Blockchain Talkers: Making the Marketers with Emily Coleman of Wachsman
By David Weiss on The Capital
“Help wanted: Tech storytellers urgently needed!”
That’s the message we’re getting from Emily Coleman, Director at the crypto/blockchain/fintech-focused communication agency Wachsman. Speaking with Coleman about her craft, it’s easy to get worked into an inspired state about crypto PR and marketing — with the unique insights that she wields on the topic, it’s clear that there’s an expert in our midst.
Coleman came to Wachsman from the well-known non-custodial digital asset platform ShapeShift, where she spent five years leading their marketing program to establish the firm as a leading crypto brand name. In the process, Coleman actually underwent a remarkable shapeshift herself, transforming from a hospitality/tourism and food/beverage marcomm (marketing communications) specialist into a leading mind in fintech and blockchain.
In this second article in the “Blockchain Talkers” series (find Steve Lee of Komodo Platform here), Coleman provides an essential PR and communications roadmap for crypto startups — if you’re on the ground floor with an emerging firm and wondering where to begin your branding, read on and move confidently forward. Meanwhile, marketing professionals of every stripe will emerge from this Q&A with a fresh sense of purpose and some sharp new tools for excelling.
Emily, from the 10,000 foot level, what do you feel constitutes professional communications? Not just PR, but even above that.
If you look at the history of emerging tech, there have been inflection points in which we have very developer-focused jargon and language being used to communicate to the larger consumer audience. We forget that every audience needs to be communicated to differently in order for the message to resonate with each individual and thus as emerging sectors mature, understanding what professional communication efforts look like is critical for a brand to succeed.
Professional communications should start with digging into the core brand development questions to ensure your energies are focused and clear: [Asking] “Who is your audience? What are you trying to get across to them? What do you want them to understand about you, and what you provide to the world in a way that they can actually decipher and understand and intake? What do you want to be known for?”
The next level to this is creating a story that provides an emotional pull for the consumer. Tapping into the stories that make up a person can be so powerful. It really is figuring out: “What is the inflection point that reaches that audience we’re trying to understand, allowing them to feel enough emotional pull to then motivate them to utilize these products or services?” Communicating only the high-level talking points that matter to your audience is key — that means not getting into the nitty-gritty of how a product works under the hood, something that has historically been hard for technical founders to peel away from when discussing their solutions.
Professional communication is not just about your external target audience, but seeing your employees as part of this unit is critical to maintaining talent and motivating them to care about the work they are doing. You should ask, “How do the people that work for you understand what they are doing there?” If everyone’s not aligned on the vision and mission, it’s very hard for a company to create products that can reach the larger world. This is not uncharted territory for the tech world. We are seeing themes of HR departments becoming “people operations” teams whose main focus is to ensure that internal communication is fluid and thoughtful. I like to live by the idea that surprising employees are never good.
That’s an excellent overview. My next question from there is, what makes performing these services for blockchain the same as doing it for other fields?
The core concept behind any company’s communication and marketing efforts is to reach a target audience with core, concise and clear messaging points in the mediums that most directly reach your customer segments. It might seem simple to put a strategy in place to accomplish this task for more mature tech sectors, but as it pertains to the blockchain tech world, it can be a little more complex due to the nature of a world that is ever-evolving.
Before I joined ShapeShift, my former company of which I sat as CMO, our CEO Erik Voorhees said to me, “You will be joining a startup living in a startup world” in reference to the risk I would be taking if I joined the project. What I’ve learned since those early days is that it can be almost impossible for very early stage startups to fully define who they are off the bat for a more normalized sector, add in the layers of complexity of ever-evolving blockchain technology and you find yourself making pivots in a breakneck speed.
This is what can complicate the communication and marketing strategy and execution. Pre-planning can be difficult, fully defining who you are and what you do can also suffer identity crisis but the core questions that any company needs to answer in order to run successful, cost-efficient marcom plans are the same: “What is your value proposition? What makes your service offering different from anyone else who might be similar (competitive advantage)? Who is your audience?” What is your origin story? What are your core messaging points on what you provide to the world?
Even if you have to reconstruct the answers to these questions once a month in order to really dial in on who you are as a brand, find the time to do this. Then train all of your staff members to understand the talking points and value prop. This is what truly sets a brand as it evolves overtime and this process is agnostic to any sector a company might find themselves in.
I actually started my career in hospitality/tourism and it’s really interesting how relatable some aspects of doing work for clients in that space and in tech are. It is a lot of the basic understanding of what you’re providing, why it’s different from competitors and how do you actually communicate that clearly and concisely. It’s all a very similar way of doing things.
I think this industry is hitting an inflection point where we need to attract and educate more marketing and communication professionals. On face level, anyone who’s got a marketing background, they know exactly the tools they need to access and the things they need to output, in order to successfully start to work on a strategic marketing direction.
If that audience persona is so important to know, does that mean you absolutely have to have that researched before you get going? What if you haven’t researched that persona — can you just have an intuition about it? How do you get started with that?
I actually love that question, because I think it’s something that I’ve learned over the last few years of being in this industry: Specifically that the world has changed a lot. There’s a lot of data that you can pull to get to know your audiences more clearly, but we have seen a world of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook that some of the data you pull and how you’re getting it can be problematic as well, and it’s not necessarily the most ethos-driven way of doing things.
I think tech startups can get really wrapped up in, “We don’t have the budget for that. We’re just going off whim and intuition.” And on the other hand, you could go out and you could hire an agency to dial in as much data tests as they can, and do actual interviews and roundtable and things like that, but you don’t necessarily need to start that way.
We live in such a digital-first communication world and have come a bit lazy in how we feel we should best gather information from our customer base. I see a world in which we almost navigate back to earlier times where face-to-face interaction with consumers provides some of the more interesting and useful data points. This is the more ethos-driven part of me speaking, of course, but I have found some of the most useful feedback comes from sitting with the customer, talking directly to them, letting them share their emotions.
At ShapeShift, actually, we did in general buyer persona studies. We sourced an agency to help us, and what they came back to us with was a broader industry-wide buyer persona grouping: The crypto curious, crypto noob, millennial age group, mostly male. And then you had the developer, then you have the financial analyst, then you have the gamer. You have these personas that were very obvious, but I think as an industry evolves and there’s more competition, and then you have more products actually coming to fruition, you do need to dial that in a little bit more.
Where I do see newer startups really tripping on themselves is when the founders of the company say, “We decided to create this product, because it was something that I knew I needed and I wanted to create a solution for a problem I saw.” And depending on from a demographic standpoint, that can quickly evolve in founders only catering to themselves. It’s important to be able to sit down and say, “Okay, I know that you and me and my best friend, Joe, and Dave over there, we all need this product. But do we know anyone else needs this?”
Without this you might hit your market cap really quickly and then have to evolve your product and pivot more than you would have overwise.
Blockchain: It’s Own Beast
I just asked you what makes performing these services for blockchain the same as marketing for other fields. Now, I want to flip that and ask you, conversely what makes marketing for blockchain totally different than it is for other verticals?
There are many reasons that blockchain tech differs from traditional marketing, many of which I have mentioned: the consistent pivots in messaging, the inherent identity crisis and change that occurs with such nascent and ever-evolving tech, the education barrier, unique vernacular, the distribution vehicles, ever-changing regulatory environment — it really is an interesting beast to navigate.
I’ve mentioned many of these things previously but touching on the regulatory implications I’ve found to be an important differentiator. In a world in which startups found alternative ways to fundraise for products that never intended to touch DeFi or investment-world layers, regulation controls much of what they are all doing, no matter the functionality. Regardless of the final legal determination of your “token” as a security or utility, the rules and laws applied are potentially every changing thus marketing and communications team must be on their toes and in lock-step with their legal teams (if they have them) to ensure messaging — down to even the smallest of words — is compliant.
The other side of this is the 24/7 support the global crypto-markets have designed. For those companies depending on market changes, you can find yourself manning the community boards and on the line with journalists or customers all day every day, ensuring you can best preserve your brand reputation across all channels. Your audience could potentially be awake all hours of the day, all days of the week, speaking a bunch of different languages, being in a bunch of different jurisdiction, having a bunch of different cultural differences that you have to be hyper aware. It’s a very globalized industry.
Where the customer communicates is also another differentiator. Reddit was this thing that was so new to me when I first started, and I think every marketer that comes from any background, even if they come from tech, they see there’s a lot of messaging to keep up with. Enter the ever-evolving career of the digital community manager, always figuring out new channels to keep up with the audience. Now they’re on Telegram, now they’re on Slack, now they’re on Discord. There’s so many other subcultures within crypto that don’t exist in a normal day-to-day consumer marketplace that you have to learn to not only get in there and talk, but speak their language.
The ethos-driven nature of this industry also adds interesting complexities. You have many visionary leaders motivated to create companies that they hope will solve many of the injustices they identify that plague the world. Sometimes, the products that are created to solve these problems don’t always align with a revenue-generating business model and even when a product pivot to meet those demands is clear, if it compromises the overarching vision, it can be hard for a company to justify this move. How do we maintain our integrity of a company yet adhere to the roadblocks put in our way? It’s a hard narrative to create and maintain.
I think that the other side of this too is when you’re creating brands in a normal environment, it’s very easy to have a messaging mapping session. Sit down and say, “Okay, who are we as a company? What do you want your tone to be? What is the mission?” and it be very specific to the brand as an entity, not the brand plus the spokesperson. So many of these projects have been launched by entrepreneurs that have their own brand persona that they have to fold into a large company brand and products brand. Being able to navigate those separately, but also collectively, is another kind of juggling act.
Marketers and communicators have to be pretty open to understanding that this message mapping that they create or brand narrative has to be open for fairly consistent changes and pivots, because things have to evolve very quickly.
On Top of the Trifecta
You mentioned crisis communications, and that’s a good segue into my next question. Wachsman splits up its services into four main sectors: media relations, strategic counsel, crisis communications and experiential marketing. Why are those at the heart of what you offer to blockchain and crypto companies?
You have the trifecta within marcomm (marketing communications) which is earned, owned and paid. Earned being any of your media placements and publications. Owned being content that you are creating on your own accord whether it be videos or blogs, things of that nature. And then paid being a lot of the components that sometimes encase experiential marketing whether it’s sponsorship opportunities, conferences, things like that. And then also different ad opportunities.
The way that Wachsman evolved, we came out and around 2017 and at that point, they had so many different projects across the sector. The industry was starting to evolve as people were understanding that the technology wasn’t just a bunch of crazy people making money out of thin air. This was something real and had tech layers underneath it and rails that could be utilized in a more thoughtful manner.
So with that, being able to take such a flooded market and every single one of these companies trying to figure out, “Why am I different and why am I important in this very loud marketplace?” media relations became important. How do we take what it is you say that you’re offering, really dial in that narrative and make sure that you are the brand, you are the spokesperson, the company that is solving this problem that we can help translate and create a layman terminology to the masses? Wachsman has been very good at that.
The strategic counsel side of this has also been important, for the supply chain space for instance. For example, Walmart: You need strategic counsel if you’re a brand like that which has decided, “Okay, this technology is important enough for us to get in on.” Having the counsel of, “How do I navigate the regulatory climate? What language is resonating with people and what isn’t?”
We’ve already navigated this for other companies. We have many, many case studies we can provide to new clients, so from a strategic standpoint, they can either try to do this on their own or allow us to remove this side of them having to recreate the wheel. It streamlines the process, it makes it faster and again, for a market that’s growing so quickly and has so much competition, a lot of these projects don’t really have time to figure that out.
How does the crisis comm aspect of your practice play into things?
As I began to get more and more involved as a marketer within a tech sector, I’ve started reading a lot more about historical tech innovations. How have these industries typically had to evolve and navigate?
It’s always very similar. Their technology has always been a threat to a lot of different outside entities, whether it be governmental which is a lot of times what we’re navigating here, or centralized versus decentralized. You’re going to have threat vectors that you’re going to have to navigate whether it be true or not.
As I said earlier, the way that you handle crisis comms on a scale of social media with thought leaders and industry leaders that are now connected to different company brands, they have evolved in their thoughts and their processes. In the social media landscape we live in now, people sometimes don’t remember the things they tweeted ten years ago that might come back up to bite them, so we have to anticipate all of those things and that’s really important because I have lived through many PR crises within this industry. Sometimes it’s actually just a lack of understanding and we have to be able to very quickly reeducate, “Okay, this article that was released was completely incorrect and here’s all the reasons it was, and here’s the reasons you misread the technology.”
Making sure we try to message map all possible scenarios, looking at historical examples within the sector, as well as historical emerging tech verticals, is the most ideal way to handle moving forward with a clients’ crisis plan.
And then where does the experiential marketing aspect come into play?
I like to relate experiential to this evolution of the way that schools are teaching children now. I moved to New York from Denver. Denver’s public schools have an experiential school program where, instead of just having the kids sitting with textbooks in the classroom, the teachers could at any given time take the kids on a field trip. So not only are they reading about history, they’re actually living in it.
I think that that’s the best way to define what experiential marketing can provide to your users. Because with something like this that’s nascent and complex, it can allow you to think so much more creatively on how you present what it is that you’re providing to the world, in a way that it can almost be touched and felt and experienced before having to have the full buy-in. It allows us to have a larger forum to educate. Education to me is such a core part of where we are with this industry right now, and so incredibly important in the narrative of everything.
When you talk about experiential marketing, would you include for example, eToro and how they provide a virtual account you can use to learn to trade on their platform?
Exactly. I’m speaking from the agency side, where we would handle a lot more experiential on the side of conferences and events that can create a buzz, and it’s a lot more in person. The simulators, though, are a perfect example of how a marcomm team, internally, would provide services that allow a customer to navigate your product in a way that allows them to feel more comfortable with it, with no actual risk.
In product development there is a concept called mental modeling in which you when you have an emerging tech, instead of you saying, “Here’s our technology, world! This is new and we know you don’t get it, but if you don’t use it, we promise you you’re going to miss out,” you actually figure out what is it that they use in their day-to-day, and build your product so it mirrors that, then evolve over time so that they can actually start to use this more nascent technology without knowing it. That’s one of the things that experiential marketing also can help do with simulators and things of that nature that helps them evolve.
Google did a really good job of this over the years when they would update say, Google Analytics or their Gmail service. It would allow you to pivot between your legacy service and the new, and it would be a series of times to try it out before you were forced into actually using the new version. It wasn’t so jarring. So that’s a lot of that experiential marketing side too.
Blockchain Branding for Startups
Emily, I’m hearing all this and I think anyone who’s reading this that’s an entrepreneur and they have a company of two people or 20 might be saying, “This all sounds great, but having (a PR firm like Wachsman) is too expensive and high level for us.” How can you budget for this if you have no budget, or if you have a small budget? Is there a way to be able to partake in these sophisticated communications activities to help your company grow when you’re still in the very early stages?
First off: do not hire a pr-specific agency until you are ready. Are you looking to raise funds? Leverage thought leaders? Have GTM campaigns ready? Product launches dialed in? Have a semi-clear direction for your company? Then let’s get talking. That’s typically when the funds are available and your PR teams can be set up for success.
In the interim, I encourage companies to find someone who’s a go-getter that has a really good marketing, communication background, a few years out of school that is going to help you evolve and really grow and can help manage a lot of that off the bat.
The thing is, I think a lot of people think marketing and communication is really simple and it’s not. Telling a story and giving narrative and making sure that you can actually build an audience that can understand what you’re doing, especially in nascent tech, is incredibly difficult to summarize and make concise.
However, it’s easy enough to sit down and just ask some really deep questions like I brought up earlier: “Who is your audience?” Really think about it. “Who is it that we’re trying to reach? What services are we actually offering and who are our competitors, so that we can make sure that we’re offering something that doesn’t already have a market share that’s completely blown out? What is our vision and mission?”
I think a lot of startups go, “Oh, vision and mission. That’s a bunch of just fluffy stuff,” but it actually is really important for you to understand why you exist and why you feel like what you’re doing is important. It motivates your employees internally and motivates your customers externally.
You should be able to tie down your motivations as well, and then from there start building out your company’s story. It’s very easy, actually, to Google some of this. Straight up: “How do I build a story?” There’s a very simplistic four- or five-point process of building a story out, and it’s — again — built around motivation. so if you can get your narrative and messaging built up, that’s a really good place to start and we always tell clients, “Your three bullet points: What are three things at the end of the day you want to get across to people when you talk to them about your product?”
The first one should be a one-sentence tagline, like, “We are creating a product that provides this to the world.” The second one is, “This service to the world looks like A, B, C and D.” And then the third one being, “It is a solution that is solving these problems.” And if you can really dial that messaging in, then you have enough of a narrative that you could talk to journalists about this.
You can maybe prioritize going to conferences, because conference organizers — if you are a sponsor — do provide you with media lists, and I think [its beneficial] talking to journalists even if it’s informational. Doing media relations before you need anything and actually just getting to know people is the best way for you to be able to leverage getting your messaging off the ground when you do have things to talk about, and it’s creating a narrative for thought leadership, as well, leveraging your spokespeople. Those are all things I think can be done in-house and that should at least start to be discussed before people move in the direction of hiring an agency, because that can be costly but it also can be a bit more cost effective than hiring, say, a CMO in-house off the bat.
Marketing to the Marketers
Emily, how important do you feel talented “block talkers,” like PR pros, are to the future of blockchain?
So important. To be quite honest it worries me a little bit that I’ve been talking to a lot of my friends who are communicators in this space, whether it be newer ones or ones that have been in it for awhile, and asking, “How do we market to marketers who want to be blockchain tech marketers?”
We have some employees at Wachsman that I’ve actually really enjoyed watching their evolution, coming to me at the beginning and going, “I feel so panicked. I have no idea what this is. I don’t understand it,” and then watching them hit these “ah ha” moments in which they understand the ins and outs, have a grasp of subject matter that allows them to really articulate the angles of a product so concisely.
There’s so much to learn all the time. I feel like I’m constantly humbling myself to still not knowing it all consistently, and I think that we need more people that want to engage and want to be part of this space because there’s so many projects needing that particular leadership.
There’s an amazing book called Crossing The Chasm that was originally published in the ’80s but it’s been evolved over the decades and it’s about these emerging tech markets. How they go from being very crowded sectors, and then there’s a chasm they have to jump to be the leaders — the most recent edition has this example of Tesla: You have this world of different emerging technologies within the solar car movement. There are a lot of different companies that were trying to evolve it that weren’t even in the car sector, and then when we jumped the chasm, we have Tesla.
There hasn’t been a good way to market this stuff. The technology of course has to evolve. That’s important, but your brand strategy has to evolve and in order to really do that well, we need more people that understand how to do that, and how to really be the translators to the masses. I think it’s incredibly important for us to evolve that space and bring more people in.
Why do you feel so strongly about the importance of bringing new marketers into the space?
I like to think about the legacy we create as communicators of this really beautiful ecosystem and at the end of the day, if it’s really hard and it feels really challenging, to remind ourselves of the many, many different potential ways that we can help change the world.
I know people use that so broadly with the technology, but I do really think that it is important to think of things from that standpoint — it’s what can give you the stamina to continue to want to learn and to be part of this. It’s a very cool way to think about the legacy and imprint that you’re creating on the world.
On that note, Emily, here’s my last question: What is a powerful “micro lesson” you can provide to blockchain entrepreneurs or fellow blockchain marketers to promote their companies better?
On the most basic level, have a really good concise one liner for what it is you’re doing and why it’s important. If you can dial that in and it shouldn’t be fluffy, it shouldn’t be nebulous, it should be, “This is what we’re doing and this is why it’s important and these are the people that it will help change their lives.”
Because once you do that, you dial in on the actual technical components of your offering as well as the emotional motivational elements of why it’s important. I think too often you hear people explain what it is they do and it takes them an hour and you’re lost, so learning to be concise also dovetails into you being incredibly patient and helpful with education. You have ample time to provide someone with information if you can get beyond the point of them saying, “That’s fascinating. I want to know more.”
— David Weiss
