gm, i wrote the post below for my newsletter. I’m looking for people to challenge me / provide perspectives or co-write this post. Thank you!

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“I often picture a web3 CM as a someone typing relentlessly on their keyoard, answering hundreds of messages and switching from tab to tab at lightspeed. 

Literally (CM)ing through their day ⚡⚡⚡

In today’s post we’ll explore some of the key functions of community managers and how web3 is drastically expanding their scope.

The role of a web3 Community Manager (CM)

Some of the key objectives of the role are to: 

The means to achieving this can vary depending on a given community needs and culture. Below I’ll mention broad categories of means and quick examples of tools to execute them.

I like to think that the community team’s duty is to match needs and opportunities between community members and the project itself to create win-win outcomes

. They are matchmakers or bridges between these the project and community. 

Thinking about it this way, community members are a new resource to the project and the project is a new resource that community members can tap into. And its on the community team to create a market between both.

I often had an intuition that Product Management was the role that most characterizes web2 organizations and that CMs would be the same for web3 orgs. After all in both cases the role arises from growing complexity and a whole new category of problems.

Community Manager and Product Manager - An Analogy

Product management was born in the 1930s in the FMCG industry and expanded with the rise of software in the 1970s. At companies like Microsoft, software grew exponentially in complexity and engineers couldn’t solve both micro technical problems and high level design of products (at least not well). So Product Managers were keeping track of the whole product and making sure it was exactly matching what the users needed.

I see a similar pattern in the rise of community management as a way to deal with the new pockets of user interactions unlocked by social media in the 2010s. Of course communities existed before that but communication channels were not as widespread and the quantity of interactions was lower — marketing could handle it. But marketing couldn’t handle all the micro community interactions, so social media manager was born, then community manager. The role has expanded a lot already but it will much more.

Therefore, I like to see parallels between the CM and PM roles:

This analogy is more applicable to web3 CMs than other CMs to this date as those not only manage manage comms and vibes but also *organize* community contributions.

What does the future of (CM)ing look like?

Today we can still distinguish web2 CMs and web3 CMs the same way we could distinguish between the 

In a way the “future [of community management] is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”.

All the practices that have emerged up until today still account for the majority of existing practices.

These days CM role is becoming much more strategic as projects value their communities more than before and try to make the most of each micro interaction:

All the above are drastically expanding the scope of community management into other key functions of the project and even though we’re still early I feel like we’re entering the 1970s era of community management when product management took off at companies like Microsoft and the tech industry started funding this new role.”

thanks for reading, lmk if it resonates or not.

Santiago

louis

Osioke Itseuwa

gm, i wrote the post below for my newsletter. I’m looking for people to challenge me / provide perspectives or co-write this post. Thank you!


————————————————————————————-


“I often picture a web3 CM as a someone typing relentlessly on their keyoard, answering hundreds of messages and switching from tab to tab at lightspeed. 


Literally (CM)ing through their day ⚡⚡⚡


In today’s post we’ll explore some of the key functions of community managers and how web3 is drastically expanding their scope.

The role of a web3 Community Manager (CM)

Some of the key objectives of the role are to: 

attract community members

onboard and engage community members

retain them and grow their relationship with other members as well as the project’s team

advanced: have some members establish more complex business relationships with the project (as contributors ✨). 

The means to achieving this can vary depending on a given community needs and culture. Below I’ll mention broad categories of means and quick examples of tool

Thoughts on web3 community management (looking for feedback!)