In this interview, Alex Nicorici, a marketer in the web3 industry, shares her personal journey of how she got involved in web3. She accidentally joined a tech startup working in the web3 space and was drawn in by the industry's unique and innovative vibe. She decided to stay and explore the opportunities as a marketer in this emerging field.
Dibbs asks Alex about her favorite web3 tools and platforms in three categories: the Metaverse, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and community management.
Towards the end of the interview, Alex provides advice to marketers interested in exploring web3. She advises asking important questions about the target audience, campaign objectives, and NFT utility to select the right tools and platforms.
Read on to receive valuable insights into the world of web3 marketing, and practical recommendations for marketers interested in this rapidly evolving industry.
Ben Plomion
Hi Alex, so good to have you on the show. I know that you're running your own web3 podcast and you are usually the one asking questions. How does that feel to be on the other side and being the interviewee?
Alex Nicorici
I'm very excited to be here.
Ben
Perfect. Let's start with your personal story because I'm very curious. How did you get into web3? What happened? What's the story there?
Alex
I think I have a very similar story to a lot of people. I'm very relatable, I would say. I ended up in web3 totally by mistake, mostly because I've been working in tech startups all my life for the last 10 years.
I started working for these guys also by mistake. They were friends of some friends that were building something in web3. And I told them, “Look, I know nothing about web3." But they're like, "No, maybe you can help with things. And while we're building this, maybe you'll want to get more involved."
And then they also mentioned that they want to get the entire team to Barcelona. And I said well, I wanted to live there for a very long time. So I said, "Okay, why not? Let's see how it goes." And it's been, I was there for six months with them. It's been a very, very challenging six months, but at the same time, I think this is kind of what opened my eyes towards the industry and what can be done.
The cherry on top was the fact that they sent me to a web3 summit last year that was happening in Barcelona. And I think that was exactly the moment in which I said, "Okay, I really need to stick to this industry." Mostly because I felt like there were so many companies and people and everything was just so new. Very different from what I knew in web2. And I was kind of sick of going to the same pitching events with startups, with everybody feeling very sick of it. So I felt like a totally different vibe, a very new vibe. And I thought to myself, well, this is the perfect place to be because first of all, I can be one of the first ones in the industry.
There are very few marketers as I got to know it as I kind of stuck around, very little expertise, which may gives me the chance to play around here a lot. And also there are like so many different companies and so many new solutions coming up. And for me, it was exactly like a big playground.
As a marketer, I always love to discover new things and be creative. And I said, "I'm sold. I want to stick around." And basically the rest is history. As I've extended my network and I started this podcast to get to know other marketers in this space and other founders talk about how they're building. For me, the educational part of web3 was very, very important and resonated with me so much that I really wanted to bring forward everything that I'm, I'm learning and the people I admire, and I think they have a word to say.
Long story short, that's kind of my story here.
Ben
Clearly we can sense your enthusiasm and positivity in web3 and your excitement. I'm so glad you can share this today. When I initially reached out to you, I saw this very interesting LinkedIn post about web3 tools and frameworks. And before we talk about those frameworks specifically, how did you go about building such a library of web3 tools and web3 platforms? How did you start? Tell us everything.
Alex
I think when it comes to web3 marketing, it is a bit complicated, mostly because at the beginning of things, you never know where to start.
The more you develop, the more you understand the industry, the more you understand the steps that need to be taken, you will find a lot of marketers, a lot of founders, or a lot of people telling you, "Oh, marketing and web3 is totally different." It is different, but the basics are the same. It's not that different if you have a good background, let's say. And I think I got to a point where I really wanted to discover more about the kind of tools that I would be able to use if I wanted to make a bigger campaign. I learned about some of these tools initially on Twitter.
And there was somebody who was saying, "Hey, guys, I put together this list of things. Let me know what you think." And then I looked more into it ever since we spoke last time. And I discovered a lot, a lot, a lot more. For me, it was very important to kind of bring forward the tools that I discovered.
And now as I'm starting to learn more about them or get approached and have like a small demo of them, I think it's very important for me to be able to share that knowledge with my audience as well because as I'm learning, they can learn with me at the same time. And it's very important that we can share knowledge or share experiences if they try to do that with their projects.
For me, it's more of a collaborative thing, let's say. But I think the growth part in web three is very, very important. And if you dig deep into it, you will see that a lot of these tools are very growth focused, let's say. There are some that are more connected to brand or community building and so on, but everything has like big numbers or like big numbers expectations at the end of it.
Ben
I love your tagline about "web3 is different than web2 and web1, but some of the marketing tools and principles are the same”. What I wanted to do next was to pick a couple of categories, the Metaverse, NFTs, and community as well, and ask you what is your favorite tool in this category and why?
Shall we get going and should we start with maybe the Metaverse? What is the tool that you like the most and why?
Alex
I would have to be totally honest with you: the Metaverse is something I have not explored properly yet. I don't want to call it a tool yet, but I want to call it a strategy if you allow me because maybe this could work as well.
I've noticed a lot of companies coming up with different kinds of ideas. For example, instead of launching a party in the Metaverse by yourself or launching a course in the metaverse by yourself I think it's a lot easier if you do it with a lot of different people to cross-pollinate and to get different audiences from each other.
And I think this is something that I discovered recently and I'm so, so, so excited because I'm going to be testing it with one of my new clients right now. If you follow my journey, maybe you'll be able to see how that went, but this is something I'm very, very excited about.
And when it comes to the Metaverse, something else I'm very excited about was that one of my friends has a podcast in the Metaverse. So, basically you can go in while they're interviewing their speakers, you can also take a look, talk to other people and so on. So I think this thing where you kind of see each other 's presence, it's something that excites me quite a lot.
And I hope it will develop a lot more in the future, because I think compared to the other platforms, the Metaverse is in its early stages and it's still something to be explored even when it comes to ads, when it comes to all kinds of events that can be done there, tracking, and so on.
Ben
Awesome. Well, let's move on to the second category. What about FTs or non-fungible tokens. Any preference in terms of tools and platform, and why did you pick that particular tool or platform?
Alex
Here, I actually wrote down two. One was tokenproof and the other one was POAP. POAP because everybody's so excited to get proof of attendance for any kind of event.
Even right now as I'm heading to EthCC in Paris, everybody's asking for your wallet to airdrop you a POAP as a proof of attendance. The fact that you are part of a community or that you have attended an event is very important for how marketing will be evolving moving forward. So this is one of the reasons why POAP is something that I'm a very big fan of right now.
And two was tokenproof. Tokenproof because it works in a very similar way. And to give you an example right now, on Sunday, I will be going to the SheFi summit, which will be happening in Paris.
And I was as I've taken the course with them and I'm part of their community. I could only buy a ticket if I show that I have this NFT as a proof of attendance of their course. And tokenproof is a platform that allows you to connect your wallet, they identify you are the owner of that NFT, and they allow you to proceed to the payment gateway, which I think was such a smooth process, and for me, this was very exciting to see, especially because in web3 right now, it feels very, very complicated from a tech perspective and to, to navigate it, especially for somebody who hasn't done it quite a lot and this is something that I liked very much.
Ben
I have a follow-up question because I think we did touch on the idea of proof of attendance really quickly, but in your own words, could you describe what you mean by proof of attendance and what's the value to the user and to the brand being involved?
Alex
It could be such a long discussion here, but I think long story short, proof of attendance. I think they're mostly in the form of NFTs where you receive the proof that you went to an event. For example, in web2, you would have the ticket or you would only have the photos of you, you attended something or maybe a diploma. Now, this NFT holds the proof that will replace everything that web2 would offer and put them in the form of an NFT, at least from what I know. Maybe they're like more things coming up. It's very important because I think moving forward it's a, it's a matter of building your community proving that these are the people that were there with you at this kind of event.
You can do all kinds of specific marketing campaigns for them. So I think it helps in many, many ways when it comes to your marketing strategy and with whatever you want to achieve. And it can be. Split into, because they can be split into different things. But basically it proves that these people have been there and they can also be targeted as brand ambassadors, not just as another number on your list.
So I think this is the beauty of a proof of attendance NFT that it can be played in so many different ways that can help reach your target.
Ben
Thank you so much for the clarification. And we have one last category. Last but not least, let's talk about community management. What is your favorite tool or tools in that particular category?
Alex
I'm actually very excited about this because I just discovered like 10 of them right now. And I can't wait to launch a campaign with it. I've seen so many companies using that, a lot of web2 companies. There is anything from my QuestN, Zealy, Gleam. There are about eight of them. Safari Club, for example, put a list of these tools together, but it's not complete. Mostly because there are always new tools coming up. But I'm also planning to make a list of as good as possible or like to make sure that I get all these tools.
QuestN and Zealy are two of the biggest ones in the industry. I think QuestN already is close to reaching 3 million users. So it's a very big platform, it's still free to use. Very important. Their journey goes a lot with making it as easy as possible to grow your audience, especially if you're an early stage startups, and I think it is a tool that can help. Both early stage companies in web3 as well as bigger companies that wanna engage an audience that has not been activated for a long time, so it can definitely be used in, like, very different ways. I'm very excited about it.
Ben
Many of the readers today are marketers. They're probably web1, web2 marketers for the most part. And it can be daunting to shout just to find the right platform or the right tool. Let's say for NFTs, what advice do you have for them to go make that selection? The right tool to, let's say, manage an NFT program or manage a community. What type of questions should marketers be asking those providers before they make a decision
Alex
First of all, everything should go back to basics because I feel like a lot of us get so excited and sometimes, we miss the most important questions.
And this, these are the questions regarding who's your target audience and are they already token holders or NFT holders? Do I have a utility of my NFT? Or if or is it just art? And what are the objectives of this campaign? I think these are the most important questions, and based on that, there are different tools that can either help you build a CRM or they can help you replicate campaigns, like maybe of a competitor.
I think Godmode is a company, for example, that is definitely helping you with replicating audiences from your competitors, which I think is scary a bit, but at the same time, very, very useful, especially if you're at the beginning of things, and you don't know exactly what to do. These would be the things that I would advise anybody to do.. Especially if you're at the beginning. If you're more advanced, let's say, or if you're a company– everybody probably knows what happened with Porsche. Or like other bigger companies in web2, for example, that already had a very engaged audience with a very big love for the brand.
I think in this case, it's a lot easier to create a utility NFT that can give them access to all kinds of benefits. And then think of how you can run this campaign. And as I mentioned these kind of tools, they're either like CRM tools or ad platforms or anything that's related to engaging users.
This would be something useful. Maybe something related to tracking and analytics. But at the same time, everything just goes back to, what are the objectives of the campaign? How many users do you want to engage? Who are they?
Ben
Incredible. All right. This is super helpful. I'm learning so much as we speak. I have one last question for you. And I know you do a spectacular job staying up-to-date on the latest tools and frameworks. How can marketers stay up to date? What type of publications should they be reading? What type of podcasts, of course, should they be listening to? Tell us what is the best way to go about these tools and updates.
Alex
I'm actually very happy that you asked this because this is the one of the questions that I ask all the time at the end of each of my episodes. Some of my speakers have very insightful places to go to. If you're very early stage and you don't know much about it, I think one of the best things that helped me was, if you're a woman, the SheFi community was very, very useful.
They do a course every four months, I think, or every five months. You're part of their community. They have this new buddy system that they do. It's weekly courses, once a week an hour. So you get this so it's not just like a recorded course. And for me, this was the place that helped me the most when it comes to explaining basic stuff.
Basically everything from, what is blockchain? What is the difference between a token and a a a crypto coin? What is an NFT? How can you buy an NFT between friends? And so on. A lot of very different stuff, which I think would have been a lot harder to learn. Otherwise if you want to make a shift into Web3 marketing, I think there's a podcast called "Web3 and Thrive" with Emily. Very good, highly recommended. Obviously, my podcast because I'm always trying to bring people that are building in the space and you can learn from.
At the same time, there's somebody who was on my podcast called Brett. He works for Accenture and I think it's called "Web3 Simplified." It's a newsletter where you can learn a lot about tokenization of assets, brand loyalty programs and things like this, which I think is very, very useful.
Otherwise Safari Club, Jump, Interact are three communities. Smoothie. There are four communities that I'm really looking up to when it comes to having more marketers in this space and kind of bouncing ideas and their newsletters, as well, are a very good place to start. Especially with Jump, they break different campaigns down on what could have been done or what was good, a lot of case studies so I think it kind of gives you a bit of behind-the-scenes I think, and not necessarily campaigns by them, but what other brands in the space were able to do.
And obviously maybe spending a lot of time on LinkedIn, this is what helped me in connecting with, with other marketers in the space. These would be a couple of places. So tools, newsletters, communities and networking. This would be like the thing that I would recommend anybody to do if they're new to Web three.
And obviously just ask around. My DMs are always open. And a lot of my colleagues would be able to maybe help out in a situation in which I don't know the answer.
The name of my podcast is "Out of Ordinary" Podcast because marketing in web3 is out of ordinary and basically you can find it on any platform out there. If you can't find the name of it, it is very important to write "Web3 Marketing Podcast" and it's probably gonna be one of the first results that you will get.
Ben
Alex, thank you so much. This is so helpful. Really appreciate your time and your insights on web3.