Sub Thread Weekly is your best source for a quick debrief across the latest news, actions, events and happenings in Web3 Fashion Media and Marketing. It’s curated and published by Global Designer Network DAO member Alma. Weave your way through the threads below to get all caught up on the culture.
This time we host an Interview with @NatalieCrue, an energetic community-creator in the booming web3 music and media space.
“We really went hardcore grassroots and we found out that it just felt better than doing any paid kind of marketing or ads or anything like that.”
After some apparently unavoidable technical difficulties getting my wifi and sound settings in order 🤦♀️🙄 I finally managed to get the call going, with much gratitude for Natalie’s patience. The conversation was RICH with useful insights for every designer and brand-builder in the web3 space and it quite frankly BLEW MY MIND. I love to see how traditional and rigid approaches can be DISRUPTED… So let’s take a deep dive into this interview:
What was your Metaverse Music Festival (MVMF) experience like?
Beautiful insanity. Myself and two friends of mine who have a show in the vibrant Token Smart community, we were talking about wanting to do a festival and there were people in our community wanting to do the same thing, so even though we didn’t exactly know how it would look like, everyone was super excited about it. But it's totally web3 in terms of interesting coordination efforts. And so within a span of days, we got into Discord and it actually took us a few months to wrap our heads around what it actually meant to co-produce a decentralised music festival. We were figuring out what it looks like to build a festival from the ground up with our community, bringing micro-communities together into this space, bringing the wearable makers, designers, fashion folks and musicians together to build this collectively. So it was a massive effort to put this together and we did a 72-hour Music Festival, it was actually insane. But it was incredible!
How did you manage to bring together and coordinate many separate communities?
Everyone who worked on this project had previous experience in the festival space, but nobody had done anything to that magnitude before, especially not with actual communities in the way that we approached our project. We had a massive amount of channels on Discord and so I and the crew became like a weaving centre to put all these pieces together. Even something seemly simple like the schedule was probably one of the hardest parts - to make sure to equitably stream events and make sure that we're hosting space and have equal streaming time for everybody. There were times when we had to figure out how to make a decision on behalf of each other and not just according to our respective agendas, so there was a few necessary hair pulling sessions to coordinate everything, but it worked out.
How were you able to build such a strong unified community in a short amount of time?
Well the core crew came from Token Smart, which is its own community within the web3 space and we all knew each other and most other creatives we connected with also knew each other. This familiarity was super helpful for building the bridges to manoeuvre between so many communities and we became a kind of web between communities, connecting all these people together that were eager to contribute.
We also discussed in meetings how to nurture people in the space and make sure that we're sharing work equitably and that we are holding space for difference of opinions, even if that means that we argue for the next eight hours. And so by collectively laying down those frameworks for the community we began to foster a sort of collective community of communities.
Did you do any paid media to spread awareness?
The way that we got people into the festival was just word of mouth. We were on Twitter all the time and most of us have a lot of social capital in different communities so we were just inviting people to hang out at our festival, live tweeting and streaming on Twitch. We put a lot of stuff on the event calendars at Decentraland and Cryptovoxels, but we also had non-web3 people that came to us with a lot of pull in their respective communities. We really went hardcore grassroots and we found out that it just felt better than doing any paid kind of marketing or ads or anything like that. Many people would put up banners and create little art installations or projects to show that they're participating and people did that on their own, we didn't ask them to do it. And that's essentially how the word out for what we were doing.
What kind of messaging did you use to connect with your audience and convey the ‘brand’ on Twitter?
We have some people in our community that are very brand-designer and brand-management focused, while others in the community are really rebellious towards that idea. So we did eventually have a branded website, flyers, and design for the festival, but some people in the community just did their own thing, creating their own flyers for their event, but also a lot of memes, gifs, other funny graphics and theme songs to add their own splash to the identity of the festival. And that just got all over Twitter. So in many ways there's a collective identity and also an intentionally branded identity.
Upon the end of this week’s deep dive it seems like authenticity, speed and organic nature of communications is at the forefront of web3 communities. They behave almost like living organisms where members are proactive in contributing their vision, values, and skills.
Feel free to join a new Sub Thread Weekly journey next week and connect with me on Twitter @alma_almaks 🧐
Any patronage of The Thread Weekly goes directly to the Global Designer Network Treasury and core GDN member writer for the week (70/30), for further growing out the infrastructure, community and market of web3 fashion, the open metaverse and more. For this week, the core writer was GDN member AlmaKS.
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