Community, communications, and crypto

What is it about crypto and the possibilities of rewiring seminal pieces of our world on the blockchain that has refocused so much of our attention on something that is still in its infancy?

For myself, it’s about the dynamic shifts in community and communications.

Crypto as a cultural and technological revolution will redefine large components of our financial and working lives.

But equally as profound is the giant evolutionary steps happening in the foundations of community and how we create, communicate, market, and manage them.

Being part of these changes as individual behaviors morph and group dynamics restructure themselves is what draws me in.

Crypto-based networks in this early stage are community-driven by design.

Grounded in the behavioral dynamics we experienced in open-source software models, but with a contextual shift where you economize the protocols themselves, democratizing the model and making the community in many respects, the matrix of the market model itself.

We don’t really understand what this means as yet, nor how it will play out.

But the questions are clear:

-When a protocol itself is tokenized, does our behavior interacting with it change and how? Does a sense of openness and inclusion deepen or lessen as work becomes economized within the community itself?

-When we interlace both vision and economics into the dynamics of the community does the very nature of the network morph in some unforeseen manner?

-Who is the customer and what is the common language when developers, investors, early customers are all part of the same community, the same channel digesting the same content?

These are obviously the key questions you address when you create the incentives for the community, design marketing and communications strategies to support it.

What’s fascinating and a bit unnerving at times it is that the pieces of this grand puzzle are clear even though the shape of the image they create is invariably not.

Those of us who have been building communities as stepping off points for markets know that there are key components regardless of the vertical or even the platform.

We all know that community simple happens and is not something that can be purchased or manufactured. That it happens in spite of as much as because of any platform. And there is a built-in anomaly in every community that demands both strong leadership and correspondingly the preeminence of individual freedoms of each member for it to work.

Most critical that by its very inclusiveness, community structures drive a sense of ownership from those who participate. Breeding tolerance, engagement and forward-looking strength.

These core truths are the foundation for whatever is to follow. For whatever tokenizing this dynamic entity creates and changes as it finds its pace.

Regardless–there is a correlation between the depth, the vitality, the messiness and emotional scale of these crypto communities and the potential success of the projects they support.

Whether you are raising funds through an ICO. Or post the raise. Or in one of many hybrid forms, the truth remains the same.

Without a vibrant community that shares a vision and passion, you will almost certainly not succeed even with a successful raise behind you.

And within this new community structure, the rules of how we market, communicate, even publish content are not really that clear. There is no one that has this down pat with any proven methodology within the context of an incentivized community.

Some projects are both building and managing their communities really well. Inventing methods of almost in-network meme-driven marketing built on over communicating as a strategy, inclusiveness as a poise with a humble naiveté as their overarching personality.

Some are driven by an overtly raw honestly, redefining the rules of consensus and light-touch leadership as they go.

Most are simply not doing it well.

Unable to understand that developer relations and marketing are one and the same at this stage, missing that community management and communications strategies are not separable.

This is a new frontier.

An added layer to community when incentivized, and sense of discovery about how this will affect actors across all the groups that make up that network and community structure.

It’s what makes me believe that the heady promise of crypto and the blockchain could actually come to fruition in some fashion. I believe in technology but I trust in community to at times get it naturally right and redefine itself to the tasks at hand to the best interest of all involved.

It is also requiring that we reimagine marketing, not from blank slate certainly but interwoven tightly with community management. Where content publishing gets redefined as an interactive process. Where language and message creation inform both the depth of engagement of the developers and possibly the degree of comfort of the potential end use.

I don’t know how to describe this other than an episodic, community process inclusive of messaging and storytelling, communications and community management wrapped into a new form. One unique unto itself as it is not searching for an outside media model but self-sufficient potentially by the economic potential of the network or community itself.

We lived through lots of platform changes that have rejiggered the rules of communications, changed behaviors but none where a technological framework has challenged social and economic pieces of how we live and how we behave quite as profoundly as these crypto incentivized communities.

And certainly, none where how we market is built not on the platforms that we create but on the communities that are creating those very platforms, consuming what they produce, and profiting directly from their success.

Never has what we don’t know, been so profoundly formative to what we have to do.

Marketing has always mattered when understood correctly, been responsive to its market and applied with nuance and openness to change.

Today this is more true than ever.