A few people wonder how we work with clients to help grow and develop their communities through creating content and messaging narratives. It’s really quite simple and basic, with no smoke and mirrors here, so we thought we’d give you a rundown of the process.
We start by identifying where the project currently sits in terms of its technical development, price point, transaction volume, and community engagement. We’ll break these down for you briefly so that you can use this technique to assess your own project or one that you’re investing in.
Let’s start with technical development. This is the area that the core team focuses almost all of their energy and thought on and you can tell that when you read their updates. They’re usually brief, overladen with technical jargon, and give little in the way of explanation to noobs as to what it all means
The plus side of this is that the team shows it knows its ass from its elbow when it comes to blockchains, minting, testnets, and so forth. This helps to convince retail investors that they’re not a rug pull, but it’s dry and uninspiring.
The price point is the other factor that usually takes up the remaining attention of the core team. We all love the dopamine hit of big green candles, but this is largely unimportant. The price point and market cap do little to create stability for a project, but the wicks can tell you if the team or VC investors are selling into every uptrend.
Transaction volume is a key factor and far more important than price or market cap. How engaged are the traders, is there a pattern of swing trading, how regular are the trades, is it a pump and dump? All of these characteristics can be represented in the trading volume and give you some more insight into the general view of the project amongst those that are trading it. If it’s an NFT project you’re looking for time to sell out, minting velocity, and the like.
One very recent example is an NFT launch that had a lot of support from other projects, a healthy whitelist, and then extremely poor minting velocity on launch. The two factors that led to this were poor communication of the minting cost and lack of education amongst the community as to the benefits of the NFT. It seems the team focused too much on collaborations and lost focus on their community, so when the gates opened there was a trickle rather than a flood.
That leads neatly onto the final area we assess in a project, namely community engagement. We’re not looking to see how many followers a project has, how many likes, and retweets. Those figures are very easy to game and give little in the way of useful metrics to analyze a project’s health. We look more into the context of the engagement from both sides. How does the project talk to its community, what type of questions do the community ask, how do the other community members behave?
If there’s a high proportion of questions around the price, exchange listings, marketing, and similar areas it means there’s very low-quality engagement. Mostly it’s superficial, people looking for easy money and expecting to earn it off the backs of the project’s team. High-value engagement is when people are taking the project seriously. They’re interested in your ethos, values, and vision.
The main thing about content is the narrative and if the project doesn’t take that seriously then they lose control of it. The best practice for communications is to have a clear vision of your message and when you communicate that effectively and engagingly you’ll steer the narrative. Projects have a simple choice, either they control the narrative or other people’s narratives will control them.
Try going through these checks with your own project, or one that you’re thinking of investing in and you’ll see which ones are ahead of the curve with communications and which ones are heading for trouble. The good news is that with some foresight, knowledge, and time, even those with poor communications can improve.