Steph Taylor

Web3 social: Are we early or does it suck?

stephtaylor@newsletter.paragraph.com (Steph Taylor) — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 05:02:26 GMT

Social media has been good to me. Instagram is where I first built my business, my brand, and my audience. But the reach that took four years to build has almost vanished in the space of a few months and several algorithm changes. I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve put more energy into building my email list—an audience I own—than growing my social media presence in the last year. So I still have a business. Other creators and business owners could be one algorithm shift from losing their entire audience.

Hearing about decentralised social (DeSo) for the first time kickstarted my journey down the web3 rabbit hole. At the time, I didn’t realise the technology already existed—I assumed it was a pie-in-the-sky idea that might happen in a few years’ time.

Then I found out about Lens Protocol. At the start of 2022, they shared an open letter about the state of social media. It begins:

Our digital identities have become inseparable from how we define ourselves.
Social media has allowed us to find our communities and discover true self-expression. It holds the promise of connection, freedom, livelihood, and voice. We spend time building a unique selfhood across platforms, but we know they are antiquated, centralized systems.
Web3 brings forth a renewed hope for what social media can be. It offers the ability for us to control how our content is used. We can have the power to own and monetize our content and community with no middlemen or centralized data harvesting.
We, the content creators of the world, deserve to hold the power and control over what we publish...
and what is identity if not ours to own?

Lens had me excited at the prospect of a world where we own our audience. Where we can vote with our feet when we no longer enjoy the content in our feed, and take our audience with us when we move. Where we retain ownership of the content we’ve poured blood, sweat and tears into creating. And where we profit off of our content, rather than fueling up Zuck’s private jet.

I desperately want to move from Instagram to a new platform. I desperately hope one (or more) of the social media apps building on Lens Protocol will succeed. But web3 social has a few problems it needs to address if it has any chance of capturing the masses.

Note: *For the purpose of this article, I’ll use the terms web3 social and DeSo interchangeably, although I’m sure there is some nuance I’m not aware of. Feel free to reach out on Twitter and let me know what I don’t know. *

Whiting and Williams (2013) found seven key reasons why someone might use social media:

For social interaction,
To seek information,
To pass time,
For entertainment purposes,
For relaxation,
For communicatory utility, and
For convenience utility.

Although nearly a decade passed since their paper was published, these core themes haven’t changed. However, the social media landscape has. Users now seek different utility from different platforms.

They might use one platform to see when so-and-so from high school gets married (Instagram). Or a promotion (LinkedIn). Or joins a pyramid scheme (Facebook). They might use another platform to design a dream house they’ll never afford (Pinterest). To get a dopamine fix (TikTok). Or to keep up with the crypto world (Twitter).

For a new decentralised social platform to onboard and engage its users, it needs to either replace one of the existing platforms in its users’ eyes, or give them something they can’t get elsewhere.

This is harder than it looks. Google+ tried—and failed—to compete with Facebook. Any web3 social platform that wants to take on TikTok, Instagram or Youtube faces some big obstacles.

It’s not impossible. But first, they need to overcome some major problems with web3 social media.

1. It’s not entertaining

I want to love the apps that have been built on Lens Protocol. I really do. But right now, the content sucks. I know these apps are still in their infancy, but my feed looks worse than if I’d searched #crypto on Twitter. It’s just a bunch of faceless accounts posting BTC graphs and pretending they know how to do technical analysis.

Of course, some of these people might know what they’re talking about, but I can’t rely on the their follower count as a credibility marker. A thousand followers could mean you know what you’re talking about. It could also mean you’ve figured out how to game the platform. The latter is particularly prevalent on Phaver, which promises token rewards in return for creating and curating the best content.

The early majority to adopt DeSo will be those who are already active in the web3 space. We understand how it all works, so there’s less friction than for someone who doesn’t know what a wallet is. It makes sense, then, that the early content on these platforms will be web3-related. But until the content on these new platforms is better than what’s on Twitter, crypto Twitter will keep tweeting.

Most of the big names in crypto Twitter make their money outside of social media or content creation. They’re building or investing. So it’s not the best use of their time to initiate a mass exodus from one platform to another. It’s also not in their best interests to ditch Twitter in favour of a new platform. Their most loyal fans might follow, but they’d still lose a significant chunk of their audience.

Mainstream adoption poses an even more challenging scenario. First of all, the platform would need to talk about something other than crypto. The general population cares about crypto as much as you care about your co-worker Belinda’s keto diet. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with crypto (or the keto diet), but it does make you want to leave the lunchroom as fast as you can.

But why would creators and influencers on Web 2.0 social platforms surrender their audiences and start publishing somewhere brand new? An external incentive—say, cash monies or Eth—might do the job. Spotify tried this. They bet $200 million on moving Joe Rogan’s show exclusively to their platform, which gave them a foothold in the podcasting market.

Educating creators and influencers might be another option. Many are disenchanted with the state of social media, but they don’t realise there’s an alternative.

2. Your family and friends aren’t on there

Your favourite creators aren’t using any web3 social platforms yet, and neither are your friends and family. Many of us are still on Facebook despite the fact that it sucks. But we love to know what our best friend’s ex-boyfriend is up to. We love to see photos of our high-school bully’s ugly baby. We love getting birthday wishes from Aunt Susan, even if she still hasn’t learned what “lol” means.

Your best friend’s ex-boyfriend, your high-school bully, and your Aunt Susan won’t start using a new social platform until they know other people who use it. Once it reaches that critical mass—the point where enough of their friends are using it and they don’t want to miss out—then it’s easy. But it’s risky being the first in your social group to try something new. It could flop. And you’ll be left red-faced, like someone who invited all their friends to Clubhouse.

Web3 social is too early for your Aunt Susan. Lens Protocol (and the dApps built on it) still has limited access at the time of writing. To claim a Lens handle, you need to have signed the open letter before May 2022, or you need to be in the right community. For this strategy to work, users with early access need to contribute quality content so that when the early majority join, it’s sticky. Otherwise, the early majority won’t stay. And without the early majority, you simply have another Google+.

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3. Kylie Jenner doesn’t know why she needs to use it

Decentralised social is a groundbreaking concept. I know why we need it. You know why we need it (I hope). But everybody else? They don’t know why we need it. Yet.

The idea that someone can own their online identity and take it with them across the internet might be a good motivator. As is the promise that their data won’t be exploited. But these arguments won’t get any mainstream publicity until they’re communicated in a way that resonates with your everyday social media user.

The problem is that web3 builders are highly intelligent people. They have such deep technical knowledge of how it all works that they struggle to explain anything in plain English. And many of the marketers in web3 are so excited about the possibilities, they forget that most muggles don’t know what decentralisation is, much less why it matters to them.

Of course, there is an inherent complexity that comes with being early to any technology. And a crucial part of any web3 marketer’s role is to be the translator for your prospects. To answer, in simple terms, “what’s in it for me?”.

The “OMG IT’S WEB3!!!!” hype might capture attention right now, but it won’t be enough to drive majority adoption in the future.

4. It looks like the dev designed it (probably because they did)

Web3 social has a UX problem. Even just connecting your wallet and minting your Lens handle feels painful. I’m no UX expert, but I know that friction makes it less likely that someone will take action.

Instagram created a deeply entrenched neural pathway in my brain where I often pull out my phone and start scrolling before I’m conscious of what I’m doing. I walk into an elevator and automatically pull out my phone. I sit down in the dentist’s waiting room and start scrolling. Some mornings, I open Instagram before I’ve said good morning to my dog.

I’m not proud of these habits, but they’re a testament to the stickiness of Web 2.0 social platforms. Part of TikTok’s success is because they made it so easy to stay on the platform longer—they removed the friction in finding new content that’s interesting by creating an endless feed of full-screen videos based on what you’ve watched.

Having to connect a wallet every time you log in? Having to sign a transaction to post? These add friction to the process.

Phaver is one exception. They’ve created an interface that feels similar to what we’re already used to, though a short scroll through my feed tells me they missed a key learning from Web 2.0 social media: if you don’t constrain image height, users will post abnormally tall images to dominate the feed.

All of these platforms still look too corporate for my liking. They remind me of the internal message board a company I worked at once rolled out, and that’s no bueno for a community that prides itself on being ahead of the curve.

I grew up in the MSN Messenger, MySpace and Bebo generation. Many social networks came and went before we landed on Facebook, and I’m sure we’ll see many DeSo platforms come and go before we land on those that stick. In my mind, it’s a matter of when web3 social media takes off, not if.

As a creator, I can’t wait to post what I want to post rather than what I think the algorithm will like. As a marketer, I can’t wait to see the creative ways that businesses use these new platforms. And as a human, I’m excited to see my friends’ posts in my feed again.

The only things standing in the way are content, adoption, branding and UX. In other words, all someone needs to do to succeed is create a decentralised social platform that’s easy to use, explain in plain English why someone should use it, and sufficiently motivate creators—and their followers—to start using it. How hard could that be? /s.

Thanks for reading. I also write a weekly newsletter about web3 from a marketing perspective, which you can find here. Connect with me on Twitter @launchmagic.

Sources:

Whiting, A., & Williams, D. (2013). Why people use social media: A uses and gratifications approach. Qualitative Market Research, 16(4), 362-369. doi:https://doi.org/10.1108/QMR-06-2013-0041

Web3 and the paradox of being early

stephtaylor@newsletter.paragraph.com (Steph Taylor) — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 13:40:52 GMT

I remember the first website I built. The year was 2001, and I was a baby nerd who spent her lunch breaks in the school library. I can’t remember exactly what the point of my website was—I doubt there was a point—but I do remember the hours I spent painstakingly creating my masterpiece using the now-defunct Geocities. The internet had been around for more than a decade by this stage. And although it was still the Web 1.0 era, those of us who wanted to publish content onto the World Wide Web had the tools to do so.

In a world where we can post a tweet in less time than it took for a dial-up modem to connect, it’s easy to forget that participating in the online world wasn’t always so simple. Tech historian, Benj Edwards, writes of his experience building a website in 1995:

“In early 1995, when I was on the cusp of turning 14 years old, I decided I wanted to be part of World Wide Web (the web) on the Information Superhighway (the Internet) by creating my own web page (website). (Even the jargon is old.) To do that, I had to obtain an Internet connection, then I had to rent web space, learn how to write HTML, and actually upload it to that space, then figure out how to view it in a graphical web browser.”

Just six years later, this young girl could create her own website with zero HTML knowledge. I didn’t own a domain, nor did I have the means to buy one. And I had no idea what an FTP client was. It’s not because I didn’t want to learn about how websites worked, but rather that I didn’t need to.

Fast forward another decade or so, and the online publishing process became so simple that both of my over-60s parents started (and gave up on) their own blogs. Blogging had officially reached the laggards.

Being early is a double-edged sword

Being early to any technology typically makes it easier to succeed. You were more likely to be found as one of 31,000 web pages on the internet in 1995 than you are as one of the 25 billion+ pages in 2022. A friend with more than 100,000 TikTok followers credits much of her success to starting on the platform long before it was cool. And we all wish we’d bought $20 worth of Bitcoin back in 2010 or $100 of Eth in 2015.

Being early comes with its challenges however. The barrier to entry for someone creating a website in 2022 is far lower than it was in 1995, as our internet connections are faster and more readily available. We now have tools like Squarespace and Ghost that require close to zero technical knowledge.

Web3, on the other hand, still has barriers to entry for the less technical. We don’t yet have the all tools to make it friendly enough for mainstream adoption. But we’re getting there. Every few days I see a new web3 product launching, solving a problem in a more user-friendly way.

Technical barriers aside, being early is also risky: this might all be a waste of time and/or money. This website I’m building might get zero visitors. This social media platform I’m creating content on might become another MySpace. This obscure digital currency I’m investing in could turn out to be a scam, or worse, a pyramid scheme.

I suspect this is the unspoken barrier to mainstream adoption. When someone tells us that web3 is too difficult to understand, perhaps what they’re really saying is, “I don’t trust this enough to invest time in learning it”. Or that the perceived upside isn’t worth the potential loss and the discomfort of changing. There are enough crypto sceptics out there to plant the seed of doubt in the majority’s minds. Even I occasionally step back and wonder if I’ve been sucked into a cult, brainwashed by the echo chamber of crypto Twitter. (I haven’t).

Knowledge barriers will decrease as adoption increases

The language we use right now in the web3 space isn’t suitable for the majority. How a blockchain operates is a complex concept to grasp. So is fungibility and non-fungibility. But will the majority need to understand these in order to use products built on web3? Probably not. Just like how you don’t need to understand how an FTP client works—or even what one is—to build a website these days, it’s likely that future web3 adopters won’t need more than a surface-level understanding of how the technology works.

And so we'll shift away from using jargon like "NFTs" or "web3". We might adopt more user-friendly terms like "digital collectibles" (as both Reddit and Meta have coined them).

Or this whole web3 thing might just become what we call "the internet".

*Subscribe to my weekly newsletter if you want to be a better marketer or creator in web3. And come say g’day on Twitter—I’d love to connect. *

Issue #2: The Web3 Marketing Challenge

stephtaylor@newsletter.paragraph.com (Steph Taylor) — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 22:44:34 GMT

Happy Monday and a big welcome to the 82 new subscribers who have joined us since last week's issue.

What's coming up in today's issue:

The big marketing problem most web3 projects are facing right now.
Mark Zuckerberg finds a way to keep tabs on us in the web3 world with Instagram digital collectibles.
How might podcasting look in a web3 world? A closer look at one show that's already exploring it.

1. Hype is out. What now for web3 marketers?

If 2020 was the year of “this meeting could’ve been an email,” then 2022 is “this NFT could’ve been a JPEG.”

In the last week, we’ve seen Tiffany & Co. launching a range of NFTs, Gucci and Tag Heuer announcing they’ll accept purchases made in-store with Apecoin (a cryptocurrency), and Starbucks unveiling their web3 rewards program.

I can’t help but think: Did these need to be a web3 project, or are they capitalising on the hype around crypto and NFTs to get media coverage?

The first major wave of NFT projects (like CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club) capitalised on hype and made a lot of speculators a lot of money. Then came the brands and celebrities. Some of them sold out in minutes, while Chris Brown’s project had only sold 814 NFTs out of 10,000 at the time of writing this newsletter. The dude has more than 100m Instagram followers—that’s a terrible conversion rate no matter how you spin it.

Chris’s failed project reminds us of two crucial elements when you’re selling anything: brand reputation and perceived value. His NFT launch was lacking in both.

Hype is no longer enough to sell an NFT collection. This is a great thing because now we can look beyond the pretty pictures and financial speculation. We can start to look at them for what they are: a killer piece of technology with so much potential value for our customers.

Tiffany, Gucci and Tag? I’m not convinced about their announcements yet. Starbucks, on the other hand, has a killer use case for NFTs: they’re expanding their existing loyalty program to include digital collectibles. If you’re a venti Pumpkin Spice Latte kinda gal, you might soon be able to show this off as part of your online identity—it’s almost the web3 equivalent of posting your daily coffee to your Instagram Story. Almost.

What this means for you: if you're exploring an NFT launch of any kind, you can't rely on customers to buy it just because it's an NFT. If you do, you risk your brand being left red-faced.

2. Zuckerberg is watching

Speaking of showing off NFTs as part of your online identity, this week Meta started rolling out their new “digital collectibles” feature on Instagram to more than 100 countries. Clearly, it hasn’t rolled out to me yet, as when I went to click on the “digital collectibles” link from my Instagram account on my computer, it tried to send me to the user @digital_collectibles. Oops.

If you want to see what the new feature looks like in action, check out @mybff.

On one hand, I love that I can show off my NFTs. On the other? I know that Meta’s revenue relies on data they hold about you and me. And in a cookieless world, this data is getting harder and harder to collect.

Two years ago, they tried launching their own cryptocurrency, Libra. If it hadn’t flopped so spectacularly, it would’ve added our purchase history to the bank of data they already have on us.

Oh, she bought a new dog bed? Guess we’ll serve her ads targeted to dog owners then.

Now, they’re going for a different move. If you connect your wallet to your Instagram account, you can show off your NFTs on your profile. But there’s a catch.

Last week I wrote about how your wallet is your web3 identity. Over time you’ll start to collect NFTs that represent your interests and the brands you align yourself with. Connecting your wallet to Instagram means that when you score that Starbucks Pumpkin Spice digital collectible, you’re telling Meta a lot about you.

And because all transactions on the Ethereum blockchain are visible to the public, once you’ve told Meta your public wallet address, they can see every single transaction you make using that wallet. Right now, that might not be a lot, but in the future? That could include every transaction from buying a coffee to buying a house. Not to mention other data that could be stored on the blockchain in the future, like qualifications and certifications, your credit score and your rental history.

When I finally do get access to this feature, I will use it. But I’ll take extra caution and create a new wallet purely to link to my Instagram account, and I’ll only transfer the NFTs I want to share with my followers.

What this means for you: watch out where you connect your wallet, and when in doubt, don't connect your main one.

3. What does podcasting look like in a web3 world?

Last week, I stumbled upon the first web3 podcast I’ve seen. Not the first podcast talking about web3—there’s no shortage of those—but rather the first podcast that uses web3 technology to run the podcast as a DAO. If you’re new here, a DAO stands for “decentralised autonomous organisation” which—defined simply—is an entity run by its community. In other words, Rehash: A Web3 Podcast is run by its community.

As a podcaster with 4 years and 500+ episodes under my belt, my eyes light up and my brain starts ticking quickly when I think about the different ways we’ll be able to use web3 to solve three problems most podcasters face: audience growth, monetisation and content ideas.

In the case of Rehash, the podcast launch was crowdfunded by selling NFTs. The community (i.e. NFT holders) gets to nominate and vote on which guests, topics and segments they’d like to hear on the show. This is a seriously cool way to overcome the struggle that creeps in every few months: I don’t know what to talk about on my show anymore.

Because the community owns a piece of the show, they now have an incentive to tell their friends about it. They have a vested interest in the show’s success.

As for monetisation, I’m not sure what Rehash has up its sleeve, but I’d love to see some kind of model where the community gets a % of sponsorship revenue distributed to them like dividends.

What this means for you: this model is likely to change the way that podcasts and other content mediums operate. Watch this space.

—

If you've made it all the way down here, that means either you found this interesting, or you're on your way to the unsubscribe button at the bottom.

Either way, I'd love it if you could please take 2 minutes to let me know how I'm doing. What would you like to see more of? Less of?

Until next week,

Steph

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Issue #1: Your identity in the web3 world

stephtaylor@newsletter.paragraph.com (Steph Taylor) — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 07:43:10 GMT

Welcome to the very first edition of Web3 for Marketers.

My goal when I set out to bring this idea to life was simple: I want to make it as easy as possible for you to succeed in the web3 world as a marketer—whether you’re a marketer by occupation or the marketer in your own business.

This week, we’ve seen a lot of chatter about changes happening in Instagram-land. We’ve seen Meta (formerly Facebook) post their first ever year-on-year revenue decline. And, in my conversations with business owners and creators, I’ve seen them getting more and more frustrated at how challenging it is to get their content—great content—in front of the right eyeballs.

At the same time, $430 million was invested into web3 companies last week alone. That's a biiig signal by any standards.

And no, I don't mean Facebook Groups. Nobody needs more of those.

Although still in its early days, the web3 world has already made one thing clear: Influence is not about how many followers you have, but rather the strength of your community. And this article from the Washington Post suggests that marketing is starting to trend this way in general, with influencers focusing more on community-based platforms (like Discord and Telegram).

What this means for you: Even if your brand hasn’t dipped a toe into web3 yet, there’s still value in building a community that’s not at the whim of algorithms. As we see further shifts in social media and greater adoption of web3, community will only play a more important role in your marketing strategy.

2. What’s in your wallet?

Mine is a mess.

In my wallet, you'll find coins in four different currencies, my driver’s licence, three expired debit cards, faded receipts and a ton of loyalty cards I'll never use. All things that tell you a lot about me—my name and age, some of my recent purchases, what stores I’m loyal to, and how disorganised I am.

Your web3 wallet is similar to a physical wallet. Yes, it houses your cryptocurrencies, but it’s also where you can store your NFTs—things like your virtual loyalty cards, memberships, digital art and more. In the future, we’ll likely see your wallet hold all the content you’ve created too, rather than gifting your IP to a third-party platform like Instagram every time you post something.

Your wallet carries your identity. It has the potential to become like a social media profile, curated to tell the world what brands you support, what content you create, what communities you’re part of and what kind of art you enjoy.

And last week, we saw some big announcements that support the idea of your wallet as your identity…

Up until now, there hasn’t been any way for one wallet-holder to communicate with another wallet-holder (other than by sending tokens). While it’s still early days—and I won’t be rushing to adopt it just yet—this new feature from WalletConnect signals that our wallets will be the way we interact with others in the web3 world and hints at what the future of DMs might be.

Mirror.xyz (web3’s answer to Medium) announced they would allow readers to subscribe to any publication using their wallets, suggesting that the future of email marketing might be communicating directly to our subscribers' wallets rather than their email addresses.

What this means for you: It’s too early to tell how this will play out practically, but a worthwhile exercise would be understanding, what identity or persona does my ideal customer share with the world, based on what they hold in their wallet?

3. It's not about the NFT

While NFTs surged in popularity in 2021, most of the people buying into them were speculating that they’d go up in value—they were doing it purely for financial gain. The news headlines about multi-million dollar NFT sales naturally led many to believe they were a fad, rather than appreciating what the underlying technology could be used for.

Now, we’ve seen the pendulum swing the other way, with some major brands refusing to mention the word “NFT” during NFT launches, possibly to avoid the negative perception many have of the word.

What this means for you: It was never about the NFT. What is the real underlying value? What are you really selling? If your brand is experimenting with NFTs (or plans to), focus on why it will help you to better serve your community and your customers rather than selling an NFT for NFT's sake.