The upcoming rollout of the communities features in Status present a significant marketing and growth opportunity for the Status Mobile and Desktop apps. The team has prepared a phased marketing approach to introduce the features in order to capture a growing conversation around “Crypto Social” while the product is still in active development. When Status Communities is deemed “ready”, we will deploy global campaigns to launch the feature. Detailed comms brief and strategy here.
At a high level the phases look like this:
- Phase 1 - Grassroots community growth and awareness in which we drive conversation around “crypto social”, push Status core and community contributors as thought leaders on the topic, and position Status as THE application to use to connect with communities. This will allow us to tap into growing conversations without building expectations too high. Brief here
- Phase 2 - Beta Launch in which we test the feature out with close communities and friends of Status to introduce the work and gather further feedback while finalizing the feature for a global launch. Introduce the work at ethereum community events.
- Phase 3 - Global launch including PR and activation of all channels and patterns with the goal of driving widespread acquisition.
As part of Phase 1, there is a proposal to drive people into the Status Community Discord Server for active engagement and discussion around crypto social. This is a point of contention as it seems counterintuitive as we have the Status App and also is misaligned with our Principles to use a centralized social platform like Discord. The comms team is looking for feedback and opinions on this strategy.
Pros:
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Retention and Usability: We know Status has a retention problem right now. Our D1 retention rate is hovering around 26% (with recent CPI campaigns paused). We also know that retention drastically decreases after that due to lack of friends to chat with, communities to engage in, and content. By driving to Discord for now, we can actively re-engage people in the community server for ongoing discussion and notify them of the eventual launch.
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Incentivized Migration Campaign: We can run an incentivized migration campaign from Discord into Status for those who join the Status Community Discord and actively participate. Mechanics of this still TBD but we can require certain actions and make note of people who actively participate in the Discord server and then potentially reward them with SNT when people move over to Status (i.e. distribution of UNI by Uniswap)
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Status Desktop not Ready: Status Desktop is still in beta while Discord offers a great desktop client. Knowing many people opt for Discord Desktop or webapp while at work, we lose a large amount of potential users if relying solely on mobile for now.
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Existing Discord Userbase: Discord has a built in user base of 300m+ registered users with pretty seamless onboarding into new servers. Most crypto projects have set up community discord servers which we can pull from. Simply put, we can onboard more users into our Community Discord more easily than we can into Desktop (in preparation for an incentivized migration into Status). Not to mention, onboarding into Discord servers is extremely seamless.
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Moderation & Spam: Better moderation of channels - many of the Status channels are currently riddled with spam. While many of these channels are bridged to Status, in Discord, we can more easily moderate and remove spam content.
Cons:
- Misalignment with Principles: Why would we actively promote the growth of a competing product? There may be community backlash of pushing people into Discord when Status has been in production for over 1 year. It is hypocritical to actively promote a centralized platform we are migrating away from - especially as our social content is taking a hard stance against centralized, web2 social platforms.
- Spam: While we can have closer moderation of Discord channels (due to centralized nature of the platform), spam is still an issue in Discord as many channels are bridged to Status. This will require closer attention to channels to keep the conversations relevant.
If this is a strategy we choose to deploy, communication will need to be well thought out, positioned precisely, and regularly reinforced for new people who join the community discord server.
Comms Requirements:
- Initial statement / blog post announcing the plan and why?
- Regular updates on social media explaining our rationale
- Pinned messages in Community Discord about the rational and the plan to eventually migrate over
- Exclusive content in non-bridged Status channels encouraging early community members to join Status now (this is a proven tactic by products like TikTok leveraging Instagram as somewhat of a trojan horse)
- Migration campaign in which we countdown to the migration day (i.e. T-30 days until we close Discord for good - date signed off by product team of course).
Please let us know your thoughts below
As we can both incentivise more customers increasing volume as well as get people talking more about SNT, seems like a win-win. Perhaps some kind of freebie with a chance to get a prize via a challenge of some kind like the 