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Break up with Web2. Blockleaders discusses Web3 bling. Is it for you?
Recorded: April 25, 2025 Duration: 1:05:19Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, industry leaders from Autonomous, Wunder, MeWe, and others explored the evolving landscape of Web3 marketing, emphasizing community engagement, innovative project launches, and the critical role of token economies. Key topics included the integration of AI in blockchain, new regulatory trends enhancing user data ownership, and the importance of building sustainable ecosystems through token launches.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, hi.
So I'm just trying to set up the spaces. As you know, it's always tricky to get X likes to play games.
So I've got a couple of speakers sorted out. Some I'm trying to. If you, if I mark, I see you there.
If you want to send me an application to speak, I think I did approve you, but it's not there now again.
So we'll just try and get people on board before we kick off so thank you for your patience Thank you. Oh no, the ads.
I've got to put some nice ambient music in the background there.
I'm waiting for one more speaker to come in and then we can kick off. E aí cool cool so I think we have everybody here that we need. I'm delighted. So it's a Friday,
so we're going to relax today. Welcome to the Block Leader Spaces. I'm glad everyone's here.
Today we're diving into a topic that's very close to my heart. How marketing is evolving
from the loud, polished world of web 2 to the messy magnificent
world of web 3. in web 2 marketeers broadcast in web 3 they belong it's less about shouting
through a megaphone and more about showing up in the group chat so we're going to explore how the
shift changes everywhere every everything from the way we build communities to the way we measure
success and how we deal with the crisis when it all goes pear-shaped. So first off, before we start, I would like our guests to introduce themselves,
and I will work my way clockwise around the room. So we'll start off with Peter. You're here from
Autonomous, you're the first person on my screen. Do you want to say who you are and what you do?
Absolutely. Check, check. Can you guys hear me all right?
Perfectly, yep.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Joanne, for inviting us you guys hear me? All right. Perfect. Yep. Awesome.
Thank you so much, Joanne, for inviting us. It's a pleasure to be here. Of course, you know,
we've had a long history and worked a lot in the past. So I'm very excited to be here. So my name is Peter. I am the CMO for the Autonomous Network. We are a layer one D-PIN that is focused on AI
powered D-Apps. High throughput infrastructure, highly scalable.
And essentially I've been in this role for about a year now.
I've been working in Web3 marketing exclusively
for the past five years.
Previously, before that, I've worked in traditional marketing
close to, let's call it about 12 to 15 years.
So I bring a nice mix of, you know,
let's call it Web2 and Web3 traditional marketing.
Brilliant.
Thank you so much for the introduction, Peter.
Yes, we do know you a long, long time.
It's all very good and it's great to have you here again today.
So next up again, working on my on my screen here, I have Wunder.
So Ryan is here from Wunder.
Ryan, do you want to tell everybody who you are and what you do?
Yeah. Hello. Good afternoon.
I hope everyone's well. My name is Ryan.
I'm from Wunder. Wanda is a decentralized social media
platform. We want to be the first fully verified platform. We are currently in build mode.
I've been at the business since January. Prior to that, I had a very much a Web 2 on and I was
the head of marketing for TikTok in Europe where I was there for about six years. So yeah, Web 3
is very new to me and looking forward to comparing my notes with the others
on the contrast and the differences
between Web2 and Web3 in the Arctic.
Well, that's interesting
because the TikTok thing is particularly interesting.
So we'll expect some very sharp, snazzy comments
from you today, Ryan, without the video,
just with the audio.
So thank you very much for that.
And next up on my screen, I have a new biz from Secret. A new biz, do you want to introduce yourself, please?
Yeah, absolutely. New biz here. I'm the primary ones. Been in Web3 for, oh, ages,
but exclusively Web3 work for about four years now. So been quite the ride so far. Definitely a lot of differences between marketing in Web 2 and Web 3. So looking
forward to this conversation. No, it's going to be great. Thank you very much, Anubis. It is a
fascinating topic. I certainly find it so. And then the last main speaker is Mark from
MeWe. Mark, don't you introduce yourself and tell me who you are, who MeWe is?
Hi, Julian. Thanks for having me on. Good to see you again, who Miwi is.
Hi, Julian. Thanks for having me on.
Good to see you again, or hear from you again.
My name's Mark Liu. I'm the head of product at Miwi.
We are a privacy-based social network,
originally Web 2-based, moving to Web 3 now.
We've migrated most of our user base onto the Polkadot chain,
and we're also building our own layer one now.
That's going to be on the Avalanche network.
So I've been doing Web2 product for about 17 years,
and I've been straddling Web2, Web3 now for about three years
as I've been working at MeWe and other projects.
So really happy to be here.
Thanks.
It is interesting, the depth of knowledge.
And also, we have here today my friend Lisa Gibbons, who's also going to be here. Thanks. It is interesting, the depth of knowledge. And also we have here today, my friend, Lisa Gibbons,
who's also going to be jumping in and out with questions and comments as she
feels fit and co-hosting here. But it is interesting.
There's a lot of web two people invited here today.
And I think that's interesting because we need to figure out how we're making
the move. And I think the shift has moved from top down messaging,
very much trickle down messaging messaging, to community-driven
storytelling. So how has that changed the role of the marketeer? I'm going to just go again.
A new bit, you want to tell me, you said yourself you had a lot of experience in Web 2 and Web 3.
How has that changed from top-down telling people, basically, to storytelling in communities?
Yeah, that's a really big question.
I think I would try to summarize it and in Web2, marketing is far more about paid placements,
things like ads, ad placement, getting your brand on TV was always king when when I was
in it.
Obviously, that may have changed a little bit in the last couple of years since I've been there. But yeah, TV ads, billboards, getting paid promotions on like there's still social media, of course.
Right. But it's paid promotions where and Web 3 uh the majority of your paid um advertisements
are going to get your platform banned as soon as the algorithm realizes that you're crypto based
or at least that was the case up to last year really that things may be changing soon but
it's uh definitely a different world in web 3. It's far more about community-based.
We use social media as basically the bread and butter.
It's very much about community-based social media presence.
Without your community, your marketing efforts are going to be almost ineffective.
your marketing efforts are going to be almost ineffective.
So I guess that's probably the biggest differences in my experience.
And I guess from what you're saying there,
also the point is that your community becomes part of the marketing arm.
Peter, do you want to maybe talk to that?
So it's not just talking to your community.
It's getting your community to relay on the message and amplify it.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Really great points there,
Anubis. I would like to add as well, I think there's an important distinction to make, right?
Typically when we're working in Web3, a lot of, let's call it a lot of these organizations that
are in Web3 are typically startups, right? So what does that mean? It means that, you know,
we're kind of inundated all around us all the time with very, let's call it very similar products,
right? You take someone that's not in Web3 and you try to explain to them what it is that we're
building, we're going to have a little bit of a problem, right? There's probably a large
knowledge gap that's probably going to happen. And what makes, you know, kind of that storytelling
driven approach very important in Web3 is that it's all about the narratives right how do you
differentiate yourselves how do you differentiate yourselves from you know maybe a dozen similar
different products and that comes down to the storytelling that comes down to the messaging
that comes down to you know the the differences in how you actually portray yourselves on a
marketing level and and and for me um that's a distinction that i found has has really helped
in kind of um separating yourself from the competition.
Cool. And then actually, maybe Mark, you want to add to that?
You mean you have a very large community in Web 2.
What kind of story are you telling them to get into Web 3?
Yeah, so a couple of things that we focus on mainly is ownership.
So this notion of like owning your data, owning your social graph, and also owning your content eventually, right? This is something that's not necessarily well understood, to just kind of be frank about it, because most people are just kind of being conditioned over the years to like, okay, well, I've got to submit to certain rules, privacy policies and terms and conditions and even norms. And so we have to kind of upend that. And what we've been doing over the past two years is, you know, having that conversation with people,
because we were, we have this community ethos, right? It's about 700, north of 750,000 communities that have been created on MeWe all time. And so we kind of already have this kind of built in.
And so what we've done is also look for KOLs, if you will, like we kind of have them already
built into the network and like just
kind of hear what their concerns are, like understand, like, what does it mean to have
privacy, you know, on a blockchain? And, you know, how do we explain that to people? Because,
you know, again, like we're Web 2 based moving to Web 3. And so, you know, understanding what
those concerns are and then making sure that we can kind of allay them.
That is cool. And actually, Ryan, you're also in social media too as well, but you're starting from
Web3, not Web2.
But what difference does that make for you?
I think the difference for us is you're speaking to people, and this is very much a Web3 thing,
is that people love to know about features in that audience, and it's a very different
way of talking to people.
So within Web3, everyone wants to know
what specific features and the details
and the specifications of what you're building.
And there's like a real interest in a way
that people aren't interested in,
the Web2 audience isn't that interested.
And so it's kind of, what we're finding is
as we start to expand our messaging,
our marketing to our Web2 audience,
we're then having to go back and look
at the benefits of those features and those products which is it's almost the reverse to
what how it would be in um in the web in the web 2 space so it's really about finding and telling
taking those stories and those those features and turn you into the benefits for web 2 people as um
as mark says and just helping educate that market. I think there's an opportunity for businesses like ourselves and like me,
to kind of help take people on that journey and kind of, I guess,
do some category marketing, right, where we can all just help people understand
and get a bit more comfortable with the Web3 space
because I think people are generally quite anxious and nervous about it.
Certainly when I speak to friends and family members about Web3,
there's a few horrified faces in there. So yeah, I think we can align people's concerns and help
people feel more comfortable with the principle. It's not just all Bitcoin and dGens.
And it is interesting. And also, the law is starting to catch up. Lisa,
you want to make a comment about the Utah bill that passed in the US?
comment about the Utah bill that passed in the US? Yeah just kind of further what Mark and Ryan
are both saying about it being community-based and you owning your own data and people understanding
that from the get-go when you're using these platforms you are entitled to your data you're
entitled to own it and the blockchain comes in really handy in that sense but they've just passed a bill this week i was reading about it um it's a utah law and it's the first state that is taking on this law
and it the law is that they will force social media companies and community development companies
to be interoperable with each other which is very interesting if you think about it and they want
you to be able to portal your data over from one
platform to another which is kind of forcing us to all think about our digital footprint and um
you know i think web 3 is in a really really interesting position to harness the the technology
to do some good there but i just wanted to chime in and say that well interesting because it's
newsworthy that's cool i'm just thinking so i i and say that because it's newsworthy.
Oh, no, it's cool.
I'm just thinking, so I wonder how that works.
I mean, if you think it in Web 2, user data is pretty much centralized and monetized and
it's all scraped up as we know.
But in Web 3, data is self-sovereign and decentralized.
Does that make it a harder job to port content from one platform to the other?
Well, I guess now you have these centralized platforms, these big tech giants and hoovering up
all the data and then selling it, feeding it, doing whatever they want with it in order to
create profit from it. But I think with decentralized technology, you can prove where
your data is. You can see where your data is and you can see when it's being transferred and used within different ecosystems so maybe the the first initial batch of users that are on the polka dot
well part of the polka dot ecosystem for me we um are through a frequency ecosystem which is
basically allowing people to interoperable be interoperable with each other so that's quite
interesting it's just a kind of a starting point for those systems to be able to allow the users themselves, even if the platform goes away in the
morning, the user still has access and control over their data. And it's something we don't
think about or talk about often. Maybe it's not really sexy enough, but it's something that I
think we'll all become a little bit more aware of, you know, in the future, especially with AI now as well.
Peter, you can go into AI a bit further because it's another world.
But it's certainly going to be important that we can track where our stuff is.
And if we need to get it from one place to another, I think it's going to be an interesting journey.
Do you want to talk to that, Peter, about the use of AI in affecting that, the transfer of
data? Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, what we're starting to see, and even on a global scale,
is that there's kind of two schools of thoughts that's kind of currently taking the center stage,
right? One is kind of the closed source, you know, large language models that
typically encompass the West, right? So you have OpenAI, which has GBT, Anthropic, Cloud Sonnet,
all these different large language models. And then you take a look at what's happening in the
East with, you know, DeepSeq and all these other open source, all these other open source language
models. And it's clear that data has really become a new currency.
It really is.
And there's a rush right now to consume as much data
within these different models as we possibly can.
And there's a belief that, you know, within the next couple of years,
there might not be that much digital data left, right?
And what's going to happen then?
And that really speaks to, you know, the value of our data,
that all of this is actually being used to train and infer and actually build the quality of these AI tools that we interact with.
So it's definitely a rabbit hole that we could definitely go down into.
Wow. So all the public data is being hoovered up.
Of course, there's a lot of silo data in companies and stuff like that, which maybe is not out there again.
silo data in companies and stuff like that,
which maybe is not out there again.
So maybe Anubis, you've been around a long time
as a layer one in Web3.
Do you find that, I mean, how does Secret approach data?
Because obviously you're involved
with confidential computing,
but how do you approach ownership of data?
Yeah, that's actually got quite a few, probably unintended consequences that are going to
come with that law. In Web3, a lot of it's based on public blockchain, which makes just
hoovering up that data and basically copy and pasting it into a new network quite easy, as long as you know how to use a blockchain explorer and several other tools.
But the way we always approach it is data ownership.
We take that part very seriously.
So what privacy really is in Web3 and in confidential computing is the ability to own your own data, make the decision yourself who gets to view it, use it, hoover it up.
And only you has that ability.
In public blockchains, everybody just has that ability by default in general.
Everybody just has that ability by default in general.
So the ability to own your own data, take it with you somewhere is kind of, it's a feature of secret network and other computing networks.
The, I guess, friction point of it would be transferring it into other, I guess, making it interoperable.
Secret does already have the interoperability.
It's built on Cosmos SDK, so it's already interoperable and able to pass data between Secret and any other cosmos blockchain quite easily. It gets a little tougher
when you get into other ecosystems like the EVM, although there was a recent upgrade that it's
probably going to make that much easier. Cosmos just had the Eureka upgrade, which made it,
the Eureka upgrade, which made it,
it brought IBC into Ethereum
and it's going to be broadening that
into just the greater EDM ecosystem
and eventually to everywhere.
So I think it's gonna be much easier
to allow the data ownership aspects
and interoperability overall
in a platform like what we have at Secret Network.
But to me, the most important point is that data ownership.
Just the fact that you and only you get to choose
who gets to access your data
or how long they get to access it.
And just having that control
where truly the majority, 98% or something,
of blockchains really just don't have that ability.
I think that's a really interesting thing.
Sorry, Julian, just to jump on that.
I think Wander are working with Secret Network
on a
partnership around this kind of thing and the way that we've been saying it is it's like you know
you you you hold your passport right and you go to the airport and you you wouldn't dream of giving
your passport over to somebody else to look after you know you go to the passport desk you hand it
over it gets stamped and you get it back and you put it back in your your purse or your bag or
whatever it is and it's that principle that we need to encourage people
and help people understand.
Because I think, you know, synonymously in Web2,
that's obviously not been the case.
It's like, effectively, you're handing over your passport
to somebody else.
It's like handing it over to the supermarket
and then getting it back in a few months' time, you know,
or never getting it back at all.
So I think it's just helping people understand how,
and putting it in terms that they understand
and make them realize how simple this is.
Wow.
And actually, because you're choosing, it's also important that the ownership is, and putting in terms that they understand to make them realize how simple this is. Wow.
And actually, because you're choosing,
it's also important that the ownership is the ecosystem.
Inubis talked about Cosmo ecosystem.
Ryan, you're a new Web3 startup.
So how did you choose which ecosystem that you are going to build on and why?
So when we're looking at it,
we're basically looking at who could help us achieve our goals and what what part what who out there had a similar ethos towards
uh creating and verifying idea and holding holding it securely and safely um and so we were looking
for partners that we that would help us do that and that's uh we were introduced to to the secret
network and um you know we need to to other partners we're working with as well um and yeah it was about people who were we could believe could help us achieve our mission
and our goal and um as you know we've talked about a rising tide lifts all boats and i think if if
we can if businesses within the web3 space can can unite and work together to to improve and educate
uh then then we all stand to benefit from that. I think, you know, currently there's what, you know,
four or five million people using Web3 and blockchain technologies.
But there's, you know, five billion people in this world,
all of them probably using Web2.
So there's a huge market out there.
So if we can find and fix these fundamental problems together,
then I think there's a huge opportunity and lots of white space for us all.
I think, is there 8 billion people in the world?
Who knows?
It's a lot of people, a lot of people.
Yeah, I always think of the Sega Dreamcast advert
from the 90s when it said 6 billion players,
but that's pretty quite out of date now, apologies.
Well, of course, I mean, the 9 billion that I'm quoting
would include children that wouldn't necessarily
be using applications.
So interesting then.
So, Mark, you mentioned that you're with the Polkadot.
Is your intention, I know we've kind of deviated from ownership,
but it is about moving data across ecosystems.
Will you, I mean, a lot of applications want to be blockchain agnostic.
Is that a movement you want to go to?
Absolutely.
So we went with Polkadot mainly because our partner, Frequency, they started to build on them.
The technology stack is fantastic.
And so we're getting a lot of the benefits of scale and being able to write social graph to a chain at scale. So like right now, I think we, MeWe itself, the entity, we write over like close to
50% of what's going on in the ecosystem. Like we just, you know, they're really like,
they're really good at accommodating that. However, we recognize that there are, you know,
challenges and limitations within the ecosystem itself. So the first one that we came across was liquidity. And overall, what did we
want to do in terms of being able to allow people to monetize ownership? So we have ownership rights
over their content, for example. So we looked around and we said, okay, who would be a really,
really good partner for this? And ultimately landed on Avalanche. And so our future is multi-chain.
So Avalanche is going to be our layer one
where we're building our coin.
We're also building a lot of protocols
to be able to support communities on-chain within Avalanche.
So these two, the frequency blockchain and our own,
they're going to have to play nice together.
And so our view of this is, yeah, of course,
we should have an open door because we see our role within the ecosystem is we try to be the on ramp to Web3.
So there'd be like the front door to where like, OK, like we can provide you with the identity.
We can provide you with the embedded wallet.
We can give you the good user experience and then furthermore, connect you to constellation of applications.
And, you know, that I think, you know, you have to be chain agnostic in order to find like where the value is.
you know, that I think, you know, you have to be chain agnostic in order to find like where the value is.
And actually you brought up, I'm jumping now in my topics now, but tokens and stuff like that.
So obviously if it's, if it's web three, there's typically a token floating around the place.
How does MiWi view it? I mean, do you think is it, is it just like,
does it transform engagement or you just get people who are token, token grabbing?
Yeah, we certainly hope it's not the latter.
What we've done is a lot of extensive modeling on how people are using the site, where are they getting the most value.
And then we've kind of built a bunch of matrices and looking at like, okay, well, how do we start to assign, like create a reward system, if you will.
to assign, like create a reward system, if you will,
and then use that reward system as a basis for airdropping tokens
that will then be used for purchasing things on Miwi itself,
whether it's things that we sell, other Miwi users sell, or even developers.
So we want to kind of use that, use the token more as a conduit
to be able to connect certain things and then on-ramp, off-ramp certain,
you know, as needed
as well.
And so, yeah, like we, our plans are really like, because MIUI's been around for 10 years
now.
And so when we talk about things, when we talk about planning, we think about, okay,
well, like what is the next 10 years of MIUI look like?
And how do we like build this thing to be lasting?
And so, yeah, certainly like we're not, like we see the token as a kind of a means
of exchange and not necessarily something that's like okay like you know we of course hope people
will will you know reap financial rewards from it but it's more about like what you know how are
they going to capture value and then you know use that token to um to gain more value okay thank you
and then uh ryan so you're about to launch or this year you're going
to launch a token. How important is having a token as part of your platform?
I think the token is essentially the lifeblood of the platform. As Mark's kind of said,
it's there to kind of keep things moving around within the platform. It has a value within
it and it's an incentive for people to carry out certain things within
within the platform but it's also a means for us to to kind of give back and rewards that wonder
there's a huge charitable giving element of our business so when users are exposed to advertising
40 of that advertising revenue is then shared with the user by the wonder token and they can
then pay that forward to charities and good causes so it's a real circular economy within within the platform and it helps connect all these different features
you know um similar to as mark says there'll be opportunities to you know tokenize uh your ip
and the content you're uploading um and you know and you can invite your communities to be part of
that and the wonder token is the is the kind of the liquid that joins all that together as well as you know having opportunities to to offer up an on-ramp it so um yeah it just it just
is the the kind of the oil that glues the machine together and helps connect people and i think
that's what again maybe one of the other differences between uh web 2 and web 3 platforms
is that there is this kind of um you know intrinsic, rather than just being your data that's being harvested
and kind of taken away,
that the wonder token or the token within the ecosystem
is the value that then gets passed around
and shared with users that you then can choose
to off ramp if you want to,
or you can keep it and invest it back into the community
and then into the platform.
So it just gives users that kind of shared ownership
and governance of what's going on.
I see that's a more holistic approach, isn't it, than just the speculation and when Moon. Peter,
what are you planning to do in autonomous with your token? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Great question.
So with us, you know, kind of being a more traditional L1 infrastructure project, our token
contributes in a number of different meaningful ways. Obviously
as one, it will serve as the main, let's call it a gas token of the network, right? Every time you
create a transaction, every time you swap, transfer, or any type of on-chain operation,
that will be utilized as the gas fee. Governance will be a big part of that as well, right? So
kind of, you know, your token will represent your nomination in the amount of
stake and the amount of vote that you have within the actual governance system itself.
And then additionally, as well, being able to participate in all the different applications
that exist on Autonomous, right? Utilizing that token will serve as your way, as the gateway into,
you know, utilizing our network to the fullest extent.
And then one thing I want to say as well,
the previous speaker just brought up a really good point,
is that comparing Web 2 to Web 3,
it's this nice feeling that we have in Web 3.
I mean, within Web 2, sure, you can participate in a number of different traditional financial assets,
such as stocks, options, bonds, whatever,
that represents your stake within this Web2 company. But within Web3, there's certainly this
more intrinsic community feeling. It feels like you're really contributing. Every time you
utilize a network token, every time you buy a token, and you're actually a part of that ecosystem,
you contribute to very granular or very high-level things. It very much feels as if you're actually a part of that ecosystem, you contribute to very granular or very high-level things,
it very much feels as if you're kind of building the path forward with that project.
So that's one of the things that I really enjoy
about the tokenization of projects within Web3.
Cool. And then you, Biz, you have a lot of experience
because Secrets had its token out for a long time.
Is it like two different marketing pushes you have to do?
And what's it like to deal with a community that actually holds token and looks at price, shall we say?
Well, I love what Peter was just saying.
A real dynamic shift in Web3 is that ownership levels.
So not only, I mean, Web3 is all about ownership, owning your data, owning your own financial sovereignty.
But yeah, every single token holder is a partial owner of the network itself.
They all, well, depending on your mechanisms, but for example, at Secret Network, like Peter was mentioning,
For example, at Secret Network, like Peter was mentioning, your stake, the amount of tokens you stake, denominates your voting power and governance and actually gives you that skin in the game on ownership of the network.
You get to have, I guess, authority in decisions that affect the network,
different upgrades, you're able to propose different,
propose different upgrades or, you know,
initiatives for community funds, different things like this.
So it's just, you really have to work with the community.
Yeah, with Secret, we're definitely not in startup mode.
We've been on mainnet since 2020.
So all of our vested tokens are unlocked.
There's no VCs and anything like that.
Our circulating supply is the total supply.
So we basically have just holders, right?
And so at this point in the game for us, it's very different to many in the space
because each cycle we have a huge influx of new projects coming to market. And to the original question, how is that dynamic marketing using
the token? In startup mode, it's a lot about how are you using the token? There is definitely
a lot of mercenary capital coming in. There's airdrop hunters, there's people buying in just for that launch
event, speculating on that. There's generally quite a bit of mercenary. However, there's
also some real value, depending on how you kind of construct your token launch.
depending on how you kind of construct your token launch.
I think it's very, for any like startups that are maybe listening to this,
definitely think very long and hard on how you make the utility of your token
and your launch event kind of work.
Because you want to incentivize your community. You want to use it to its fullest
extent to build that community because that is the backbone of your entire project.
But do your best to avoid and I guess shut down the gaming of your launch event. In Cosmos,
I guess shut down the gaming of, of your launch event.
In Cosmos, it's a, it's usually about airdrops.
So the airdrop hunters tend to come in, gather, game, game the airdrop,
get as much of an allocation as possible and then dump on the,
on the launch, which tends to hurt communities at, at, at the launch event.
In other communities, it's, there's different mechanisms.
So it kind of depends on your ecosystem.
However, for when you're kind of further into it,
like secret network,
you really need to think about the utility of the token.
And I think everyone that spoke before is already thinking on that. Like,
I love the ability to use it to monetize your social media content, like from Wonder and MeWe,
the secret network, utilizing it in governance decisions, gas, pairing it with liquidity for your networks, decentralized exchanges and things like that.
But you definitely need to put a good emphasis on your token holders, your community, and stay engaged with them.
Here, you want to have a pulse of the sentiment in your community.
you want to have a pulse of the sentiment in your community,
have those,
those chats where you can kind of feel out what the community wants as far as
a direction thing, things of that nature.
So it's very different from,
from the web two world where it's most of the decisions are happening in a
meeting room at the executive level and web3, a lot of your decisions start in
the pipeline of the community. They can filter through into your leadership channels, but you
always have to have that pulse of your audience. I think that's the thing that really shocked me
when I first came into Web3 was the availability of CEOs
and founders in the Telegram channel. I go, what? They're answering messages, questions there. So,
I mean, you are very much beholden to your community because there is that access there.
There's less space between everybody. I want to say, people who are listening,
please do follow our speakers. They've got a lot of good advice. So Autonomous Wonder,
Anubis, A Secret, and Mark, and Mark and MeWeek and Lisa and myself too as well
please are very happy if you want to follow us. So the other thing that struck me when I came
into this space and again from the marketing perspective is the prolification of that's a word
of influencers. That's not really I mean maybe correct me if I'm wrong but influencers are
seen to be the just the be-all and end-all and I heard recently
a quote one influencer who had a rather substantial following must be said but charging a grand per
tweet and I'm going whoa give me that job please well first of all I was shocked then I went no
please give me that job so is that something that you find is is there a lot of money floating around
the place are influencers as important as they they they are? Who'd like to jump in
there? I'll open the floor to anybody. I can jump in. I think influencers is a massive thing in
Web2 marketing as well, to be fair. I think it's a huge thing. And I think what people are starting
to wake up and crack it, if it was a thousand pounds for a post, then we'd be spending a lot
less money on marketing. But I think we, yeah, influencers are incredibly important.
But I think what people are quickly realizing is that this
happens again at the same Web2, is that you have these huge
KOLs and they have a huge following, but it's the
engagement and level of those followings that can be
sometimes difficult.
And it's about making sure you find people who really
resonate and partner up and are affiliated with your brand.
You know, in the Web2 space, you can work with kim kardashian as an influencer but
i mean i don't know if people are going to necessarily action and take um take an action
based on what she posts about whereas when you start working with smaller level micro influencers
and other influences then you get a lot more engagement and traction so it really depends
about what your objective is and it's very much the same in the Web3 space.
KOL is a really important part of our ecosystem.
And they are advisors to huge swathes of people.
But it's about knowing what you want to achieve
in your campaigns and who you can partner with
to deliver the correct outcome.
And not getting swept up in just purely based on user numbers,
but looking a little bit deeper.
Cool. And Lisa, I think you and I were having that conversation. How do you feel about influencers?
Yeah, obviously they're needed across the board. And I completely agree with Ryan. They, like, influencers isn't a new thing, right? They're big, huge in web too. Just look at Instagram.
It's just, you know know a platform for influencers mostly
and i'm heading to dubai next week with with the maybe team and and wonder i hope you're out there
as well and and secret and autonomous um i like if you look at dubai and you look at the influencers
that are the money they're making just to be out there and posting about dubai itself
um you'll get an idea of the Web 2 volume of
influencers.
In Web 3, it becomes really interesting because everyone is essentially an influencer and
where we hang out is X and Discord and the specific influencers on Telegram, the specific
influencers on Discord, specific influencers on X as well.
So you definitely have to work with the KOLs
and the influencers but I do feel going back to what Ryan was saying it depends on the type of
person or the type of influencer you need and the ones that are going to motivate people to take the
actions that you want them to take. So what are they going to sign up to? Are they going to listen
to you if you're you know know, depending on if you,
let's say you don't have a token and you want people to get motivated about your
values and, you know, data ownership, user ownership,
giving back to the content creators, you know, sharing of revenue streams,
that kind of stuff.
You need people that are incentivized to be around you with or without the token.
The token obviously will help, but that's my two interesting and mark what about you do you work a lot with uh influencers
actually we don't i was just thinking um based on what lisa and ryan were saying like this is where
the beauty of communities comes into play you know they i don't want to like you know dismiss
influencers but you know what i'm saying but like you know when you come to like, you know, dismiss influencers, you know, what I'm saying, but like, you know, when you come to me, where you come for the connections and you, and oftentimes like these are communities of less than 50 people, but they're always there and they're always with each other and they're influencing each other.
Right.
So they're talking about art, they're talking about travel and politics and what have you. And so like, you know, I think that this is like, you know, it's a very important
aspect that gets overlooked. And that's kind of what we're trying to accommodate as well,
or even kind of, sorry, we want to like really support and flourish is that like, how do you
reward these smaller communities for like influencing each other? And then like, also
furthermore, the people that don't necessarily speak up, right. Cause of the, like the dynamics
of social media, like most people don't really post things. They just kind of lurk and, you know, maybe they'll comment or they'll like something.
Like, how do you reward those people? And how do you like incentivize them to like,
build the community in a larger way? Like, those are things, those are sort of the dynamics that
we're really interested in. And then on the influencer side, you know, like we are, we are
building an ambassador program, thanks to all the hard work that Lisa has been doing. And, you know,
we hope that they also will kind of take that spirit as well which is to say like come and like you know build their
own communities within MeWe as well and then also like listen to what they have to say and then you
know funnel that all the way up right because we like our vision is like we want to take MeWe
completely decentralize it and allow all of these communities to have a say in what happens in the
platform overall and so that's like when I about influencers, I think about like the influence of a community for the platform. Cool. I like the
idea that the community is, it's where you're at, and that you can influence small groups, people
who have a shared bond of vision, passion, topics that they want to talk about and communicate about.
Peter, is that your understanding too as well? Just in terms of marketing,
do you think it's community-based rather than influencer-based?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And maybe I can share a bit of insight for myself.
You know, having been through a few cycles,
working for different foundations within the space,
one thing that I've noticed is that, you know,
kind of the meta of Web3 marketing tends to change from cycle to cycle, much as the different narratives as we go from cycle to cycle start to change.
Right. You know, a couple of years ago, let's go back even right back in 2016, 2017, we had the whole ICO phase.
That was the first time that that whole paradigm really started to come out.
And then all the different marketing around then, 2021 we kind of had defy summer etc etc
this year we had you know the whole ai craze um and in a much very similar way i do believe that
marketing changes as well and it's a testament to how quickly the space is rapidly evolving
things that used to have work you know very effectively in the past just don't seem to work
as much now therefore it's very important to kind of stay in the thick of it to understand you know, very effectively in the past just don't seem to work as much now. Therefore, it's very important to kind of stay in the thick of it, to understand, you know,
what exactly the mindshare, what the narrative shift is slowly starting to be in order to
actually tap into the demographic of users that you actually want.
In terms of influencers, you know, I kind of have a love and hate with that type of,
you know, engaging with those types of folks.
As you mentioned, Jillian, some of them offer, you know,
kind of really disproportionate prices that are just completely unpegged
to the rest of the market.
You mentioned, you know, $1K for a tweet.
I'll be honest, I've seen personally, I've gotten offers as high as $20K for a tweet.
And in my perspective, it's just like, in what world does this, you know,
validate any type of spend? So for me, I think as a project, it depends on what you're looking
for. One of the speakers vocalized it very well. It depends what the outcome is that you want.
And once you're able to determine that outcome, you can kind of work back to figure out what the
exact strategy it is to get that user acquisition or to get that type of focus on your project.
KOL's influencers can definitely contribute to a portion of that visibility, a portion of that mindshare.
But at the end of the day, I think a question that all Web3 marketers need to ask is, is the spend worth the ROI?
That's a good point. That, that 20 grand a tweet.
I want that job.
Why can't I get that job?
That'd be lovely.
So I'm just thinking then,
and you have secret soldiers, don't you?
Which are kind of like micro influencers.
How do they work?
Yeah, I love what Peter was just saying.
He's absolutely right on the meta changing every cycle.
What works very well in one cycle changes in the next.
So I think a lot of people have a misconception that influencers are kind of the be all end all.
And it's a trap that a lot of startups get kind of
stuck in. I've noticed. Yeah, the ROI on the majority of them just really isn't there. Having
worked with quite a few and seen, I guess the cycles change. I started in 2017. So I've been around for a few cycles now.
And yeah, the influencers in previous cycles had a far higher effect. I've noticed in this cycle,
especially the micro KOLs tend to do much better than the gigantic, you know, million plus follower
accounts. And, and it's interesting interesting because those micro KOLs,
if you're going to do some kind of a paid campaign with them,
are going to be far more affordable, a far better ROI
when you start diving into the metrics
compared to those million followers.
Because to be honest, the majority of these gigantic accounts
are non-active followers and or bots.
So a lot of times that huge $20,000 per tweet is really going to get you very little engagement compared to someone with a much smaller following that is very engaged with their community.
So doing some diligence on who you're working with is a must.
I think influencers, they are definitely an important role, especially for startups.
When you're a startup, you really have to break through the noise.
There's so many new projects launching every day in Web3.
And so you have to break through the noise somehow.
But you have to do your diligence on who you're working with, why you're working with them.
It's important to kind of align yourself with an influencer that actually follows your ethos and will hopefully actually engage with your community beyond just that tweet.
Right. Find the ones that actually want to work with you because they believe in you, right?
And that can be a little tough, but that's why we call it diligence, right?
And now that said, I do like the term KOL a little better than influencer, key opinion leader.
the term KOL a little better than influencer, key opinion leader, you find the people in your
community that are outspoken because they believe in you, in your project, what you're doing,
they're aligned with your ethos, and they're bullposting because they believe in it.
Try to help them build up. Try to grow with them. Get them to a point where they have an audience
and continue working with them because they're to a point where they have an audience and continue working
with them because they're going to be your biggest advocates.
Generally, I find the ROI is definitely going to be much higher when you're working with
people in your community.
If you're blessed enough to have accounts that are decent size
definitely start with them
your community is always your breath and butter
it's the backbone of your project
so in almost every aspect
you want to start there
rather than throwing
or slashing money around
it with external
people
I'll accept 20K for a tweet.
I really will.
I don't mind.
Right.
Who wouldn't?
But I mean, it's the people paying that 20K.
I feel for them.
Yeah.
I'll do it naked.
Scare the horses.
So tell me now, I'm just thinking now,
we're coming close up to the yard
10 minutes left but i want to also ask influences on kols kol is good differential a different
differential different differentiating term thank you and you miss i'm thinking also as well because
the impact of ai on just on our general content um and i'm going to go to ryan because obviously
with tiktok you would have seen a lot of um content, I presume, or you tell me, in TikTok and Web 2.
And is that replicated? Is it worthwhile using it in Web 3?
Yeah, well, interestingly, at TikTok, just to add another term for the nomenclature, we used to use the term creator rather than influencer.
And the idea being that people that were creating content around their passions and what they were rather than creating content purely just influence in the same way that Anubis pointed out the key opinion leaders is a marked difference to influence, I think.
But in terms of content, I think it very much depends on what it is.
There's people out there who create AI artwork, which is phenomenal based on the briefs and the stipulations they give to the technology.
I think that you're going to see in the Web2 space a huge increase in what's been termed
as AIGC.
And that's purely because people have found that making high quality content is really
expensive.
And so lots of the platforms from YouTube to TikTok to Meta, they're all producing AI
that will enable advertisers
to make much more content very, very quickly
and very, very cheaply.
And of course that content is then available
to creators and influencers and KOLs and whoever.
So that you are gonna see a huge population
of that type of content.
I think platforms have their work cut out
to be able to mark and label that content
appropriately and effectively so people
understand that it's um it is produced by ai but again it kind of depends on what why it's being
made some people as i say are making it and it is it's really of a high quality it's because it's
their specialism other people are making it because they're playing a volume game um so you will see
more and more of it i think it's up to platforms to market correctly users need to navigate that
world uh with a bit of savviness and smartness
and not necessarily believe in this straightaway.
But I think it's going to be a real challenge
and ultimately an education process that society needs to go on
to understand what AI content is and looks like.
I mean, probably not the most timely thing to say,
but do you remember the AI pop image that went viral a couple of years ago?
People genuinely thought that was real, that was in mainstream newspapers.
And that was maybe a bit of a penny drop moment to people thinking, oh, wait, we can all get fooled by this. So yeah, it's going to be a really interesting time. We need to educate people so
they can keep themselves safe. That's interesting. And Mark, you're with a large community at your fingertips too as well.
How important is the rise of AI in terms of content?
Well, personally, there's some really interesting things, projects that I've seen,
I'm sure that you all have seen that have done really good work with AI generation, content generation.
And so those kinds of things, I think it's freed up a lot of creativity. And so I'm excited about some of these things.
I'll just shout out through the channel that I found.
It's called The Door Brothers, DOR Brothers.
I've only got a few videos, but I like what they do.
And when I see stuff like that, I think, okay, well, there's a pretty interesting future for entertainment there.
Having said that, I think I totally agree with what Ryan says.
If we're not really careful, we're going to lose our grip on reality, whatever we determine as reality.
And so from a blockchain perspective, one of the things that we were kind of keen on is this notion of provenance.
And can you establish where did something come from so in the case of the pope right which i think is a really funny instance like how do we know that that that that came from that person
can we establish that okay i actually know that this was it came from the vatican it was a you
know april fool's joke i'm just making that of course but you know that that's like that that's
that's going to be super important you know know, to be able to prove these things.
And for us, like, we don't necessarily have, like, a huge challenge with misinformation, although, like, you know, we do see it from time to time.
So we're not, like, you know, we're not immune from it.
But for us, like, because we don't really necessarily amplify things.
necessarily amplify things. We don't have like algorithmic feeds. So that doesn't kind of,
We don't have, like, algorithmic feed.
we don't put a lot of that type of content unless it's like popular amongst somebody that's really
popular on MeWe. It's not to say that we're going to stay that way forever, but I think that like
for us, what we're looking for is like, yeah, those, you know, like what are those guards that
we can put in place? What's the education that needs to happen to help people to distinguish between these things?
Because it's only going to get better.
And actually, Peter, Autonomous has AI at its heart.
So how do you work with AI?
Yeah, absolutely.
So in quite a few different ways.
Number one, we have our own agentic framework.
We've made it quite easy for users to spin up their own agents on
chain. And kind of the main USB around that is it kind of comes back to the network. All of our
data is stored on chain permanently. So if you can think of how that can potentially benefit an AI
agent, well, it can benefit in many different ways. Number one, it has a longer, let's call it
retention window, right? So the ability to, or rather a longer context window.
So the ability to retain memory, the ability to audit the actions of an AI agent on-chain
becomes very valuable.
We can actually see how this agent comes towards its decision-making within a very verifiable
and tamper-proof way.
And then on top of that, one of the things that our researchers have been exploring
has been the introduction of MCP into our protocol as well.
So just kind of making it very easy for users,
for developers to streamline agentic workflows
into their processes
is one of the things that we're focusing on.
Additionally, on top of that,
being a high throughput network,
we are enabling
the, let's call it development of high powered AI applications on our network. So any builders,
developers out there that are building things related to AI applications, then we invite
you to check out Autonomous. We kind of have everything to support you in building out
the application that you need.
Wow. Okay. That's interesting. And the new biz,
the role of AI in secrets work.
Yeah. AI is definitely a blessing
and a curse.
Loved what everyone's had to say
actually in this.
There's a lot
of benefit in AI tools
as far as efficiency. There's definitely some downsides. There's always the in AI generated content. There's always the, I guess, pitfall of people becoming lazy, just just copy and pasting whatever the AI tool generates for you and maybe not not checking it so well or
personalizing it at all. So be careful in that. I try to use AI personally as little as possible.
It's just it's easy to see what when AI is when content is generated by AI.
At the same time, AI-generated art, graphics, video,
there's some amazing things that can be done with that.
Definitely use some AI tools in graphical design and video generation.
That's been a real blessing in my personal role.
For secret network, the approach to AI is, again, coming back to that own up.
So the ability for a person when they spin up that agent to keep it personalized, make a granular workflow for it
that is personalized to you,
can actually contain sensitive data
and work on proprietary use cases for businesses
and not leak that out.
At the same time, I also see a pitfall with AI.
As someone else mentioned, just that, I guess the same time, I also see a pitfall with AI, as someone else mentioned,
just that, I guess the concern of deep faking,
there's definitely going to be a time
that we're going to see more and more scams
kind of generated using AI,
spoofing influencers, big accounts and things like that, which I have
a real concern for. So something we definitely need to solve for. And I think Web3 and blockchain
infrastructure is one of the biggest and best steps in kind of starting that solution.
Cool. Okay, that's very interesting. Do you know, the only bad thing about this space,
that we all agree with each other,
there's been no fights.
A good fight always livens things up.
I don't remember, but people's time is very important.
So maybe a 30 second,
if I go around the room, a 30 second point from you guys,
you think, what is the future of Web3 marketing,
you know, and what you're doing,
but just a 30 second, this is the most important thing, KOLs, AI, whatever it is.
And then I get Lisa maybe to say, well, what struck her most,
just about, I don't know, the most exciting thing
that she heard in this very, very polite space
with no arguing, I'm sorry, I should have brought
some arguments, some arguments people in.
Anyway, so I'll go around the room again.
So we'll start off with-
Can I jump in first, sorry.
I've got to jump because speaking of marketing,
so I've literally got to hop to a Telegram AMA
that I'm hosting with.
Oh, go, go, go.
That is the most important thing to me right now.
The Wanda community is where it's all at.
Exactly as all the fine panelists there have said,
community building is what it's all about.
So yeah, I'm going to go and spend some time with them,
but it's been lovely.
If you want to join the Wanda community, join us on Telegram. We um yeah i'm gonna go and spend some time with them but it's been lovely if you want to join the wonder community join us on telegram we'd love
to have you there and continue the conversation thank you chalene and lisa for hosting and thank
you for the panel and we'll see you very soon thank you brilliant okay thank you ryan that's
brilliant okay who else wants to jump in because we're all the top of the hour the 30 second takeaway
30 second takeaway.
I'm going to go for.
I'll jump in real quick.
I would definitely just say start with your community, empower your community, reach out to your key opinion leaders that already exist within your communities.
That's where it's at.
Brilliant.
Mark, I can jump on to you next.
What's your key takeaway?
Yeah, no, I'm just going to be the broken record on this one, you know, because we are communities. So full feet ahead there. Really great panel. Thank you all.
Thank you very much. And Peter?
I'm going to go a bit higher here. I'm going to go just broadly marketing. Where I see
marketing going in the next couple of years with the proliferation and acceleration of
AI is that we're going to see fully customizable targeted ads based on the user experience.
Whatever it is that kind of tickles your skin, ruffles your feathers,
that algorithm is going to tap into it so much.
And it sounds scary, but it's coming.
We're looking at probably a very Black Mirror-esque world
in which all the content that we see is going to be extremely
streamlined and extremely catered to the specific end user. So hyper personalization, wow okay,
and I will do, just for the record, I will do tweets for, I'll do bargain rate tweets, 10k
a tweet, I'll do that. Anyway Lisa, anything that jumped out at you in this conversation today?
Yeah, I love the conversation and feeling the love from everyone like you
said Jill we need someone to come in and kick a few butts but it's lovely to
feel the community spirit right here in this space and amazing host Jillian as
always. I thought the whole idea of user ownership and community first they're
the two things that really shone in this in this space if you put your community
first and you think about giving them back through the token or through facilitating,
allowing them to own their data or be part of the community in different ways,
then we're all going to be benefited from that.
And the proliferation of AI, like Peter was saying, I think it's going to be fascinating.
Autonomies is a fascinating project to watch in this space.
I just want to thank Wonder Secret, Autonomous, and Meiba
for being here, because I think that we are all learning
together and growing together.
And we can look forward to a very bright future of Web3
if we continue to do these kind of things.
Brilliant.
Thank you, Lisa, for a great summary.
Yes, apart from the fact that nobody thought, it was a very interesting conversation. Thank you, Lisa, for a great summary. Yes, apart from the fact that nobody fought,
it was a very interesting conversation.
Thank you very much for your time, everybody.
I really appreciate it.
And I will follow up with some notes on this talk,
because it's too good.
There's gold in these conversations.
So thank you very much, and have a wonderful weekend,
a wonderful Friday, wonderful weekend.
And as my good friend Justin always says, go out into nature.
Don't stay in front of your computer.
Ground into nature at some stage. So thank you thank you very much everybody and we will chat with you
soon Thank you.
