 Welcome to the Evolution of Content series presented by Solis and Cointelegraph. This series of panels explores how content creation, distribution, and engagement is evolving, featuring a curated selection of producers, actors, directors, artists, creators, and founders with traditional and Web3 experience. Today's panel explores how content can be used to build communities with Cheyenne Van Cleef of Spoken World, Josh Wagner of Virtue Animation, Phil Ranta of We Are Verified, and Roberto Nixon of MV3HQ, hosted by Solis' Brett Claywell and Cointelegraph's Anastasia Drenovskaya. This is Building Community Through Content. As far as we know, to form the community is very, very important for each business, because without supporters, you're nothing. You have no name, no force, nothing. So in our digital world, everything goes to Web3 space. Everything goes to be digitalized. How do you think in terms of creating a community, would something be very changeable, or it will be like, stay at the same way things are here and now, or how do you think it would be look like? Big question. We'll start with the operative big question. I feel like if I were to be stone cold about it, one of the interesting things about Web3 is that you can be both a participant and investor, and that makes you want to dive into the community, because you're protecting your asset. If I'm to be a little bit more warm and fuzzy and mushy about it, I come from the Web2 world, I spent two decades there. The Golden Goose was always building community. Everything was a parasocial relationship. I have a YouTube channel, I'm talking to my audience, but I dream of the day that they'll all meet up in person and cheer my name at VidCon and yada yada. What the Web3 space does is creates these kind of dark social communities on things like Telegram and on Discord, where people really can kind of one-to-one connect using the asset as their starting point, where they say, hey, I've got this one with this feature, so you've got this one with this feature, so we've got this kind of thing out of it, and then they start building general community around that, and then it's our jobs as kind of the directors or conductors of these NFT projects or Web3 projects to give them more to talk about and give them more opportunities to commune. So I do feel like it's a shift, but I feel like the shift is a little bit still about the asset, whereas the future of this is going to be about the events, about the utility, and about all of the important things you get out of being an owner. But what if they do not have any assets? What if they just wanted to communicate together and just explore the field? Now we're talking about Web2. Exactly. Now we're talking about something you can do perfectly fine on Discord and Twitter, but if you have that extra kind of buy-in or gating or it feels like it's more of a contained community, that in itself is valuable because I can't be friends with a million people. I think the best option here is to have a word with our virtual friend because we just connected Web2 and Web3, and he is in his own metaverse right now. So... Hey there, in outer space. Tell us your opinion, please. I'm glad to join virtually, but I wish I was there in person with you all. Yeah, so Roberto, maybe just throw this to you. What are you seeing from your perspective and the difference between Web2 and Web3 communities and how you're building yours? That sounds very funny. I think there are a lot of similarities, but there are some key differences. Web3 presents this unique scenario where you can actually have ownership to these communities that you participate in and the way that we've kind of gone about building communities by being like relentlessly helpful, completely authentic, and I think that genuineness really resonates with people. And yeah, that's what I would say about communities on Web3, the main differentiator between Web2 and Web3. Yeah. So Josh, you've been, you've launched virtual animation with Bob Bacon, who comes from Disney, who some would argue might have the greatest community in the world in the Web2 space, right? Sure. What have you and your team learned from that experience that you're applying to how you're growing a Web3 community? I mean, between what Bob's done at Disney and Paramount and what I've done with, you know, at Lyricle, like community is the grail, right? It's also really hard to build. Like it takes time. I think it takes like, you have to build trust. And I think beginning of Web3 NFTs was a lot of like, let's launch and then go figure it out. I think where this is going is that you have to have a really clear vision, identity of like, why would I want to be a part of this community? And then people will flock to something that they're interested in and they enjoy like the people and the vibes. Anybody can do performance marketing and build a bunch of hype, have number go up, but there's no sustainability in that. I think in Web2, it was more of like a top-down approach. I think in Web3, it's bottoms up. So really building with community and with us, I've said since day one, like we don't have really customers. We have partners. And I'm saying like, you guys are actually a part of our team. So I want your feedback. Tell me where I suck, how we can get better. And I'm actually, that's the difference. I'm actually going to listen and integrate those and involve you in that process. And whether you're creating a film, a brand, an event, people being involved in something, there's a psychology in our brains that's going to make us much more connected to that. We've seen a shift that content is no longer a monologue, it's dialogue, right? And we've seen that through what's happened in Web2 with Twitch or with live streaming, a lot of the stuff that we've done, as well as I think the new buzzword is no longer engagement, it's participation, right? We want audiences to participate. So, Sheehan, I want to direct a question to you because the community you've built for the past 25 years was very participatory. I was in the room with the poetry lounge, reading poetry 12 years ago up on stage. And what have you learned through building a Web2 or building a just traditional community over the past 20 years that you are excited about what this technology will give to you? I think for me, looking at it as the lounge, I think for us, it was... I think the model was based on finding a space where we felt our story mattered, right? So, the same thing, you want to participate in something, but in effect, you are not just participating in it, but you are growing whatever this thing is. So, for us, with the lounge as our model, if we use the lounge as a model, the lounge started with four people in a house, in a living room. So, you have people coming to your house. There was a Web1 actually, right? But see, there was no... For our model, we're kind of behind the ball. I mean, we're kind of on the outside coming back to something because the idea of digitizing or even turning it into a Web experience was not something we even thought of. Everything was all about, we're here, we're going to do this, da-da-da-da, what should we do next, how about let's do this, and so you built this thing, and after a while, you can't be in a house anymore, so we moved to a theater, and we get 300 people every Tuesday night for over 20 years, going on 25 years. So, there have been hundreds of thousands of people who have been part of that community, who've gone on to be politicians, who've gone, you know, film, whatever. And I think for us, it's now looking at the model that Web3 provides and going, how does that... and how can we bring our community of people into that who are not necessarily literate in regards to the digital space, because most of the people it's all interpersonal in this way in a physical space and converting them to be disciples of the digital age is a thing that can be far into a lot of people, so I'm really open and interested in seeing how that transition takes place. And how do we create that same energy around the content when people aren't together? This is like vibration in the space. Did you actually change the approach like you're doing in your content things? What is really the great secret to create a great content? What does it mean for you? And if you did change the approach and you collected all your employees in the room and asked them, like, hey guys, from Monday we are going to Web3. So how everything happened? I mean, Web3 is a possibility. That's how we look at it, right? Because we already created a thing in this one space and so moving... Possibility means instrument. As an instrument to engage more people because the thing is most theater space and those performances, people are just standing in front of a microphone and just talking like this. We're a 360 space, the audience is 360 around you, to turn around and talk to people. And that builds something that most performers don't necessarily get as far as poets are concerned. And a lot of performers, you know, you're camera-facing all the time, but there's something to being aware. And there's an awareness that we're hopefully going to capture in the Web3 space that allows people to see what goes on completely around them and around the world, which Spoken World is, is an open mic and a poetry space where stories are told, because I think everybody has a story to tell. Not everybody's story will be heard, but Spoken World and Web3 allows that story to be heard no matter where you are on the planet. And I think it's also giving more people an opportunity to be involved, right? Yes. Depending on where you're from, your background, race, whatever, there's not been opportunities for you to get into film or to find poetry communities, but now with social media, with Web3, and even, like I said, the genocence that we're moving into, there's three tools that we have now. Social media we've had. Now we have NFTs, Web3, as a community-building aspect. And the third is AI, which is going to reduce costs to produce content. So now we have the three tools where I think we can move into this future where more people get an opportunity to bring their ideas to life. And that's amazing because we've been a little bit stuck, at least in Film World, and we are very risk-averse, so we don't see a lot of new creations from new people from different parts of the world. And now this is going to open up that opportunity. And you can even simply equate that to, like, when I first started, you had to have a physical agent. You had to have a physical manager. You had to be in the room, right? You had to be in LA half the time. Now you have Siri. But now we've even seen the shift of, you know, self-tapes. You know, Solace, we branded ourselves because the sun doesn't discriminate who it shines its light upon. We want to shine a light all over the world on underrepresented stories or undiscovered filmmakers. Three of you in this room, one of you outside the room, have really strong projects in Web 3. Yours is Own Every Word, which is doing really well and building a really strong community. You just launched Basement Gang, which is great. First, Roberto, what are you learning about launching a film project and building a community that maybe wasn't possible a few years ago, and how is that informing actually making a film? You know, we are all really bounded by our love of storytelling, and so that's where community came from. And this community came well before there was financial incentive, and I think that's also important. With Web 3, I've seen so many communities that have been built on top of the dangling of financial incentive, and that certainly doesn't work because if the profit expectations are not met, people abandon that community. So the way that we did it is well before there was a project, it was me and my sister who is a showrunner, just bonding together over our love for storytelling and trying to figure out what's possible with Web 3 and how it could help pioneer and disrupt storytelling. So well before there was ever a project, we were bounded by our shared love of storytelling, of film, of television. And so I think that's really, really important in Web 3. Possibilities are limitless, but certainly you don't want to start with that financial incentive. You know, Jesse, my sister, Jamey's co-founder in Mv3, she began asking the question, what would it have looked like if NFTs and blockchain tech was around when a young, wide-eyed Stan Lee was creating Spider-Man? What would it have looked like if you could have been to the storm trooper when Lucas was imagining this world? What would it have looked like if you could have been in reverse engineering building the world of Illuna City within Mv3 and we're allowing our holders essentially to participate in the upside of the franchise. So it's a big ambitious goal, but if Mv3 becomes a great franchise, one of the next great franchises birth from an NFT collection, which I think there's going to be thousands of, then the holders are going to be rewarded with the success of the project by holding a token. I think that's really special. That is. And Phil, you're doing something similar. You launched, you basically launched a series on every word. Now you're launching a game. You have a weekly show. So it's a little bit of a different route. You're in more of the digital weekly content space. And for those that don't know, you come from full screen. You come from... Yeah, I come from the stand-up comedy world. A lot of my stand-up comedy friends had zero income streams. So what we thought is, we wanted to create the vibe of a comedy club, but online. So what we came up with is think of the most ridiculous premise you can, which is very common in the comedy space. But we thought, well, what if we minted every word in the English language, have comedians write funny definitions for each one, and then use that for filling the blank game shows on Twitch where we bring in comedians, kind of has that at midnight flair where people joke around and then whoever submits the funniest word gets another NFT, which is like a prize NFT. So that was the original premise. Big first drop we did through crypto.com, and then we've done subsequent drops every month through there. Most of them have sold out, some of them depending, market-defended, you know. But now we've grown the community to such a point where we are moving the whole chain over to Chrono so that we can start building games on top of it. The first game is done, now we just have to do the migration, so it's going to be like more of an automated game show where communities vote. And even though it's not this huge community, it wasn't a multi-million dollar drop, the proudest part about it is we've gotten 30 stand-up comedians who otherwise didn't have work pretty regular work, right? They're not making millionaires out of it, but they were able to write jokes for a living and then be participating in this game show for a living. And I think those kind of like passion-driven very specific communities where if you have a couple thousand holders, it's a success, I think that's going to be a big part of Web3's future. They'll always be the Marvel movie ones where they'll be like big and equity financed and maybe this will become the next Star Wars. But I also think there's going to be an amazing middle class of people who are just like targeting this specific problem and building real communities around them that could like withstand the test of time as long as nobody rugs. Let me bring some concerns to the stage. Well like all of us, we are interpreters. We are like owners of businesses and we are trying to understand how we can go to this Web3 space, how we can combine experience, how we can engage everything to one. And in terms of building community, you know like 90% of people are not very involved in the community. They do not know even how to use Facebook properly, how to create an account. And two questions here. First one, how you will like work with those people, how you will get them involved in this. And the second, I spoke with many friends from film industry from New York as well and they decided to bring second screen option to help people like you can catch user twice. We are like watching the movie, we are trying to purchase something from the movie etc etc. So in your personal opinion, could it help somehow the second screen technology here or no? I think the biggest problem we actually have in NFTs right now is customer attention. So people come in and then they get bored and they leave. So like how do you increase customer attention, right? It's how even to explain to them how to play in this world. Yeah, it's always on content, always on engagement mechanism. So like I love what Roberto said is like one people want to belong. So like build a community where there's an identity. This traces back to like when we were Neanderthals around the campfire and if you didn't be by the campfire, you were getting eaten by a dinosaur. So like that's in our DNA. Story telling is the most powerful form of communication. So like story is one way we're building that emotional connection. And then the third thing that I think answers your question is this gamification component, right? So we have different gamified mechanisms set up. So basic challenges that you do that actually tie to our story allow you to then like once a day, once a week do very simple like button clicking things that then like get you to understand the story and you earn rewards for that. Right. So one example of this is like our guys are wild misfit like they're mischievous. So they need to go to the gym and they need to train. So to train you have to actually go to the site. You have to click train and now you can like track and follow progress. And if you do that, then you're actually earning things and they're evolving along the way. So like one basic mechanism to get people to engage and then hold and like go along this adventure journey. I think the beauty of what we're all, what brings us together and like minds in this type of panel is that we understand that the strongest communities are built organically through good content. Right. Mr. Beast, unequivocally one of the strongest communities in the world. Right. Just turn down. Yeah, but no, no, not even educational. You will not educate them how you will you know. No, I'm like just give them a carrot. Game of Thrones is not educating anyone. But it's a huge community. That's what's exciting is we can tell stories. We can build digital shows. We can build films. We can build communities that love what we're doing, that walk into a room every day, every week and feel included because they get to tell their story. They get to step up on stage and be bold and read their poem and perform where they get to go and lose themselves on their couch for it with dragons for an hour. Right. That's a community. What excites us about Web three is now we can create stickiness from episode to episode from season to season from country to country, global communities real time communities. I think what we're tasked with right now is figuring out how to activate that community and what to do with it. Because those I think we've seen content builds community unequivocably. It just has always been a dead end. I walk out of Maverick biggest community in the world. Everybody's talking about it. I should be able to go to my phone and engage with that community and participate and be part of the process. But not only when I leave the theater before the film even gets to the theater and get incentivized to do so. Yes. So as you participate and engage, you're getting incentivized to do it which stimulates this like circular economy. So then more people come in and they spend more time and activity within the brand. And we've seen all of these applications of these ideas. Dows. Dows are a great idea. Have they been applied the right way? Maybe maybe not. I don't think Dows are a great idea. But they could. But micro Dows could be. Like I could form a Dow around the wardrobe department of my film. And they could specifically work in that space. And I could reward them in that space and they could apply their expertise. And it could just be about what my characters are wearing in the film. Well I think that a lot of this what you're, what we're kind of dancing around is that this is kind of a UIUX problem, right? Discord is hard. And there's not a lot of web three platforms that make token gating easy. So what I see is frightening. I have to type in my social security number. As soon as I start feeling like, hey, you can buy this NFT, but also here's a place to purchase cryptocurrency. Immediately 40% of the audience is going to be like, whoa, what did I sign up for? So I think that making it as breezy as signing up for a Twitter account is a big problem that we have right now in terms of community building. And guess what? Discord ain't it. It's way too hard. I think that in the next couple of years you're going to see a lot of that dry powder in the web three space start funneling into really important companies that are just focused on solving very simple problems around dows and community building. And we're going to look at, you know, Discord in the future and be like, that was a wonderful 1.0 way to get into web three. 4.0 is going to look as easy as like, I sign up just like I do a Twitter account. Here are my communities. Here's what's new and what's relevant to me. Here's where I can vote for things. And then it starts to become like fun and easy again. I think in your own stack. I think the future is you own your stack, you own your audience and you don't have to use all these different tools like it's one white labeled stack for your community. That'd be a wonderful way. Do you think community have to have a leader? Like a proper leader because in terms of DAO, like DAO is like one way to decentralization. But on other hands, you know kind of people from this DAO community, but you do not know who exactly is in church, who exactly is a leading component. So do you think that community has to have like this a leader? Yeah, that's a good question like you're does a community need a leader? Your community is kind of built and grown itself, so I'm curious what you think. In terms of building trust. In terms of building trust, but the thing, okay, so I think it does need a kind of, it does need a leader, but I feel like the proper, the right community will democratize what that looks like, right? So like I think for me as a host, let's start bare minimum, run the poetry lounge, physical space, people come, the community starts being built from their connection to me as a host. So if they're interested in me, they start coming because of the story I have to tell. Because there could be 30 poets who read in a night. That's why how they find each other. Who suck. And if I can't keep them interested throughout, then I lose the audience, right? So the leader of that isn't necessarily like I'm the person running shit, but basically you have to string together a night and that's a skill that you learn over the course of time being in situations where you have to string things together to make stuff work. So for me I connect to the audience first. I also feel like the most important part long term of a poet or an artist's career is what they're doing when they're not doing their art. Because anyone can have a really dope moment and then be shit the rest of the way. So how can you keep people engaged when you're not the dopest thing possible? Because that means that community will be completely destroyed if you will leave the industry. I'm not going to stage anymore and people are like, oh, go home. But he's right. Everybody gets an opportunity to have their voice and not everybody actually owns that opportunity in the best way and that's what we're talking about with Dallas. It's like the real world example of it, right? Exactly. And you have to somehow you have to somehow keep some cohesion in that group if the wrong people have the mic at the wrong time. I think in the beginning it takes a leader someone who's like well respected, has the expertise maybe around this like identity subject. But then after a certain amount of time as the community grows and builds I think then the community people can step up and own different lanes and areas and maybe like the founder does end up exiting and the community ends up owning this thing. You need strong leadership in the beginning to shape the vision to get it on the trail. Because I've been a part of Dallas, like really smart amazing people in it but then there's like too many, you know, cooks in the kitchen. And then it's really hard to get things done right? Like politics. So like you need the one leader that shapes the vision puts it on the path and then I think there will be a point these communities can start to own things and that's where it also gets really interesting. I think the logical question after this one should be should leader always be in touch with the audience, with the crowd like okay you framed everything, everything works well. You're like smoking cigar in Caymanian islands counting your bitcoins and like what else should you like hey guys let's have a zoom call I'm still here with you I created all this world for you like let's talk. I don't know after that initial once it gets set and it's rolling I don't know if that's necessary but the person that we couldn't have it all right? Yeah, yeah because I think there is value to someone you know the whole like you know understanding Flash Gordon more than Christopher Columbus my you know like I know understand the future more than my parents do right? So like for me I can talk to people who come and we get the range we get people who are pre-teen through 90s our oldest part was like a Holocaust survivor I used to come read poems all the time and so that to me being able to talk to that many people from that many different backgrounds has value as in a leadership position because there's some familiarity there's some understanding there's a connection that's created and I think once that person removes himself whoever those people are that take over whether it's going to be a multitude of people taking over that one position they kind of have to have that spirit of being comfortable with talking to people and learning more because that's a world that was foreign to me for a long time the online world was a foreign like I remember when YouTube kind of launched up and I had a fucking poem on there and it was the first poem to have a million views I was like oh a million people's but there was no mechanism in place for me to go I can make that mean something else like there was no way I can touch and because I wasn't that engaging engaging that much online where I was like I'm blogging every day or blogging every day and there was something I just kind of just you know watched it just kind of disappeared let's check is Roberta still alive Roberta no Roberta is there like does it hard to build a bridge between web 2 and web 3 how do you feel yourself there yeah no there's so many great thoughts I wanted to touch on some of them I think something that Brett said that really resonated with me in that you know community everybody needs to have a voice everybody loves to be heard and I've always said a community is more listening than talking I think that's really important and then there was a follow-up question where you know should should the leaders of said community be in the community long term do they have to be I agree with she and I think over time I think it becomes less important the community becomes much more than you know its leaders its founders but I do believe at the least should probably be spending 25 to 30% of their time in the community I've often thought that when a founder is nowhere to be found or not accessible within a community probably not you know the best indicator of community strength you know the community sort of transcend discord so I've also thought no there's this argument between community and audience that I've been thinking about lately and I think the strongest barometer to know whether you have a community or an audience is a community would follow you across platforms so we all probably follow people on Instagram Twitter whatever it is that if they disappear tomorrow and move to another platform we might not even notice but then there's the creators and what not that we follow that if they were to move platforms we'd follow them so Phil mentioned or Brett mentioned Mr. Beast that's a great like if Mr. Beast decided to move from YouTube to his own proprietary platform to follow tens of millions of people would go along with him he's way bigger than YouTube the strongest communities are the ones that you know will be followed anywhere else on the internet I think that you know a lot of great thoughts on this panel and I think everybody here was brought in because you have your own unique experiences that you're applying and we all collectively although we may not all be working together right now we all collectively are trying to build communities through content authentically versus it being maybe built by those with ulterior motives in mind that's built by advertising dollars or built by data that can be acquired and I think that's the true I think that's kind of like what we're talking about is does every community need a leader I think it's more so maybe every community needs leadership and it may not be an individual but it may be an idea it may be a concept you know I love the idea of how Web 3 can support what's happening in Iran right I love the idea of I you know as an actor my background I was on One Life to Live and we were the first gay love story in the history of daytime television and when we started that role gay marriage was not legal in the United States and we finished it was legal in five states we literally used our content to affect the real world and that was a shift in my life and it changed everything I've done since so I think that idea that we can actually change the world and build communities and represent stories and represent voices that need a larger microphone I think that's the greatest potential of what we're all doing here so I think maybe there's a good point to kind of wrap up I'm big fans of all of your work and really appreciate you being here really I watch all of you and I hope we're all watching each other and we're all open ears to receive because we all need to grow this is an infant we have no idea this is American online of Web 3 this is dial up is where we're at so let's not judge ourselves too harshly let's continue to grow and educate I think that's really important right now as we're educating communities as we build them you did say this you did say this you know we're only touching what 2% of the world 1% of the world less that really knows what's going on and let's be honest on behalf of us that are making things don't know everything either we're learning as we go so on behalf of Anastasia and Brett Roberto, Phil, Shion, Josh thank you for watching see you soon