Community Member Relationships = MOAT
Community Member Relationships = MOAT
Thoughts on the importance of interpersonal relationships and some ideas to foster them.
Gm,
It’s me again talking about web3 community management.
Today’s topic: generating healthy engagement and retention through the creation of relationships among your community members.
As we’re settling in the bear market I’m seeing more people insist on the importance of quality over quantity. Intrinsic over extrinsic motivation. Long term vs short term.
And it makes sense, right.
In the short term extrinsic incentives do really well at engaging people but their appeal doesn’t last in time. Think PFP drops, airdrops and all kind of financial incentives.
On the other hand, relationships are intrinsic motivation. They grow organically between people as they keep interacting. The network of relationships that develops within a group needs less and less external inputs to be sustained over time. This is the way (i feel).
But hey, how do you form good relationships on Discord, it’s hard ain’t it? Hard it is. And URL will not replace IRL anytime soon. Nevertheless there are richer and richer ways to interact, share fun activities, create memories, collaborate and eventually grow relationships of all kinds.
So what are some new tools that may help!? Beyond AMAs, contests, Twitter spaces… Here are some interesting tools I caught this week.
Category: “just build your own social network duh”
There are communities where the whole value is community management. FWB is one of them and they just released their home made app called ‘FWB’ on Testflight.
The app has tabs for events, governance, member benefits, social feed annnnnd a member directory where you can find new friend suggestions. It still leaves a lot of work on the member to go ahead and interact but its beautiful to see communities building their own tooling. Sovereign community vibes.
Category: “good conversations make good friends”
Another project is building on top of POAP 🥳
This project is Salsa (previously Pearl) and it enables POAP collectors to connect with other fellow holders. If you and someone else claimed multiple of the same POAPs their are reasons to thing you’d vibe together.
The app is already available, still early but it could be a fun way for people to connect with the most relevant members in their community.
Category: “sharing a fun activity”
3 months ago Discord released a new batch of activities that can be played right in voice chat.
I’ve played some of them on my own and I’m looking forward to trying it with frens (maybe you? reach out to me!).
There are also many third party Discord bots I didn’t know existed until earlier this week (call me a boomer i’ll agree):
MEE6 economy ~ which is a bunch of casino type games one can play through Discord commands
Epic RPG ~ which is a more complex role playing game that you can play through Discord commands.
and many more to be discovered through the Discord App directory…
Category: “stream it and they will come”
Another Discord thing :/ (not very web3 I know)
The Stages feature is getting an upgrade enabling video sharing and live text chats, adopting more Twitch-like features.
Real time feedback is absent or weak in most kinds of online events. Being able to embed text chats on Discord Stages is a step towards solving this problem. After all the whole point of livestreams is the live interactions.
Final Category: “next level VR events”
At a time where I’m desperately searching for ways to make online events more fun, the team at Based AF has done just that AND turned the event into a video that must have demanded so much work. Very high quality alert.
Of course, it takes a whole professional content team to produce an event like this but these experiments help the whole space think better about VR spaces and the memories that can be created there.
Ok, that’s it for today!
I’ll keep experimenting with this newsletter as I try (so hard) to be consistent and ship weekly. I also have to acknowledge that I’ll need a lot more work and structure to make it good but let’s start small ¯\_(ツ)_/¯