Why Community Matters
A 5-Part Series on the Importance of Community
Episode 1 Originally aired Nov. 7, 2018- Adapted from Medium Series for mobile, available here, November 2018
In this webinar series, co-sponsored by OmniSparx and Chicago Blockchain Project, moderator Judy Gordon, VP of Marketing at OmniSparx, dives deep into the multifaceted world of Community.
Community is such a critical part of the success of Blockchain projects, but today, it’s very hard to build and engage the community. In conjunction with CBP, we decided to develop this series to help community managers with this critical job. — Judy Gordon.
OmniSparx is the premier collaboration platform for crypto and Blockchain.If you have any questions or comments, please join the project Telegram, at t.me/OmniSparx, or visit the website, at OmniSparx.io.
Precious Commodities Soaring High
A High Level, View, How to Grow the Value of Sustainable Cypto and Blockchain Communities
This Webinar kicks off with a high level overview of the value communities offer sustainable Crypto and Blockchain Projects. Driving community growth in sustainable projects is critical for Blockchain’s & crypto’s continued life cycle success.
Today’s speakers May Pao and Steven Jacobs are consultants at Concitor, an executive advisory firm dedicated to harnessing and subsequently leveraging disruptive technology to accelerate growth. Given their wealth of experience, we were eager to hear their thoughts and they most certainly did not disappoint! We caught them between trips en route to conferences in warmer climates.
Since community differs in the tokenized Blockchain space due to the multitude of different stakeholders all interacting together, from Builders & Developers to Speculators & Investors, and even the End Users, what does that term ‘Community’ in this sense encompass?
Own Your Value
May tackles this head on by highlighting the importance of ownership to foster a sense of belonging. A crucial element in any crypto-community due to Community being an asset or a representation of the projects’s inherent value. Communities present opportunities to:
- Develop products
- Inform and cultivate your investor network,
- Engage users
- Collaborate on product lines/features
- Advocate to recruit new users
- Strategically network with service providers and potential partners,
Key Take Away → Diverse segmentation for messaging and positioning is imperative to accommodate this melting pot of interests.
Community a Ticket to DRIVE
According to a study by Concitor, over 60% of ICO raters weighed the Community in their rankings, and in a second analysis the team analyzed 500 coins with over 50 data points respectively to better understand the primary drivers of value. These were divided into 4 categories to identify positive correlations underlying what creates a sustainable ecosystem to drive value in an ICO. The four categories as evidenced by an R-Squared of approximately .96, are enumerated below.
- Community as measured by size and number of wallets; the team identified two layers. Those that stood on the sidelines and participated tangentially and those that had invested in tangible or non-tangible ways, creating a second layer of fully-immersed stakeholders.
- Opportunity via total potential market, business model, and progress.
- Capabilities of both the founding team and open source, including git hub stats.
- Liquidity considering both fiat pairs and cryptocurrency pairs
Smooth Sailing or Wild Ride?
Now that you have the basics, how do you create your Community to scale? This is a tough question. May offers the top 10 concerns of Community managers which range from mitigating the trolls to the interaction ratio of most Communities. She cites the 90–9–1 rule of social media is a good guideline of how Communities unfold. This idea is explained in the article linked here from the Nielsen Norman Group, [1]
This, then, offers a biased understanding of your community.
Participation inequality is not necessarily unfair because some users are more equal than others, to misquote Animal Farm. If lurkers want to contribute, they are usually allowed to do so.
The problem is that the overall system is not representative of average web users. On any given user-participation site, you almost always hear from the same 1% of users, who almost certainly differ from the 90% you never hear from.
Images taken from: Nielsen Norman Group [1]
Scaling presents unique challenges, which need to be weighed carefully. In an OmniSparx poll, she identified these top concerns.
Changing regulations and strong advocacy add new dynamics to these common challenges many community managers face. What are the best practices and tools for managing this diverse ecosystem? There is not one platform that retains the ability to address same.
May cites, currently they are,
‘Holding these tools together with Duct Tape and Scissors…’
A sad statement of reality when these communities may very well represent a project’s most valuable asset! Enter Omnisparx, a comprehensive platform that will offer one repository for Community Management.
Next Episode
We will hear from Franklin at Beaxy to learn how to manage a Community (like a boss). How do you gain buy-in, turn detractors into contributors, and leverage same for scale? Franklin tackles all of this and more!
Links:
To hear the full episode, Click here
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Missed the webinar, you can easily catch up here, or watch the episode in its entirety on Youtu.be, here.
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Resources to Learn More:
[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/
