We appreciate your interest in The Metalife Project and look forward to hearing from you.
We invite you to participate in Metalife by visiting our blog at Metalifestream.com or by following Metalifestream on Twitter or on Facebook. If you wish to contact us with a question or comment you may do so in the following ways:
Email: info@metalifeproject.com
Mail: The Metalife Project
P.O. Box 2216
Winter Park, Florida 32790
Metalife Consulting
Metalife Consulting is a multidimensional communications, brand, marketing and organizational development consulting firm. We explore the effects of the tools of technology from a breadth of perspectives.
Why does Metalife explore behavorial, cultural & directional phenomena?
Clients often ask us, how do you connect the dots between Metalife phenomena and the world of business and customers?
Metalife examples are typically behavorial, cultural, and directional. For example, a woman texts while driving, crashes her car, goes to hospital, recovers and leaves the hospital, then texts and drives again. This example shows a largely unconscious behavior; a cultural practice involving our use of cell phones while driving and in other, often intimate, settings; and a directional trend of altering our lives to accommodate technology rather than the other way around. Seen through the Metalife lens, these examples present business opportunities because at many levels, they show how customers are changing their lives and life stories, how technology is enabling often radically different values, expectations and interactions. Knowing this you can choose, as we do, to follow your customers into this new world and explore it with them.
What value is that exploration?
The fact is, your customers are doing this exploring in record numbers, consciously or otherwise. We believe it’s better for you—and for them—to be conscious of how communication tools affect us at many levels. Think of these examples as canaries in the mind: communication tools are so powerful they change how we speak, think, act and what we pay attention to—they even alter our sense of safety and danger! Understanding your customers at this level, you can learn from them how your product or service fits into their changing lives. You can offer them assistance, conversation, connection. We are, in Daniel Goleman’s words, “wired to connect.” In Social Intelligence, Goleman says: “All communication requires that what matters for the sender also matters for the receiver… Mirroring occurs whenever our perception of someone automatically activates an image or a felt sense in our own brain for what they are doing and explaining.” We now have more tools doing more sending, receiving and mirroring than ever before in human history. Your work is cut out for you!
Connecting Metalife to the concerns of the business world
Here is a simple, step-by-step summation of how Metalife connects behavioral, cultural and directional issues to business:
- As humans "we are wired to connect". Some examples:
Social intelligence
Social networks
Mirror neurons and mirroring
Observational learning: desire to be and look like others
- Obviously communication tools enable connections.
- The Metalife view of communication tools: at the same time they enable, they also change & reorganize those connections.
- When tools change and reorganize connections, they change and reorganize our lives.
- Seeing that change and reorganizing shows us another level of information, like the metadata of a photograph. That other level of information is useful to you in business.
- This information is behavioral, cultural, directional.
- Connections matter to all of us. Follow your customers’ and stakeholders’ connections and you’ll understand their behavioral, cultural and directional patterns and passions.
- Understanding these patterns and passions, you will see customers and stakeholders differently and know them more intimately.
- You will also see communication tools from a different perspective.
- Seeing tools from this perspective, and knowing your customers more intimately, will give you greater understanding of and confidence in using those tools.
You can read more, as well as participate, at the Metalife Blog, www.metalifestream.com
