers? Let’s call this: Catalyzing innovative energy.

HOW DO WE SCALE THIS VISION?

How can we find a way to get the funding needed to: 

1. pay students; 
2. seed pro-social enterprises; 
3. create an open data platform for innovation; 
4. link students to faculty (who are themselves linked to the global knowledge network) to diffuse knowledge to make it locally available???

 Let’s call this: building a sticky innovative platform for a transformational economy.

That is my challenge to you – help me design this system from the ground up, tap dynamism, incentivize growth – include the poorest and excluded in the development. Ideas needed!

Playing to our Strengths

Catherine Livingstone talks to Tony Malkovich on The need for a 10 year plan

Australia needs to focus on building an implementing a 10 year plan - to take advantage of the enormous opportunities that are on offer says President of the Business Council of Australia -  Catherine Livingstone

4 Focus Points 

We need to focus on the following:- 

1. Shore up free trade agreements 

2. Improving our competitiveness

3. Reigning in the budget deficit (not sure about this one?)

4. Focus on Entrepreneurship and Innovaton 

3 mega trends 

3 mega trends are happening over the next 10 years in Australia that we need to focus on:- 

1. Ageing population

2. Globalisation 

3. All pervasive digital technology in our business and lives 

5 Growth Areas

AUSTRALIA has identified 5 areas in its industry growth centre initiative

1. Advanced manufacturing

2. Food and agribusiness

3. Medical technologies and pharma

4. Mining equipment technology and services

5. Oil , gas and resources 

Where government will encourage deregulation, skills, collaboration and commercialisation.

Capability

We need to expand VET (vocational education and training ) to upskill the workforce . There is a serious skills gap at the moment due to lack of funding - this needs to be addressed.

Innovation

Risk taking , entrepreneurship and innovation  should be encouraged , supported and invested in.

The way we do things now is completely different to what they will be in the future. Current jobs will be made redundant through robotics and new jobs will emerge. We need to be ready to embrace this change.

Collaborative  infrastructure

Needs to be developed and nurtured . 

We need to roll up our sleeves , rethink and reshape our economy - the future wealth and wellbeing is dependent on it! 

About Catherine Livingstone 

Catherine Livingstone is a Chartered Accountant , former CEO of Cochlear and a former chair of CSIRO. She is currently the Chair of Telstra and a Director of Worley Parsons . Catherine is the president of the Business Council of Australia, and in 2008, was awarded an OA for her services for the development of Australian science, technology and innovation to business 

 

The fundamentals work - look at SIngapore

Innovation Guru Curt Carlson suggests we take a leaf out of Singapores book:-

"I just came back from Singapore where I work with the government.

They take a “different” approach and they are doing fine.

They actually do nothing that would be surprising  they just stick to the fundamentals of innovation, economics, and business and work to continuously improve.

And guess what, it works.

Pretty good for a country that was in poverty 40 years ago without any significant infrastructure and now has a PPP GDP per capita 20-30% above USA. And this with no water, resources, agriculture, energy, hardly any land, and many enemies. 

They do have a port, but they had to develop that too. They are not us, but we can learn a lot from them. The fundamentals work."

Curtis R. Carlson, Ph.D.

Founder and CEO, Practice of Innovation

Former President and CEO of SRI International, 1998-2014

Website: www.practiceofinnovation.com

Engelbart's Law

Before there was a Moore's Law, Doug Engelbart predicted the following -- call it "Engelbart's Law":

1. digital technology would became increasingly miniaturized and affordable, 


2. its injection into all levels of business and society would become increasingly widespread and rapid


3. this would cause a disruptive ripple effect in society like never before seen -- on a scale more massive than the introduction of fire, written language, agriculture, bronze, printing press and industry combined, all in a significantly compressed timeframe -- shifting us onto an unsustainable trajectory where important challenges are becoming increasingly complex and urgent, with potentially disastrous consequences to humanity and the planet if this phenomenon is not well understood and adequately addressed 


4. our organizations and institutions, which steer the boat we are all on, are trying to get smarter and faster to stay ahead of the curve; however the vast majority are severely underestimating the magnitude and speed of the curve, and thus are aiming too low, too slow; meanwhile the stakes keep getting higher


5. it is no longer an option to get incrementally smarter and faster; organizations must become exponentially more intelligent and agile, using successive gains in Collective IQ to accelerate progress toward that goal; those that lag will be rendered increasingly ineffective

The bottom line? Organizations need to double their Collective IQ, and double it again, and again, faster and faster... Our collective objective is to create brilliant organizations, and through them brilliant societies, and evenually, a brilliant world.

How? By adopting a strategy specifically designed for this. Based on his predictions, Doug Engelbart designed such a strategy, first documented and tested in his lab in the early 1960s. As far as we know, it is still the only one in existence. He called it a Bootstrapping Strategy, for bootstrapping our Collective IQ. 

Engelbart stumbled on this important set of discoveries as part of a larger study on how to facilitate the transformation of organizations to be become more effective at perceiving and addressing important problems collectively in a climate of accelerating change. He recognized that organizations would be entering a new frontier that would demand higher and higher collective intelligence in a compressed timeframe. Otherwise our organizations and institutions which shape society would become increasingly less effective. 

Engelbart surmised that it is not simply desirable or important for organizations to jump this curve, it is imperative to our survival as a human race and a planet.

Continued improvement in U.S. labor market in 2014

Thanks David Nordfors for the heads up!

Good news, it seems - unemployment is going down, wages are going up.

http://qz.com/395203/the-impossible-just-happened-american-wages-are-rising/

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/continued-improvement-in-u-s-labor-market-in-2014-1.htm

The U.S. labor market continued to improve in 2014, with both a decline in unemployment and an increase in the share of the population employed; high levels of long-term joblessness and involuntary part-time employment, however, persisted.

Unemployment in the United States continued to decline in 2014, with the number of unemployed falling by 1.9 million over the year, to 8.9 million in the fourth quarter. The unemployment rate fell to 5.7 percent by year’s end—1.0 percentage point above the pre-recessionary rate of 2007.¹ Employment, as measured by the Current Population Survey (CPS; see accompanying box), grew at a faster pace than it did the previous year, expanding by 3.1 million in 2014, and the employment-to-population ratio increased by 0.7 percentage point following a slight decline in 2013.² The civilian labor force—the sum of the employed and the unemployed—grew by 1.3 million, reaching 156.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2014. The labor force participation rate, however, held fairly steady over the year.

This article summarizes changes in key labor market measures from the CPS during 2014, both overall and for various demographic groups. The article also examines changes in usual weekly earnings and in labor force status flows, and reviews the employment situations of veterans, people with a disability, and the foreign born.

Comment from Curt:-

We have a LONG way to go.  Unemployment, as you know, is a funny metric.  What really matters is how many people are working.  

-- 

Reply by David:- 

Although the statistic represents a fraction of the people working, it seems the economy is recovering - Although the bigger issues remain ahead of us!

The upturn in the economy will only spur entrepreneurs maximizing the value of people by innovation, if anything.

From Bob Cohen:-

Yes, the recovery has been difficult but last year showed an increase in the total workforce and nearly 4 million net new jobs. Nice work after losing about 700,000 jobs a month after the financial crisis.

While investment is down in oil and gas, there are signs of a more sustained upswing in housing. Capital infrastructure firms like Caterpillar and Deere are using Big Data to drive hundreds of millions in cost savings and shifting spending to new analytics systems and new types of jobs. UPS and FedEx are using similar analytics systems to optimize truck routes and flight schedules with the trucking savings alone for UPS hitting about $600 million per year. With flights, savings for both could easily be a billion dollars per year each for FedEx and UPS. This is fueling more investments for new digital ecosystems.

Much of this is under the radar screen but it suggests that besides profits new technologies are freeing up funds for a broad digital revolution even at big firms (somewhat contrary to John Hagel's contention that these big industries will fracture).

So that's a bit of what some economists see happening, not just me. Perhaps not quite so long a way to go.

Reply from Curt:-

We are very slowly recovering.  Growth this quarter was 0.2%—ug.  We need to get above 3% to make a difference and make up for the past 5-8 years.  I just came back from Singapore where I work with the government.  They take a “different” approach and they are doing fine.  They actually do nothing that would be surprising to this group, they just stick to the fundamentals of innovation, economics, and business and work to continuously improve.  And guess what, it works.  Pretty good for a country that was in poverty 40 years ago without any significant infrastructure and now has a PPP GDP per capita 20-30% above ours.  And this with no water, resources, agriculture, energy, hardly any land, and many enemies.  They do have a port, but they had to develop that too.  They are not us, but we can learn a lot from them.  The fundamentals work.