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Editor’s Note: This article was adapted from a presentation of the same name by Adam Ilenich, head of community at Rarible, at Adweek’s 2022 Social Media Week event in New York.
Much like any industry, the world of NFTs is simultaneously super broad and super specific, leaving many marketers wondering where to start—and the acronyms you see online don’t make the art of deciphering cryptic crypto tweets any easier. WAGMI? GM? DYOR? FUD? Oy.
If brands are going to succeed in Web3, they need to start by listening and mastering the following four areas: slang, platforms, content and trust and safety.
Let’s start with slang
I’m sure you’ve seen the “how do you do, fellow kids” meme which became popular a few years ago when brands started dipping their toes in “on fleek” territory. It was a weird time for the internet in which brands were testing the waters with phrases like “stan,” “sis,” “sus” and “spilling the tea.” Fortunately, most—most—brands have taken a few steps back from that ledge and have resumed normal functioning.
One of my favorite examples of slang gone wrong was Gothamist who tweeted: “The L Train Is Particularly Deadass This Fine Morning.”
Please note: the tweet has since been deleted. Cringe.
If you’re familiar with the term “deadass,” that’s deadass not how you use it correctly in a sentence. Can you think of a time when a co-worker, friend or parent used internet slang incorrectly? Did you immediately die? It sticks out like a sore thumb.
Brands and marketers who want to break into the NFT conversation must avoid situations like this at all costs. Mastery over a community’s vocabulary is essential for brand participation and can only be done through listening.
Let’s dive into a few popular acronyms to get started:
- WAGMI: We Are Gonna Make It.
- NGMI: Not Gonna Make It.
- GM: Good Morning.
- Fren: Friend.
- DYOR: Do Your Own Research.
- FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
This slang is akin to professional jargon and becomes natural over time, and while individuals may find the community willing to help them understand what these terms mean, brands will be afforded no such luxury.
Listening. Is. Essential.
Late last year, Pepsi released a collection of microphone NFTs called “Pepsi Mic Drop,” making it one of the earlier brands to release an NFT collection.
Here’s Pepsi’s launch tweet:
But all was not well in the land of brand Twitter: The conversation around this announcement featured a minefield of brands that had no Web3 presence at all hopping into Pepsi’s replies using slang reserved for the space—poorly. And the community called them out.
Budweiser replied, “Welcome brand friend. WAGMI.”
User @itstylersays replied, “Imma let y’all know this cringe asf.”
Any time anyone builds or contributes to the Web3 space, even if imperfectly, it’s a win. But from the perspective of the NFT community, throwing around slang before you’ve established yourself in the space, especially as a brand, just looks bad.
Pepsi, an international corporation earning nearly $100 billion in revenue per year, is tweeting “WAGMI”—which, as we learned, means “We’re all gonna make it.” It shows that the team behind this project was wildly out of touch with the conversation.
Web3 is all about decentralization, so when billion-dollar brands—which represent quite the opposite—throw “fren” and “WAGMI” around, it looks disingenuous and makes experienced members of the community scratch their heads.
This isn’t to say that brands don’t have a place in Web3. They do, and they will. But language is the quickest way to either earn or lose trust in the space. Understanding when to use—or not use—slang, just like when to hop on or not hop on a trend or meme, is crucial in this space. Context, timing and word choice all matter.
Onto platforms
As social marketers, we’re all wary of new platforms for our brands. Joining a new channel has to be a strategic decision. Brand leadership will ask (good) questions like:
- Why should we join that platform?
- Is it the right fit for our brand’s persona?
- What’s your strategy?
- Who is going to create the content and manage the community?
Social media managers are still tiptoeing around organic content on TikTok with varying degrees of success. Did you see the TikTok where the Duolingo owl had babies? It was shocking and surreal, but the audience response was enthusiastic and—for the most part—positive, and the video went viral on multiple platforms. (Though it’s worth noting that since that moment, Duolingo has misstepped while commenting on a TikTok about Amber Heard. Every brand has good days and bad days, even the ones that seem to have their social strategy down pat.)
There are two main channels for Web3 and NFT conversations: Twitter and Discord.
Twitter is the “town square of the internet,” in the words of Twitter’s vp of global brand and consumer marketing Beverly Jackson, where the broader conversation happens about the everything Web3: NFTs, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, DAOs, tokens—you name it.
Discord, however, is a completely different beast. Essentially, a Discord server is a chatroom for people who rally behind a project, collection or brand, and who are all there because they want to connect with each other. It’s a never-ending stream of “GM”s and conversation that, when activated and moderated effectively, can be the epicenter of a brand’s superfans.
Once you’ve gotten familiar with Discord, it’s time to start thinking about the content your brand will create as it joins the Web3 conversation.
Web3 content is a mix of shitposting, memes, market speculation and technical analysis. (Shitposting is peak internet—it’s the perfect blend of smarts, nuance, humor and perspective.)
User @Locodoco tweeted:
This user is leveraging humor to acknowledge the volatility of the space while still not entirely knocking the space. Bear markets happen. We’ve just gotta grin and … bear it.
Anyone need a good meme? Look no further than Web3. This one by @HODLGandalf references the scene in Titanic in which the violinists are all playing a quartet as the ship goes down. The user has replaced the heads of the musicians with a popular NFT project, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and saying he’ll hold his NFTs even as the market goes down.
It’s relevant, timely and has a strong point of view.
Market speculation is something you see all the time in the Web3 and NFT conversation and shouldn’t be confused with financial advice. Everyone needs to do their own research and make decisions for themselves based on their expendable capital and their comfort with risk.
@heytylr tweets:
You can see the tweet starts with “gm,” so he’s greeting his fellow Web3ers who are just as bullish about the space as him. And I agree, Tyler. New technology takes time to gain mass adoption, and with the upcoming merge coming to the Ethereum network making it faster, cheaper and more environmentally friendly, I think we’re going to see a huge uptick in usage. (And hopefully price as well.)
Technical analysis also happens a ton within the cryptocurrency conversation within Web3 but spills over into the NFT conversation more and more once the market starts to pick up or lose speed. Essentially, people take real-time market data to identify trends and make predictions.
Here’s @PhariseesHouse, a member of the #mfer community (an NFT collection of stick figures sitting at a desk) who pulls and publishes stats about the project. This type of analysis is used to predict the health of a project and ultimately its success:
The NFT conversation is unlike anything else that has existed before it. Shitposting is the norm, and memes are the everyday language of these communities. The bar for Web3 content is high, and brands will be expected to meet it.
Lastly, let’s talk about trust and safety
For many people in Web3, corporations stand for big money and centralized power. Think about it: These corporations have global influence, an obscene amount of money and nearly unlimited resources all pointed in one direction: to sell. Web3 is about decentralization, autonomy and the privacy of the individual. So there’s still a lot of suspicion when a brand announces it’s getting into the space.
Additionally, there are a ton of scams in Web3, most notably ones that take advantage of people being new or people being confused.
And one of the advantages of Web3, decentralization, can also be one of its biggest pitfalls. When you transact on the blockchain, there isn’t a bank you can go to to reverse the transaction or report fraud. There isn’t a government agency you can report scams to, because oftentimes, someone’s identity in Web3 isn’t public—it’s just a series of letters and numbers in a wallet address. How is the government supposed to track down someone who is just letters and numbers? Brands need to be absolutely ironclad in their security with any NFT activity they launch, or they risk people’s money and trust.
Safety in Web3 comes from one of two things: education or experience. Brands have an opportunity to educate their audiences on topics like securely setting up a wallet, storing your seed phrase, ignoring DMs from Discord bots, etc. The alternative is letting newcomers learn on their own, which is costly. NFTs and ETH get stolen every day from unsuspecting people who think they’re getting a bargain or secret deal. If something sounds too good to be true, then it’s very likely a scam.
Brands do have a place in Web3. But how they enter the space and activate in the space needs to be done carefully in order to be successful.
Your homework after reading this article?
- Learn the lingo.
- Master the platforms.
- Create compelling Web3 content.
- Preach safety while earning trust.
Thanks, fren. WAGMI.