Direct to Community: A Recap

In March of this year, we published an article called The Rise of Direct Community, which laid out our thesis on why the technologies that fall under “web3” will help usher in an entirely new and powerful way for brands and communities to grow, market, and build relationships with their biggest fans.

If you haven’t read this piece, I’d strongly recommend giving it a skim HERE first. 

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‍If you’re short on time, here’s a quick summary of Part 1: 

• The core purpose of technology is to make things more efficient, often cutting out middlemen.

• Two recent examples that we’ve seen change the world are:

• Social media, which allowed brands to speak more directly to their audiences through centralized platforms like Instagram

• E-commerce, which allowed brands to cut out wholesale middlemen to build more direct relationships with their communities

• And while brands can now sell and speak directly to customers, they still rely on centralized middlemen to access their audiences, and don’t own the underlying value.

• Blockchain-enabled tech, or “web3,” allows brands to issue digital assets, empowering fans to become communities through cultural co-ownership, thus driving engagement, brand loyalty, and viral effects.

• Unlike in the past, where simply buying a physical item was a way for a fan to support a brand, now fans have a world of cultural and financial incentives to support and evangelize the brands they love.

• We call this the Direct to Community revolution.

But things change quickly in our industry, and half a year later, we thought it would be appropriate to revisit this thesis, make some updates, and take the time to make some announcements about how Myosin’s vision for this Direct to Community world will continue to evolve.

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So Where Are We Today?

We’re slowly finding our way out of the bear market. Blockchain development happens in boom-and-bust cycles, and the hype bubble for the latest generation has died down, to say the least. At the same time, the launch of ChatGPT has shown the masses the power of what AI can unlock for brands and consumers. The low hanging fruit is obvious for many, where AI allows teams of any sort to automate simpler and less strategic tasks to work more efficiently, such as data entry and analysis, but also to help with more creative pursuits, such as copywriting, creative ideation, and more.

But in truth we’ve just started to scratch the surface, and from Myosin’s point of view, AI is actually one of the key beachheads to accelerate adoption of blockchain technology for the masses, as we move decisively towards a Direct to Community future.

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The Co-existence of AI & Blockchain

In many respects, AI and blockchain technology exist as yin and yang.  

AI represents digitally-native knowledge, while blockchain represents digitally-native proof and provenance.  

AI generates an abundance of information and content, while blockchain generates scarcity.

AI engenders alignment problems and truth uncertainties, while blockchain engenders coordination and trust. 

But these differences do not mean the technologies should remain separated. Rather, AI and blockchain technology should work in harmony together and complement each other, ultimately allowing companies and brands to generate as much value with their communities as possible.  At their heart, blockchain and cryptocurrency are technological rails for digitally transacting and distributing different kinds of value, including the economic value of the tokens managed by a wallet, the social value of the identity and reputation assigned to your digital assets and activities, and even the political value carried by a token’s governance rights within the liquid democracies of decentralized web3 projects and protocols.   

As a fully transparent ledger of digital transactions, blockchain is an under-explored gold mine for data analytics — a dormant superpower for brands and their community managers just waiting to be switched on. Meanwhile, AI both creates the potential for infinite data and content, and simultaneously represents the best solution for managing and curating these ever-increasing information flows. And as AI continues to get smarter through additional data processing and improved prompt hacking, it will also become more specialized within the specific communities that implement it through continuous fine-tuning. 

As users engage with companies and brands – for example by purchasing membership NFTs, voting in community collaboration projects, or receiving proof of attendance at events – blockchains will aggregate and store all of this data. But the data isn’t valuable until it is synthesized. 

That’s where AI comes in.

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AI is the next evolution of data synthesis: making sense of the data abundance created during our day-to-day digital lives.   

By providing the intelligence to route information and generate optimal, bespoke outputs, AI unlocks turbocharged knowledge and insights — literally augmented intelligence. This way, AI is able to help translate all of our data into higher-quality content, better brand experiences, and more meaningful digital assets for communities and audiences. And through the use of blockchain technology, the resultant value can then be owned and distributed among all participants who had a hand in producing it. 

Altogether, the sovereign ownership over data and infrastructure enabled by the blockchain helps smaller companies and brands compete with the dominant platforms that endeavor to maintain monopolies over compute resources and user online identities. And the digital signatures inscribed on the blockchain propagate a digital source of truth that helps combat the potential misinformation spread by AI.   

All things in perfect balance.

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This symbiotic relationship between AI and blockchain technology will have huge effects on the way brands and companies can grow, engage with, and retain healthy communities.   

At Myosin, we believe this relationship will shape the future of Direct to Community.  

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The Future of Direct to Community

A key element of Direct to Community is co-creation: the ability of companies and brands to design and build hand-in-hand with their customers and community. In a twist of irony, the current development of ML models – which includes both training the models from vast amounts of data, as well as fine-tuning the models to return more specific, tailored outputs – also relies on a different, more extractive sort of co-creation.

Essentially, the data on which the models become “intelligent” has to come from somewhere. And so far, this data has been scraped from the activities and attention of regular users on the internet, while those individuals have typically seen nothing in return. This practice also mirrors the evolution of traditional web2 platforms, as large companies today leverage user data in order to get smarter and more useful without rewarding the user (except, of course, if you count profligate, often invasive, targeted advertising campaigns).   

Probably why user perception of these platforms isn’t so high. 

Blockchain technology and cryptocurrency provide an alternative path of co-existence with AI — one that creates communal value, rather than extracts it, and builds towards a more collective good, rather than zero-sum profit games. Through transparent attribution and ownership, blockchain technology enables a system of digital property rights: a system that will be necessary to instill individual sovereignty over the value created through our digital activities that feed data to ML models. This capability creates the possibility for community-led AI development, which can feature integrally in a brand’s Direct to Community strategy.

At Myosin, we haven’t just done a lot of thinking about this topic; we have built actual products and implemented these strategies to engage and grow our own community. 

So far, we have focused our efforts on building AI-powered engagement bots that help community managers and marketing teams maximize user retention for digital communities. These bots help keep users coming back – turning MAUs into DAUs – by providing more engaging and gamified interactions within the primary forums of digital communities. 

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We also recently launched our own AI-powered travel concierge bot called Jeeves, in collaboration with Ava Labs (behind Avalanche blockchain) and several other partners. With Jeeves, we’re helping hospitality brands provide personalized travel itineraries for aspiring travelers, providing value upfront, with immediate booking available for hotels, flights, and experiences. 

In this case, when one creates a Jeeves account, one can sign up with email, which creates a crypto wallet on the back-end, thus opening the door to tying together emails with tokenized loyalty programs. And once multiple brands are using Jeeves, this unlocks a way for complementary brands (ex. Etihad & Hyatt) to opt-in and collaborate in far more meaningful ways, sharing communities and customer data in a seamless way!

And it doesn’t stop there. 

AI bots native to your digital communities can serve other functions too, such as token-gating experiences, onboarding customers, and displaying live community data, such as participation rates, transactions, or something as specific as “gm” streaks. Then blockchain provides the means to reward members with real value in exchange for these pro-community actions. For instance, we are currently rolling out Myosin Passports: membership NFTs issued on a blockchain that contain identifying information based on community member activities, which, in part, are driven and tracked by our own AI-powered community assistant, Mylo.      

Perhaps the most important part is that by interacting with your models and bots, you make them more effective. That is to say, the more you use these AI-powered tools, the more intelligent and tailored to your community they become. For companies and brands trying to drive community engagement, this process should integrally involve customers and users — by translating user engagement metrics into rankings for prompts to be used during content creation, for example, and then fine-tuning the dataset off of user activity for future model inference.

[Caption: Source: Niko Grupen, "AlphaFold, GPT-3 and How to Augment Intelligence with AI"]

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Blockchain offers a way to meaningfully reward users for their contributions of data, model fine-tuning, and governance with various digital assets, allowing community members to derive more value than just improved consumption experiences. Therein lies the primary difference between web2 and web3: value capture vs. value creation.

By co-creating AI tools that enhance product experiences, brand content, and community interactions, and by distributing the resultant value to everyone who contributes resources and attention, web3 technology promotes community-focused initiatives, transforming consumers into creators and fostering true communities of loyal fans. More than ever, brand community members will become brand ambassadors, working to spread the word and bringing more friends into the community — co-marketing and co-building the future of the brands they love.

This is what Direct to Community is all about: companies and brands building and growing together with their customers.

Co-creation. Positive-sum outcomes. Collective value. 

Welcome to the future of the internet!