A day in community management in web3
A day in community management in web3
It's a whole new world of quantifiable sentiment, audience engagement, and co-building. Supercharged open-sourced communities.
During my past year in web3, I’ve had a bunch of roles. Community management, or should I say community building, is probably one of the most eye-opening so far.
You really don’t understand web3 until you build in the trenches with community. And I don’t mean talking at community, as you do with press releases or blog posts. I mean chatting in Discord, the default chat app for crypto, or hanging out in Twitter.
Why does web3 community matter?
There are two ways to consider this.
Quantifiable sentiment
Most web3 companies have tokens. Think of tokens like stock traded in the open market. If sentiment is down, your token holders (aka your community) can very easily sell your tokens and drag down the overall value of your tokens.
There are a lot of assumptions in that statement. But the crowd undeniably has more power in a web3 model than traditional companies.
NPS now has as dollar value attached to it.
Incentivized crowd-sourcing
Open-sourced projects have been known to produce some of the best innovations in the web. For example, Blender, one of the best 3D tools available, is open-sourced. Now what if the same top-class developers could profit by contributing to the public?
A simpler model is creator and artist fandom. Through a web3 community model, artists don’t have to rely on Spotify or labels. Their audience and fans can directly finance and profit from the success of their idols.
Power to the people ✊
What are the outcomes of community?
Lots! So much so that I can’t believe web2 companies haven’t jumped at this yet.
Feedback. Probably the most obvious benefit. With a highly active and incentivized community, they have never been more eager to share time and thoughts. Some web3 projects even take it to the extreme and lets the community vote for what happens in the business and product. Feel free to argue if that’s a good idea or not.
Growth. Particularly promos and sales. Token holders can be LOUD in social media, because incentives are aligned for them to do so. If done right, the same community members will be your distributed sales team bringing business opportunities right at your doorstep. Again, incentives are aligned.
Funds. Depending on the approach, crowd-sourcing financing and resources is also an option. At the time of this writing, Uniswap, a top web3 app, had a $3Bn treasury! Not bad for an app that just launched in 2018.
Talent. A strong community can attract amazing people. Fostered well, your community could be the best pipeline for talent after referrals. At Immutable, we’ve had a number of hires who first started contributing through our Discord channels.
What do you actually do in community?
First of all, I don’t think the playbook has been written yet. Web3 is a young industry. Below are some of my hypothesis after my own trial-by-fire.
Comms: one-to-many and one-to-one
One - many. People want transparency and regular communication. They’ve (literally) bought into the dream, and they want to be part of the journey. A lot of my team’s time is spent keeping tabs on news and progress across the company to deliver to the community at large.
This could be in the form of announcements or packaging information into wikis and community portals. For example, check out the Immutable Community Hub which houses all the up-to-date information an Immutable community member would need to know about the company.
One - one. Some people additionally want connection beyond just comms. As early supporters, they feel like they’ve built part of the business and they want their voice to be known and heard. I think this is partly why real-time chat via Discord is so strong in web3. We have regulars in our channel who we often chat with. It not always about ‘work’.
AMAs (ask-me-anything) events are also extremely popular. I can’t recall any industry where founders, executives, and project team members hop on a call with the community as often as crypto does. At Immutable, we have AMAs with the team and the community at least every month and we try to aim for weekly as much as possible.
Engagement: education and something to chat about
What do people like to do when they get together? Chit-chat.
People need something to be excited about and have a discussion with. My team and I facilitates this through two ways: education and content. We’ve built the Immutable Academy to help people learn about the project through a simple ‘quest’.
At the same time, we pepper the servers with content and news to help kickstart conversations amongst the crowd. The community has even done a couple of game nights together for fun!
Enablement: people want jobs to do
Your token holders want to help. Being a contributor to the community mission also creates more commitment and attachment.
At Immutable, we’ve empowered a few community moderators to help their fellow community members. It’s a great experience for relationship management. As the community grows, we’d love to enable more community-driven leadership.
At the end of the day, community is exactly that—a group of real people getting together, choosing to spend their time and effort on something they believe in.
Contribute to a community
The best thing about ‘a day in a life of a community builder’ is that there’s no barrier to entry! Don’t take my word for it. You can just go do it yourself today, especially in web3. Join a few communities, hang out, make a few pals, and contribute the way you know how.
Here’s a few places to start:
BanklessDAO
IndexCOOP
Immutable X (obviously the best of the three, shameless plug)
I also post stuff in Twitter @nigelwtlee
None of these are financial advice and all opinions are of my own and not representative of the company’s opinion! [insert all other disclaimers, NFA, DYOR, IANAL…]