Joe Pulizzi: How Web 3.0 will change content marketing

Joe: Are you going to have digital property that’s valuable that in certain communities you can use to get things and do things? That’s the token.

Advertiser: This is the Inbound4cast, a podcast series about inbound marketing and organic growth for B2B companies. Here’s your host, Jerrel Arkes.

Jerrel: Joe, welcome to the podcast.

Joe: Jerrel , thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Jerrel: Yes, it’s a big honor. You’re the man who taught me content marketing.

Joe: Boy, now I’m worried about you. I was okay this guy knows his stuff, but now, that’s a little iffy, but thank you. I appreciate it.

Jerrel: It’s almost ten years ago, when I started listening to digital marketing, and it was the first podcast that I ever listened to.

Joe: Oh my gosh.

Jerrel: I loved it.

Joe: Thank you.

Jerrel: I still love it.

Joe: It’s hard to believe we’re almost at our 10th anniversary of digital marketing. Although, we did take a year break because I took one year off sabbatical in 2018. Besides that, we’ve been mainly talking about content marketing.

Jerrel: I’m happy the podcast is back and, of course, your book. It’s a big honor for me. Today we are talking about Web 3.0 and the future of content marketing. Before we start, can you briefly introduce who you are?

Joe: My name is Joe Pulizzi. I’ve been in the content marketing industry for, believe it or not, over 20 years now. I’ve written six content marketing books. The most popular one is probably Epic Content Marketing, which has a new version coming out at the beginning of 2023. Content Inc is for small businesses, and of course, you talked about the podcast digital marketing content Inc.

Joe: I do speeches. I’ve done speeches on content marketing in over 20 countries, probably, 400 and 450 keynotes. I enjoy teaching the art of content marketing, and I started the Content Marketing Institute in 2007. My wife and I sold it.

Joe: I’m still speaking at Content Marketing World, the big event that we started but my new venture is called The Tilt, where we focus on content creators. Instead of content marketers, we’re focusing on independent professional content creators and how they can build a financially sustainable business.

Jerrel: Is Web 3.0 a big part of that, or will it be in the future?

Joe: It’s a part of it. Of course, I believe the idea of starting the tilt was that we’re trying to teach content creators and marketers not to rely on social networks. That’s a big problem that I have. I always talk about not building your content on rented land, if you will, and I think Web three is a solution to that, where you can have the token owned by a community member.

Joe: You can create scarce resources if you’re the creator. NFTs, social tokens, and lots of other things to come. With all of this, we’re at such early stages here, but I believe in the future. There’s something here. We’re trying to teach our community about it. We have our social token, tilt coin, and our NFT project, part of our event creator economy expo. We’re dabbling in it.

Joe: We’re trying to teach, and I feel we’re a few years away, but now is a perfect time, especially for B2B marketers, because as B2B tends to lag a little bit, I think there’s an opportunity to learn now so that we’re ready when it takes off in the future.

Jerrel: Yes, indeed. I started listening to your, I think, a few of your interviews about this at the end of last year, so I thought I had to buy Etherium, but I did it at the wrong moment. It’s not very good right now. [crosstalk 00:03:49 – 00:03:50]

Joe: No, we’re definitely in the middle of crypto winter. There’s no doubt about it. I’ve been through this twice before. I started in late 16 or early 17 with Ethereum and Bitcoin, and we’ve been through two big down cycles as that’s happened, and it’s going to happen. It’s so early, volatile as we go, but it’s good to learn about it.

Joe: People listening to this don’t have to run out and buy Etherium or anything, but I think it’s a good time to get a digital wallet like Metamask. Find a creator community that’s doing this. Dabble around in it because the technology behind it and the blockchain is really important, especially when you want to create amazing content experiences for some of your superfans, and it’s a very good way to do it.

Jerrel: Indeed. Maybe we should start with a few definitions. Web 3.0. Social tokens. Smart contracts. I think a few important terms. Maybe, you can explain.

Joe: Yes, Web 3.0 is such a large topic, and you people cover it in A.I, and they cover it in the blockchain. The whole idea to me is that the creator, the content creator, in this case, can share the ownership of the content assets with the community. That’s the way that I look at it.

Joe: The how is through tokenization. You had these tokens on the blockchain, I don’t want to get too technical with it, but right now, there’s two major types of tokens that we can build relationships with our audience. The first one is the social tokens, a fungible token, which means it’s like Bitcoin, where if you and I trade Bitcoin, it doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. It says the same properties, the same value. It’s all the same.

Joe: What a creator can use a social token for is they sort of can create it as their own currency. Let’s say you’re part of my community and have 10 Tiltcoin. You can access different parts of our Discord server so you can communicate with me or with a certain group on that level. You can get free merchandise. You can get training as part of how many tokens you have.

Joe: You can get access to Creator Economy Expo if you have enough Tiltcoin. It’s membership on steroids, but it’s really about limited experiences that you can create because of that. We use it as a reward and loyalty system, it works really well for that.

Joe: When somebody signs up for the Tilt newsletter, they get Tiltcoin, and you want to get that in the hands of your community. Think about it as a way to reward your superfans, and then have ownership over this token, and they can trade that, get rid of it, or use it as part of the currency. The second way–

Jerrel: Can I also buy it?

Joe: Yes, you can buy it as well. We like to give it away. We want to have people do things to earn it. Of course, we’re talking about marketing here. Marketing behavior change is a big part of this. We know that the people that own Tiltcoin in our community are our most valuable. They spend the most money, they come to our events, those types of things. I like it for the rewards and loyalty system.

Joe: There are a lot of people out there that say, hey, this can be part of a creator’s financialization. They can use this as their business model, and they can, but that’s not the way that I look at it. I don’t think we’re there yet to say I can create this big market cap, and I’m not there. There are too many unknowns with regulations. I don’t even go there. We use it as a loyalty system. That’s social tokens.

Joe: The second part, the most popular one that everybody seems to talk about, are NFTs, non-fungible tokens, and that’s where you have a smart contract underlying every NFT. It makes it unique. We have our own NFT project called Never Ending Tickets, a never-ending ticket NFT.

Joe: If you buy one, we limit it to 100, and if you buy one with ETH, you can get access to our event. It’s a lifetime membership, but each one is individual. They have their individual properties, their image. For example, you might mint an NFT on our minting site, and you might get free merchandise at the event as part of it. You might get access to a special event that only you and a couple of others can attend. We have one–

Jerrel: When it is never ending, how are you going to earn money within two years from now? Because you get the money now, but they still want to go to the event.

Joe: While you get the money now, you’re paying a premium upfront, and that’s how we’re monetizing that aspect. Suppose you pay a little bit of premium, great. Now the other thing is, let’s say that you buy a never-ending ticket, NFT. It’s just yours. You’re one of 100, and you say, I’m going to get a construction job. Now, I’m not in the marketing or content industry anymore. I want to sell it.

Joe: You can go to OpenSea, the marketplace where you can buy and sell NFTs. That’s our secondary marketplace, and you can go ahead and sell that. When you sell that, we set the parameters in the smart contract that when you sell it, we get five percent of that. That’s where a lot of NFT creators, musicians, and artists, that’s where they make a lot of their money.

Joe: They might mint the NFTs for free or just for gas prices, but on the reselling of it, that’s where they make all their money. Gary Vaynerchuk’s Project V Friends is a really good one. They’ve had so many millions and millions of dollars a turnover there, which helped Gary build up that whole NFT project. That’s where Creator can make a lot of that money.

Jerrel: The smart contract part is only for NFTs, not for social tokens?

Joe: That’s correct. I’m not a tech person, but as far as I know, social tokens are completely different. There’s an underlying smart contract that’s set up depending on what kind of token it is and specific to a non-fungible token. Those are the two use cases right now, and I would imagine, Jerrel , if we’re talking three years from now, there’s going to be about ten more, and we might not even be talking about NFTs as NFTs because I think what’s going to happen is the technology moves along.

Joe: We’re calling it this crazy term right now, non-fungible tokens, but everything like when you go and buy a ticket to a football match, that could be an NFT, where you buy, you want to see the Dutch play? Fantastic. You’re going to see you’re going to buy this thing. It is an underlying technology on the blockchain, and you could sell it to me peer-to-peer.

Joe: You don’t have any middle layer in that, that’s taking a cut of that, and that could work out well. I see a lot of sports franchises being the first to move to NFTs if you want. Let’s say you buy a car, and you want to have insurance on that car.

Joe: There’s probably going to be an underlying NFT as proof of ownership so that when you sell the car, you’ll also sell the NFT as a certificate of authenticity. Those things are already happening. So it’s exciting that we’re getting beyond the here’s this overpriced piece of art, digital art that you’re going to pay for into actual usable case studies. That’s where I think we’re going.

Jerrel: Okay, and how is that related to content marketing? How is it going to change content marketing?

Joe: Content marketing is about consistently building amazing content experiences for your audience on a consistent basis in order to see behavior change, right? That’s what content marketing is.

Joe: Can you do that on a limited basis to some of your superfans using a token? Yes, that’s where it comes in, so that’s where I want people thinking about that. It’s just technology. It’s not necessarily the content itself, but it can give a certain group of people access to premium content.

Joe: If I’m an author, I might say, how will I monetize this book, or how do I want to get this book out there to my superfans? You might separate chapters of the book into different NFTs. You might have special editions of the book only available to some superfans.

Joe: Where we used to do something on a Kickstarter or a membership program, you might sell it as an NFT. You do that because you give the audience member, the community member, ownership over the ability to sell that content experience to someone else to double down and get more active in the community.

Jerrel: To motivate them but also to give them extra value besides the content.

Joe: I’m sorry, what was the second part? Besides the motivation.

Jerrel: Besides the content, an extra way to give them value?

Joe: Oh, absolutely. You, as the creator, we’re always looking to give value, and you want to give value to a particular audience. Let’s say that you think you’re a content marketer, and you say, this is my audience. What part of that audience are your super fans? They are the ones that you’re going to co-create content with.

Joe: They’re the ones going to share your information. That connection of the token makes a difference, and I’ll tell you firsthand, we have about 2300 or so token holders of total coin. I can tell you that those are our superfans, and they share our content the most. They refer to our newsletter the most.

Joe: We have partnerships with three or four of those creators on co-creation programs that never would have happened if we didn’t have that token connection. Now, could you do it some other way? Yes, you could, but I don’t know if it would have happened without the token.

Jerrel: Sometimes with startups, you see that the first employees have a small percentage of shares in the company, and they never leave the company. They work ten times harder than the rest of the company because they feel that the company is part of them. Maybe it’s a bit the same with this. For example, they feel like they are part of the company that deals.

Joe: Exactly it feels like they have a say in summary. They do, by the way, because if you own 20 Tiltcoin, you’re a part of our VIP Discord group, and I share all the information about the Tilt business first with them and they give me all the feedback, and I know all of them. I know everyone by first name. I’ve met most of these people. They’re great, amazing people. They want to be involved.

Joe: What content marketer doesn’t want that group for research, just to figure out the audience’s paying points and what’s going through? Of course, we’re just testing. It’s just an experiment for us too. We don’t know, but so far, the experiment is succeeding in and of itself just as a research project to figure out what kind of content we need to put on our blog, newsletter, podcasts, books, event, whatever the case is.

Jerrel: Doesn’t that also mean automatically that you have to build a community, right? You can’t have tokens without a community.

Joe: If you don’t want to extra work, that this is going to be forever. Like this is not a campaign. This is a marathon. Don’t do a token project. We started our token in February on 2021, and I can tell you, you have to be at it every day because your community’s audience expects you to stay involved.

Joe: They expect me, Joe Pulizzi, to stay involved in that group, and I have to go on the Discord and make sure I talk to them and email them out and get together with them at events. I’m happy to do that, but I know that that was part of the deal, so if you’re going to do this as, oh, let’s do a six-month token program, oh geez, don’t even do it. Don’t even waste your time because it will be a failure.

Jerrel: Even more long-term than just content marketing.

Joe: Of course, you want a long-term philosophy for both of them, but yes. Here’s the thing, let’s break it down a little. Let’s say Joe Pulizzi sells the Tilt, and the Tilt is gone. The Tiltcoin is still there. It’s probable that Tiltcoin may or may not be sold with the company. It stays with me because if you go on to the rally that IO site and that’s the site that Tiltcoins are, that’s the minter of choice we use. My name is still attached to it. It’s still Joe Pulizzi. This might be my thing. I might have a token for 30 years, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Not that I’m complaining.

Joe: I think that’s a huge opportunity to build a relationship, so if you are a B2B brand, you have to take this seriously. That’s why the companies that are doing this well, Adidas and Nike, are getting into it. Last month, Starbucks announced they’re getting into leveraging Nfts as part of their rewards program. Not to replace their loyalty and rewards but as a secondary part for superfans. They know this is for the long haul, so you have to realize that.

Jerrel: In trying to understand this, I wrote a few sentences about how it’s all related. I’d like to hear your opinion on this. Let’s say a community is a way, I think, to get an engaged audience for content marketing. A community is an extra channel to reach your audience with your content marketing series. It’s an extra way to give value to your audience by letting them connect and talk to each other, etc., and I think Web 3.0 is a way to get an active community because you can give them something back and keep them motivated.

Jerrel: I know a lot of communities that are not very active. People try to build a community, but when it’s active, it seems pretty easy to keep it active. Still, before people start reacting and publishing and things like that, that part is very hard, and I think rewarding them for being active with tokens is a very good way to do it. Therefore, a community gives you a much more engaged content marketing audience, and Web 3.0 gives you a more engaged community. Then you need Web 3.0 to make your content marketing successful. That’s a good summary?

Joe: In a perfect world, what you said is 100 percent correct. There’s a couple of things that I would caution about, especially if you’re a B2B company marketer listening to this.

Jerrel: Yes, because many of the examples are B2C, of course, what you see.

Joe: Ours is a good B2B example. We’re targeting small businesses. We’re doing it on a small and experimental scale. Here’s the important thing. The things that I’ve learned. Don’t launch a token project unless you first have an audience. It’s very hard–

Jerrel: Yes, that was one of my questions. You have the audience from Content Marketing Institute, your podcast, etc. I don’t have it. This podcast is a few months old, so I still have to build my audience, so this might not be the best moment for me to start.

Joe: Some people will disagree with me. You’re all on that. They say you can start and build an audience with an NFT project. It has happened before. It’s very rare to do that. It’s much easier to start with and get a minimum viable audience. By the way, you have to decide what you believe your minimum viable audience is. Mine, in my opinion, was 10,000 email subscribers. We wanted to get to about 10,000. You’re right. I have an audience from my past that I brought together when we launched the Tilt. We were already there, so it was easy enough to do that.

Jerrel: Ten thousand in the community or 10,000 that you had before you started, and let’s say 20 percent of them will be part of the token community.

Joe: When we started the whole token, we were working on our email database, so when we launched, we were close to 10,000. That was the goal, and we were just about there. Now we’re at 17 or 18,000 or something like that. I think that email connection is important. Of course, you know me, I’m all about, you know, first-party data having that opt-in connection, especially with what happened in social media. We want to make sure we have that. A B2B company can decide to have an audience. You don’t have to have a community. To your point, the community is another step. It’s way more difficult to navigate.

Joe: The benefits are tremendous, but you can’t force the community. That’s where when the token comes in, you’re like, okay, we have this audience. We’re going to try to create a deeper connection. The token can help us get to the point where we could build a community, and that’s what we’re trying to do, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job at the Tilt of making that happen. The token was the start of that. You might say, okay, first of all, do we have the minimum audience, which could be 1000 subscribers or 2000 podcast downloads. Whatever you believe it is, you have an audience there. Then you’re going to insert a token of some kind. It could be an NFT project, could be a social token. Then you have to create, along with this, the terms.

Joe: What do people get for this thing? What value will you create for the five percent, 10 percent, or 20 percent? Ours seem to be about 10 to 20 percent of our audience going through the process of getting the token and referring people to it. What are you going to give them? Why should they care? What’s the added value? That’s a separate content experience. For example, at the Creator Economy Expo last year, people that had the NFT, we had a separate event for them, and that was part of the value they got from the investment they made into the NFT. We want to deliver that value, and we will keep doing that for every event we’ve done. However, there’s a lot of work associated with that. The community and the token works hand in hand as you go.

Joe: You could have a community without a token. I just feel that today because of this technology, it’s strays your all. That connection is so powerful. I even underestimated it because when we were experimenting, I said, let’s give it a try. I believe in this working off of social networks. I love the connection aspect. I love the ownership aspect of the community. I love creating limited content assets, but let’s test it out. It ended up so far, I mean, it’s been almost a year and a half now, and it’s seemingly working, but again, you’ve got to work at it every day.

Jerrel: It feels like you have chosen rented land for the community Discord.

Joe: I have. The token is the connection. That’s the ownership connection where we have that conversation. We have that conversation on LinkedIn. We have it on Facebook. We have it on Discord. Discord as a community. If in a perfect world, if you’re saying if we want to keep that off of social networks, if you will, communities that we have no control over, then we would want to purchase like a circle or mighty networks or something like that and own that community. We can import that information out, almost like email, right? If I work with MailChimp, ConvertKit, Active Campaign, HubSpot, or whatever the case is, they do something crazy. I can still work that email database off and create and use it in another technology.

Jerrel: Yes, maybe there’s a difference. You also have the email addresses and all the conversations on Discord and some communities. Let’s say when you have a Facebook or LinkedIn community, you don’t have the email addresses, and it’s rented land.

Joe: Honestly, I don’t have a problem with using rented land. If we have that connection, I’ll tell you the most important connection we have is email. No doubt about that. Opt-in email is critical, and of course, you can look at every social media network. What do they use as the primary key for every database they have? They use their email address. We want to do that too. We want to have the first-party data, and then do we use other Web 2 platforms? Absolutely.

Joe: Twitter and LinkedIn are my two best platforms for sharing the message of content creation, Creator Economy, and content marketing. Whatever the case is, that’s where people are, but I have the strategy, and we have the strategy that tomorrow I could wake up, and it could be gone, and if it is gone, we are going to be okay. Like we still have that–

Jerrel: To be honest, maybe this is a bit of a sidestep from the topic of this episode, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, the last years, but recently, even more, because I think it’s getting harder and harder not to build on rented land. Google is keeping people on its platform. LinkedIn is doing the same. New social media platforms are doing the same. I’m working in B2B, and in B2B, you have this movement of demand generation of publishing content on LinkedIn without a link to the website telling your story there. Telling it in communities and everywhere where your audience is. Um. I’m not sure anymore what I think about that. Maybe we can do both. I think we can do both but–

Joe: I think we can’t. Let’s use your example. It’s a really good B2B example. LinkedIn, I have no problem publishing on LinkedIn. I publish on LinkedIn. There are a lot of business companies that publish consistently on LinkedIn, and it works. The problem is you don’t control the algorithm. You don’t control the data. You’re adding value to LinkedIn. That’s fine. You choose to do that, it’s a free service, all good, and you can reach an audience on LinkedIn. That’s fantastic. Use that. Choose that as one of the primary platforms you’re going to use, but at the end of the day, if you don’t control distribution, you control nothing. You have no control.

Joe: What is the conversion, though? Let’s talk about demand generation. Some conversion down the road has to be you’re going to build this audience on LinkedIn by delivering a wonderful content experience every day, every week, whatever the case is. As it goes and as it works, you’re going to move that over to your superfans. Your amazing prospects that you want to be customers into some email product, and that’s where most B2B organization emails are terrible. Let’s be honest. They are horrible.

Jerrel: That’s right.

Joe: It’s the most important thing we have. If you’re a B2B company and you focus only on LinkedIn, if LinkedIn changes their rules tomorrow and they say, sorry, you’ve got to pay for it, or we don’t want to give you access. I’ll give you a really good example. In 2014, Google Plus, I work with some companies that spent millions of dollars creating amazing photography communities on Google Plus, and they got the email, whatever day it was, February 2014, and said, sorry, we’re closing the entire platform, and they spent millions on this.

Joe: I want everyone to keep that in mind because that will happen again. It’s happening on TikTok. It’s happening on Instagram. They’re turning into content discovery. They don’t care about the creators as much as you think they do. They want to drive more revenue and drive more profits for their investors. That’s fine. They can do that, but we can do something about it. So we have to have a secondary plan.

Jerrel: I agree with all the arguments, but then I look at, for example, Refine Labs, and they don’t have my email address, but they are very successful. You have my email address, and you are also very successful. Maybe they have more risk, but when LinkedIn is gone tomorrow, I think they are also investing with a podcast on Spotify, and they are trying TikTok out right now.

Joe: That’s a really good point. This is a great conversation. There’s a subscriber hierarchy, right? I have talked about this in Content Inc for a long time. At the bottom of the subscriber hierarchy, you have Facebook fans, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. They’re all good. They’re very, very good. We want those things, but we want to continually move up the hierarchy right in the middle of podcasting. We have a little more control over that. A little bit, and I think it’s going to get better.

Joe: I love what Spotify is doing as they’re coming in and coming up against Google and Apple. I think you will see more data being given to the creators. Then you go into print subscribers, email subscribers, and owned membership. To your point, we already talked about that tokens. We’re going up there so you can have these amazingly huge communities built on rented land. Nothing wrong with that. That’s fantastic, but you’ll want to keep moving up the subscriber hierarchy to at least protect your model so that tomorrow you’re out of luck.

Joe: There’s a really good example with Twitch. Twitch is a streaming platform. Amazon owns the biggest streaming platform there from a 24/7 streaming. They had a big thing with gambling sites, and they just came out. There were a bunch of controversies, and Twitch just came out and said no more online gambling. If you’re talking about online gambling, you’re done. You have about a million creators that are doing online gambling on Twitch that are out of business right now. A B2B marketer might not think about that, but that’s a good example of today I’m in business and tomorrow I’m not because I can’t control anything anymore.

Jerrel: I think we’ve seen that on all platforms. I agree with you. Interesting discussion.

Joe: We could talk about this all day. The opportunities we have as a social media are incredible, but again, we’ve got to realize it’s not about social media anymore. It’s content discovery. TikTok has shown us that if you’re going to have a challenge with search engines and Google’s dominance, it might be TikTok. I think they’re going in that direction and teaching all these other platforms. Instagram and Facebook are already moving in that direction away from social media into content discovery, and that changes the rules for everybody.

Jerrel: I agree. I want to ask many questions, but let’s keep it to about 3.0. Let’s see, where were we? One other trend that I’m seeing is, well, I’m not sure if it’s a trend, but a decentralized autonomous organization.

Joe: Sure.

Jerrel: Is that the holy grail of rewarding people who will be a part of your community and making them co-owner of the company?

Joe: No, it’s not. It’s just one model. It’s just one business model. I think for when dolls came out. People said, oh, this is the way to run a community. It is very difficult, Jerrel , to run a community and get everybody going. To your point, the community owns this thing. It’s like the Green Bay Packers in the United States. It’s owned by the fans, but is it? No. You still have an owner that has the ownership that’s calling the shots. With the DAO? Not so.

Joe: I like the model of there being a leader or a leadership structure, just like in most organizations. Then you have a very, very supportive customer base that feels like they have ownership, then do have a little bit of ownership. I think that’s a better model with the other token projects we discussed. Can a DAO work? Sure it can, but we haven’t seen many successful DAOs. It’s so early in the process. They’ve only been around for a couple of years. We don’t know, but I don’t know if in a couple of years we’re going to be talking about that as a model that works because you have to have a community that’s all on the same page with getting things done and there are not many communities that do that.

Jerrel: I think it’s complex when you have a few company owners and a whole community with something to say about the direction. I thought about it when I launched this podcast. Should I be a DAO? I don’t have the community, and I don’t like the idea that the community can have different ideas of direction. Then within a year, maybe it’s not my podcast or platform anymore.

Joe: I thought about the same thing when Brian Clark and I got together to launch Creator Economy Expo, which now happens every May. We talked about the idea of maybe we create it into someday being a DAO and everything was DAOs are all the talk at the time when we were getting through this and I’m so glad we did not do this. To your point, I have a vision for what CEX should be. I have a vision for what the Tilt should be. You have to have somebody with a vision.

Joe: Now, can the community come up with that vision and mission? Absolutely. Takes a long time to go through that process to really make it work. Even when you saw the DAO come together, what was the constitution DAO? They went and tried to buy the Declaration of Independence still didn’t. Fair was that? Yes, that was that. It was one of the copies of that. They still could not get that done because they didn’t have that one person like really set out there who is the visionary and the community, are they going to necessarily pick the right leader? I don’t know.

Joe: Maybe, but I’m not going to put my money on that model. It’s going to be called something else. I like the hybrid model better. Give the community a chance to be part and do certain things and help you grow your content business if it will get them involved in content projects, give them special access and experiences. But I think somebody needs to be running the ship and set the vision.

Jerrel: When we look at the Metaverse, do you think that will be a big part of content marketing combined with Web 3.0, or is it a totally different experience in the Web 3.0 world but not related to what we are discussing?

Joe: I have mixed feelings about the Metaverse. First of all, the Metaverse, which is coined by Neal Stephenson, a great book I believe, is a different thing from Mark Zuckerberg’s idea of the Metaverse. I honestly don’t know what Mark Zuckerberg’s idea of the Metaverse is. It seems like it’s, oh, we’re going to take our digital selves and be there. That’s not it.

Joe: Look at the Metaverse right now. The best examples are Minecraft and Roblox. They’re already happening. These communities where you are active, you’re sort of living as whatever in those communities, not necessarily you are a digital representation of you. There’s commerce going on in these communities. I don’t think it’s a vision of, Oh, Mark is now a digital Mark Zuckerberg, and we’re going to plop them in a horizon studio somewhere online, and we can all get together for a virtual campout.

Jerrel: Drink.

Joe: Yes, When I see pictures of, Oh, we’re in the Metaverse, and it’s all people’s stage, I say, that’s not the Metaverse. That’s something else. If you want to figure out what the Metaverse is as a B2B company, talk to your kids who are on Minecraft and Roblox. That’s already happening. We’re not going to force this new term of what Metaverse is. I don’t even know what it’s going to become. I know that it is there. Let’s talk about like digital property.

Joe: That’s probably where it comes in. Are you going to have a valuable digital property that you can use in certain communities to get things and do things? That’s the token. If you’re going to call it a metaverse, that’s fine. This stuff is already happening. But we haven’t seen anything yet. I feel bad for everyone who loves that word that mark Zuckerberg came in and co-opted it and changed the name of the company and did the whole thing because now nobody wants to use it. Nobody wants to use that term anymore.

Jerrel: I think only the people who bought an ape for maybe $1,000,000.

Joe: That’s an interesting community. If you’re looking at the board ape community, I think there’s a lot of value in having a board ape. I don’t know if it’s that much, but there’s a great community there. You have access to parties. You can use that to launch whatever products you want based on your ape’s IP. That’s great. Is that Metaverse? I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s the definition of the Metaverse. It just sounds like–

Jerrel: I don’t think so, to be honest. I think–

Joe: It sounds like an exclusive membership.

Jerrel: Yes.

Joe: Which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Jerrel: For people who are listening to this podcast and think they want to start. They want to do something in their space, they have a B2B company. Step one is an audience, right?

Joe: Let’s take it a step back. Let’s say somebody’s listening to this, and they’re completely confused, and they’re like, what the heck is this? This is a thing where it’s like the Matrix, right? Are you in the Matrix? You can’t describe what this is. Let’s start to figure this out. First of all, get a digital wallet. To get a digital wallet, Metamask is free. I have a digital wallet. What do I do with that? Follow a couple of creators that are using NFTs or social tokens.

Joe: You can come to the Tilt and figure out how we’re doing it. It’s all good and get active in those communities. At some point, you can fund your digital wallet with some Ethereum. Get that in there, and then maybe you can buy a cheap NFT to figure out the process and be part of somebody’s community. That’s six months right there, you all. To figure out what. Because when somebody first started to describe to me what an NFT was, I was like, what? You have to go through the process and do the digital work.

Jerrel: It took me a few months, and then I had the Ethereum and the wallet and everything, and I wanted to buy an NFT. Then I think it went from $3,000 down. I lost almost $2,000. Now I’m waiting. When it’s up again, W I want to try it out and see how it all works.

Joe: I guess to your point with that, now is a good time for people listening to us to get involved because we’re crypto winners. Everything’s down. Again, you don’t have to spend a lot of money. I’m just saying we want to experiment, test, and get involved for the next run of this, which is we’re going to see some amazing used cases outside of the board apes, the crypto punks, and all that.

Joe: We’re going to see some amazing businesses come in and do something. I would start there. Then we get to your point about let’s build an audience first, picking a platform where you can deliver consistent content. What’s your content niche, what we call a content tilt? what is your differentiation to break through all that clutter? Those are the core areas of content marketing. You should start first and then get down the line. You’ve got this idea of the token.

Jerrel: All right.

Joe: Not to be negative about it. I want people to do this, but it’s a different animal altogether, so you’ve got to be ready.

Jerrel: Do you think do Discord will also be for B2B companies? Of course, your company is B2B, but is it the right platform? Because I think a lot of crypto people use Discord. I also think maybe gamers and generation z. How many B2B people can you move to the platform?

Joe: Honestly, I’m happy that our communities are on Discord. We picked it specifically because we thought that we were making the right decision with where we were going with Web 3. We could have done something on a proprietary platform just as easily. Maybe that would have been a better decision. Discord doesn’t have to be the thing if you are looking at a community. By the way, your community could be a LinkedIn group.

Joe: Let’s be honest. It could be anywhere. I like Discord because we can integrate our token into that, and I can send tips and Tiltcoin to people. I can reward people for their behavior. We can set our group levels easily. There’s a lot of off-the-shelf software you could buy for memberships that aren’t integrated with crypto. That’s why we chose it. The other communities will get there. I know. I’ve talked with a lot of them.

Joe: They’re going in that direction. That’s great. When you decide on a community. You can look at mighty networks, you can look at The Circle. You can look at Discord. Discord is free. We’re not paying for mighty networks and The Circle. You’re going to have to pay. There are a lot of other ones. Some people might use Telegram. There are a lot of different ways to do it.

Jerrel: All right, and the Tilt, can people who want resources and information use the Tilt for it?

Joe: Oh, absolutely. If you subscribe to the Tilt, you will get put into the process where if you want to, you can get Tiltcoin. If you prefer, you can join the groups and get more Tiltcoin. You can see how we use it. You can buy it. You get free merchandise if you go in that direction. Then on the site, we have a lot of education on Web 3. We’ve got a whole beginner’s course. It’s completely free, so if you want to figure out how to get this thing going, we sort of, I don’t want to say, dumb it down, but it’s a very beginner’s level version of this is how you start thinking about it.

Joe: Here’s the technology, and that’s where we’re at with the Tilt. The Tilt. We’re all about helping content creators become financially independent. Part of that, a very small part right now is understanding Web three. We are teaching about it. I would say every three newsletters we send out have something Web 3 related, and as more creators get better case studies and using them, we’re going to start promoting those more than just the ones we do on newsletters, podcasts, YouTube, TikTok, and whatever.

Jerrel: All right, Joe, thanks a lot–

Joe: Thanks, Jerrel . I appreciate it. It was fun.

Jerrel: For being a guest on my podcast. Indeed, interesting stuff. Looking forward to seeing what will happen in the next few years.

Joe: It’s going to move fast. It should. Maybe not as much as in B2B, which maybe the opportunity for people listening to this.

Jerrel: Yes, because I think you said in multiple podcasts that it’s about 98, 99, and 97 when you compare it to Web 1.

Joe: Yes, it’s funny. I was talking to somebody the other day, and there’s an example in the United States of On The Today Show and Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric talking about what is this Internet thing. That was in ’96, ’97, what do we use it for? Whatever. We’re probably two years past that. To your point, we’re just getting started before the big run-up. We don’t even know what it is before the Amazons, before the eBay’s. This is a really good time if you’re a marketing practitioner to practice and experiment.

Jerrel: To be honest, there was a reason for me to start looking into this because I always had this feeling that I missed the boat back then. That there was so much missed opportunities. I think we have the same opportunities right now. When you start looking into this.

Joe: That’s a great way to look at it because I did too. I missed that first run, and what an amazing, exciting time. Looking back and what it would have been. Well, here you are, and it looks terrible, right? Because all the crypto prices are down. Again, it’s not about the prices. Don’t think about that. The token is different from cryptocurrency as a whole, so we’ve got to treat it differently.

Jerrel: When you want to buy, doing it on a low is better than on a high, right?

Joe: Absolutely. Everybody jumps into that. You and I bought it, right? We probably bought it at a little higher level. That’s okay if you’re in it for the long term. Like I’m a big Bitcoin believer. I believe in decentralized finance. Those things. We have a long, long way to go if your outlook is five, seven, or ten years.

Jerrel: I think in 2013, I bought €150 of Bitcoin. Then one Bitcoin, I think, was €1,000, something like that, and then it dropped to €150 for one bitcoin, and everybody laughed and made jokes about my Bitcoin, but I kept it. Then a few years later–

Joe: Who’s laughing now?

Jerrel: I was the one who was laughing, and I was angry at myself for not buying more.

Joe: Obviously, this is not an investing show, so we’re not running out financial recommendations.

Jerrel: I’m not an expert on this.

Joe: I’m not either, but if you’re looking at your overall portfolio of stocks and bonds and everything else that you have, a little bit in cryptocurrency is a really good way to diversify along with energy companies and gold and silver, and whatever else you have. From that standpoint, you’re just diversifying. It’s not a bad thing in the end.

Jerrel: Thanks again, and nice to talk to you.

Joe: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

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