How to Become a Crypto Community Manager

Crypto community management is becoming recognized as THE legitimate tactic for ICO’s to sell out on their sale days. Aside from the core development, proper community management is easily the most crucial task to undertake for any blockchain project.Whether people are using airdrops, bounties, or organic growth, crypto community management is a valuable investment to make for crypto companies. Many people come to Crowdcreate asking questions about how to become a community manager or how to get hired. This guide will break down the three main things I look for when I am hiring crypto community managers for my crypto community management team.

What Platform Will You Be Moderating

The platform you want to moderate is very important. Ideally, you want to be able to learn moderation well enough to do crypto community management regardless of what you are moderating. It is critical to understand the nature of all the existing popular platforms and how they differ in terms of moderation tasks.

Telegram, for example, is a stream of consciousness meets forum. It is currently the de-facto standard for hosting communities of blockchain projects. Your management and tracking skills will be very limited but discussions may happen more organically. Discord, on the other hand, provides incredible framework and structure for moderation. Having been primarily targeted towards gamers, They have channels, integrated voice, and video calls, screen-sharing which make everything easier for both the community and moderators. Slack and Riot are also used by some crypto communities but haven’t gained enough traction to be considered mainstream options in the crypto world.

This is important because the rules that you are going to implement in your community is restricted by the platform. This makes different platforms good for different things. Telegram is good to get community feedback, Zendesk is good for ticketing responses, and Discord is good for gamifying communities.

The best community managers, however, are savvy enough and have the experience to navigate all forms of communications. A first-hand experience on all these platforms would provide for a solid understanding of how they differ and different strategies to dominate them.

What Projects Do You Want to Moderate

Not only does the platform matter, but the projects you want to moderate are equally important. A lot of community engagement, growth, and management has to do with social proof and standing. Projects have reputations, community managers have reputations, and the entire team has a reputation. Keeping the checks and balances is very important for a project.

For example, if you are moderating a community room and they decide to exit scam, the fire will be pointed at the closest person. Being relegated to a phony or notorious for managing scam projects isn’t good for hiring aspects. It is important to understand that unlike community management for traditional projects, the stakes are exponentially higher. Given the vested financial interests of community members, the tension can get significant in the face of an adversity (i.e. discovery of a protocol vulnerability, negative sentiment caused by a harsh press piece etc.).

The same thing goes for the manager as well. A project with a terrible crypto community management team is going to be known for its terrible customer service, and overall, terrible platform. Several promising projects have had to face the heat and eventually garner a negative reputation because of lousy community management and customer service.

Crowdcreate advises people to be truly passionate about a project before considering moderation. People who are interested in gaming will provide much better service moderating something they care about. This goes both ways because the projects and the managers should have a proper understanding of each others role and have to establish a clear communication gateway for feedback to grow. If the community manager is actually well informed and passionate about the project it does reflect on the community and the platform. To community moderators, I’d advise against moderating for projects you are indifferent too. It saves a lot of time and headaches on everybody’s end.

How Good of a Crypto Community Manager Am I?

Properly self-assessment would not only benefit the project you’re going to be working with but will also prove invaluable for yourself in the long term. Being able to understand your strengths and flaws will help you grow and become a better manager.

Community management is judged based on three things. Those three things are accuracy, speed, and growth. You will be able to fully control the first two, but the third is a little tricky. Accuracy and speed should be built into your foundation as a participant in the crypto community management game. You should bring your A game every single time and stay in control of an escalating situation. All moderation will require you to answer correctly and as fast as possible.

Growth, however, is a completely different thing. Your ability to grow a room will differentiate you from the bottom 99% to the top 1% of crypto community managers. Being able to grow the community for your project is single handedly the most valuable skill in a community manager. The faster you can grow a community the more you will become a sought-after employee.

The thing is there isn’t a single success recipe for growth. There are several methods to grow a room, it is your job to find out what style of growth works for you. Optimal growth strategies differ from project to project based on the nature of the community and several other important factors.

In the crypto community management business, it is a fine line of walking between massive growth injections and organic members. Engagement should always be on par with growth. This can’t be stressed enough. Having too many people in your room with no activity turns your room into a dead planet. Similarly, solely relying on organic growth without designing any sort of incentives to join is a definitive path for failure. Understanding these concepts and more importantly working hard on getting these strategies right will automatically reflect on the growth.

It is your job as a community manager to keep track of these three things and prove your value to your clients. These three things will generally determine how happy a client is. Crowdcreate, naturally, excels at all three.

Moving Forward

The three big things Crowdcreate looks for in a community manager is What Platform Will You Be Moderating, What Projects You Want to Moderate, as well as your personal metrics (how good of a crypto community manager are you?). Like all jobs, these three parameters don’t determine whether you get hired or not but serve as a critical foundation for Crowdcreate to understand your current skill level. Crypto community management isn’t easy, but by adjusting how you look at crypto management, you can turn it from Vector Calculus to Algebra 2.

Originally published at www.crowdcreate.us on July 24, 2018.

How to Become a Crypto Community Manager was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.