The Importance of Word of Mouth in the Crypto Community
I’m the lead community manager at WOM Token. My background is in marketing and it was WOM’s fresh take on marketing that drew me in.
Community management isn’t new, but it arguably takes on a lot more meaning in the crypto space for several reasons that I’ll discuss in this article. A community is so inherently important for blockchain projects because you are building something collectively. Every community member has their stake in the project and everybody is dependant on each other to successfully grow the project. This is something I hadn’t seen before in the digital space, but it’s something I see strongly in the crypto sphere. Here is what I’ve learnt so far.
Forget the vanity metrics..
Social media community management has been around for well over a decade now. Since the launch of Facebook in 2004, social media has grown into an essential marketing tool for brand building, news broadcasting, customer relationships, and — with varying degrees of success — conversion. In the early days community managers often had the task of growing the biggest possible community to report impressive numbers back to the board. Reach was the measure of success. Reach, of course, is no use without relevance and the community managers had to perform a balancing act between serving up vanity metrics and building valuable communities. Over the years changing algorithms and the maturation of social media monetization models have made it even harder to chase all metrics, from reach to relevance and engagement. Even now social media marketers are struggling to prove the value of social media. So where do we go from here, how do you build and manage a genuinely valuable online community?
Getting back to good old fashioned word of mouth…
In the world of endless online ads and banners, personal marketing approaches are gaining back their momentum. If we go back to the days before the internet and before the mass market reach of TV and radio, traditional business owners had to promote their businesses with a personal approach — or — word of mouth. This type of marketing might have looked like it lost track in the digital era, but nothing could be further from the truth.
If we take a look at the blockchain industry, building a crypto community should be about bringing people in and nurturing more personal relationships, not chasing reach, not spamming people with an overload of advertising. This is what creates advocates that will help you spread honest word of mouth messages and flourish your community.
Since the premise of cryptocurrencies is that they are not backed by gold, governments or any central authority, their value derives mainly from the community that supports it.
Keep your community happy!
The key to keeping a happy and positive community is to make sure they know they’re appreciated and to make them feel special. If the community is treated well, they will be the best and cheapest publicity your project can have. They will come up with ideas you never thought of. They’ll help with your code, do testing, and even write and share articles. One might refer to these actions as bounty campaigns or airdrops, and although it can help it’s not enough to align the community with your values and ideas. I wouldn’t recommend hiring an agency as it builds a wall between the company and the community which goes against the very principles of community management.
Make sure to have at least three community members in-house to cover all the time zones. Pick them wisely and make sure they’re empathetic in a sense that they know how to treat every member as family. And last but not least, educate them well about every little aspect of your project so they know how to answer FAQs correctly and their efforts are focussed on nurturing the community and having valuable conversations.
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