AMA #15 — Influence with Impact

For this week’s AMA, we’ll be focusing on a subject which gets a lot of attention in the crypto world. If you’ve spent more than ten minutes in any crypto project Telegram group, no doubt you’ve seen someone ask a variation on the timeless crypto question: “wen marketing?” — maybe you’ve asked it yourself. That’s what we’re going to be talking about this week — marketing, PR, social media, community — and we have an extremely special guest to help us navigate the subject: Emma Sparrow, from Influence With Impact.

Formerly the driving force of sustainable swimwear and ocean activism brand Ocean Mimic, Emma set up her brand new marketing service Influence With Impact this year. The agency’s purpose is to bring the know-how and experience amassed by Emma to other organisations working in environmental protection, to help them build their communities, get the word out about their work and raise awareness about the issues they’re tackling.

We’re extremely excited to reveal (you’ve probably guessed it by this point) that we’ll be working with Emma starting next month, to achieve all of those things.

It’s worth mentioning here the differences between crypto and non-crypto marketing. When people drop the “wen marketing” stinkbomb in a project’s Telegram, what they’re usually asking is “when will this project spend a large amount of money and/or tokens on spamming other Telegram groups, fake-boosting Reddit posts, paying off forum moderators not to delete their posts, buying banner ads on websites like 4chan, and carrying out text-based AMA’s in communities whose user numbers are a questionable mix of real investors, contest prize seekers, and bots.

Now, we’re not saying this kind of crypto marketing is ineffective — in fact, it can be extremely effective in providing a fast, temporary boost to token price, which allows traders to sell high and buy back low. But the project gains nothing. Genuine, long-term investors gain nothing. In fact, both the project and long-term investors lose out — the resources spent on the marketing boost are lost, the token price (more often than not) returns to the level it was at previously, and the only winners are the traders.

The kind of marketing we’ll be doing with Emma is different. We want solid, organic, reliable growth. We want to grow our social networks, get influencers talking about our project on Instagram, Tiktok and Twitter, get stories about our project into mainstream, scientific, environmental and activist news. We want to build a massive community of deeply engaged people — people who understand the problem we’re trying to solve, and who are genuinely invested in our solution. This growth will lead to the same benefits as short-term crypto marketing — a bigger, healthier Telegram community, more investors, better project visibility — but when those benefits arrive, instead of evaporating as quickly as they appeared, they’ll stick around for good.

So, join us at 11am UTC this Thursday (11th November 2021) on our Twitch channel to find out how we get there! And don’t forget to ask your questions on our Twitter in advance — the best 5 questions get $20 in SEA.