Memeify Everything (Your Community Demands It) | Christian Dumas - Superform

[Music] hey everybody good to see you here my name is Christian I'm the head of ecosystem at superform and today we're going to talk about memes when they selected me to do this talk about a month ago I realized that the industry perception of memes was a little more positive than it is today but promise you we're just going to focus on the fun side of memes um not the evil extractive side of memes and I'll try not to trigger your PTSD too much we're going to look at what a meme is I like to start from the basics and uh it seems like today especially in our industry everything is a meme so if everything is a meme what is a meme exactly and we'll use that as a foundation to then understand why memes are the infrastructure of web 3 community in fact the language and the social fabric of the crypto ecosystem we'll look at some crypto memes in action how you can actually um use these memes as a tool to engage your community these are some case studies and then some specific tactics that um you can try in your own communities what is a meme there's a lot of ways to define a meme I like this definition um it's from Wikipedia SOI but I think it's good uh a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols and practices because the meme is not the picture the meme is what the pi picture represents the picture is a vessel for um transporting this idea this cultural phenomenon effectively between people people's minds uh a couple other ways you could look at this are an idea that rips through public Consciousness or um it's something that's copied and spread rapidly in fact there's a um an analogy between memes and genes in that the most successful memes um are very viral you know there's this self-replicating aspect there's this natural selection aspect to the memes that are the most successful um and often there's slight variations memes mutate over time they're typically humorous in nature because you're more likely to resonate with and share something that you find funny um and they explain complex ideas simply think a picture is worth a thousand words essentially and um memes have been around for probably as long as humans have been communicating but the internet is where they really took off because it made it so much easier to create memes and and share memes and enjoy memes so uh even uh if we go back as far as you might remember the earliest memes that at least I'm familiar with are these internet based memes like uh you know cat memes and pepe and Doge and getting rick rolled and if you guys remember fosa Raptor all these guys um memes are powerful so there's tons of examples of memes being powerful but an example that uh I think we can all resonate with is Doge or Dogecoin and in fact at um the peak of the last Market cycle uh Dogecoin uh as a cryptocurrency was valued at over $80 billion or maybe here's a better way to uh demonstrate that and now today doge is a department in the government where in fact uh Elon Musk has literally MD himself into being the right-hand man to the president of the United States yeah Bo I'm impartial I just got caught up with that and um another example would be that um Trump launched a meme and single-handedly caused the crash of the crypto market so memes are powerful memes are powerful and for all the other reasons that we described the properties of memes they are the perfect infrastructure for web 3 culture and as I said before they are you can look at them as the memes are the language or the Identity or the social fabric of the crypto ecosystem a couple reasons number one memes and crypto are a natural fit that's because we as an industry we are internet native perpetually online in fact uh we were we were raised online we grew up on the Internet we watched the evolution of these memes over time we are fluent in memory so we resonate with these things we can easily communicate with these things um and also the industry is anti-establishment uh in a way where we're trying to get away from the old ways of doing things and one way of doing that is through the way we communicate in a less professional manner um in a way that's more less serious more joking more fun Vibes and memes fit that perfectly memes within web 3 can be used as a coordination mechanism some familiar examples are hodle and wag me you know we can actually coordinate within financial markets through memes right these are just ways to get people to uh you know collectively not dump their Bitcoin right and uh we can coordinate through the transmission of these memes through tokenization memes have become financial instruments uh you can speculate on the value of a mean now through crypto uh and then we even have this meme super cycle that unfortunately turned out to be a meme in and of itself but that's okay and then one more Point here is that memes are a competitive Advantage if you're running a crypto Community meme culture builds strong communities for all the reasons that we discussed prior um but a big one is like virality and um memes are so much more effective than any traditional form of marketing they are the you know most viral force on Earth I believe and if you can effectively tap into the power of memes you can spread your brand message very effectively more so than through any other traditional Channel and another point is that memes Foster the sense of identity with within a community it's very easy to attach yourself to a particular Meme and resonate with it and help in the mission of sharing it and people kind of um come together around that idea so virality and identity along with the other properties of memes help to um build strong communities so memes are this unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols practices um the memes are very powerful they've become even more powerful lately because the internet has made it so much easier to create memes and and spread memes and memes are the infrastructure of web 3 culture through the fact that we as an industry are internet native and anti-establishment and within crypto we can use these memes as a coordination mechanism as financial instruments and they're competitive Advantage for crypto communities when used properly let's look at some crypto memes in action some case studies of how to effectively use memes as a tool uh to engage your community an example that I really like is bar chain um you know bar chain started out as just some nft collection of Bears getting high and somehow they mem their way into becoming a chain that's live now with billions of dollars in tvl um so look at some examples of like specific bear memes that I think were really effective in getting them from stoned Bears to live blockchain um I absolutely love the bear chain website because you you don't scroll down you actually scroll up only um and then you have Bears you have uh you have honey you have the Bear in an airplane now we're in outer space you have a bear in a spaceship and right at the top here all the way at the top you have um this planet giant join our community right like that's the final call to action and that's just like I think a master class in um you know Meme marketing on a website for a crypto project uh in my opinion it's like the best I've seen the up only thing just gets me every time honestly um the concepts of like bears and honey this is like ingrained into their core product offerings uh they stay true to the meme in every single facet of their product and the marketing um simply just replacing things to have them start with a b instead of Royo you have boyo instead of request for proposal you have request for proposal um um meme numerology so the numbers 420 and 69 are present in their even their fundraise announcements um you know whatever your opinion might be on the be bies at least it was a unique way to try to engage like a different segment of the crypto Community um and it's definitely a meme in itself and uh you know at the end of the day you can just go into chain Discord and say BM or ugab Booga and uh super quick super accessible and immediately you're part of the community and you're you're you're sharing the meme um in a very easy straightforward way and now I'd like to talk about perform so obviously this is the company I'm working for and um one that I'm really familiar with some of our meme tactics so I want to walk through some of the things that we've done um and you're about to see a lot of stuff related to pigs just fair warning um so it all started we had this like pixelated pig that we um kind of MD into this uh these Pepe faces onto this pig because the community was kind of seeing super form as this uh onchain savings account or your onchain piggy bank so started to kind of run with that and um these are pretty common like reactions in the Discord to various circumstances the one in the top right there is probably the most common reaction uh in Discord basically just to meme people um and you know people are using these all the times we have different ones for different um circumstances and then through like contests and things like that the community went and kind of created their own and there's all kinds of ones like a French pig and a uh cool sunglasses Pig and pyramid Pig there at the bottom so we decided to just like go hard into the pigs because the community was liking it and we're like okay sure we got to pick some kind of like identity for the community to Rally behind and resonate with so pigs and we ended up launching piggy so piggy is actually a fair launch meme coin for the super form Community uh that we launched late last year and this was no team allocation no investor allocation we ended up doing 45% of the supply to the superform season 1 participants based on their tvl we did 45% of the supply to community members based on their Guild points for those of you who don't know what Guild is it's a a platform for Community engagement you can reward your community for various social and onchain interactions so we able to track content creators people who are active in Discord people who are helping us with Community moderation and translations people who are particip ating in our monthly campaigns we're able to actually get some sort of quantitative metric of community engagement albeit like a bit subjective but still a quantitative metric and reward that um with a literal mem coin um and then some more memey things we had we had liquidity mining so we had uh if you have liquidity and you deposit it into the slot bucket you can uh Farm the remaining 10% of the token Supply and then we had the Christmas roast so on Christmas day all the unclaimed Piggy was uh roasted and actually in the contract it wasn't burn we literally called it um roast so we here we have like the slot bucket right in the superr website you can deposit your LP tokens to earn more uh piggy we have the piggy bank vault on super form so this is like a super form product where you can deposit your piggy to earn super form cred or points um we had the collaboration with Royo where we did the Oink Locker uh royco lets you incentivize uh onchain actions so in this case we had a 10 we lock for Piggy and you get uh bonus points for doing that we wanted to call it poo originally but decided o clocker was much more appropriate and then some other things like uh just going hard on the pigs you know we've got the um Discord roles you can get for being active in the Discord you can start as a piglet and work your way up to being a pig and a a swine and event you become a bacon or a pork chop and we have one Community member who actually achieved the legendary rule of pork chop and we sent him like a merch kit like some shirts and stickers and things uh just to as a token of appreciation then we have a oink Channel like you know you have your uh Lang Regional language channels like if you speak Ukrainian or Mandarin whatever now if you speak pig you can go and Oink in the Oink Oink Channel and people are just in there every day oinking I don't know but they do it and they love it and then going this is a guild just some examples of things in Guild so we can actually incentivize people to put an emoji in their bio or to deposit a certain amount into a specific Vault on super form or to provide liquidity for the meme coin uh so just another tool to kind of you know using this meme as a tool to actually get what we get the community to kind of do what we want them to do there was a New Year's party where we literally got pigs so we got some little baby pigs and uh had at the party um you can actually see some ham in the background too that's not great um but just we were just like doubling down on the pigs cuz the community loved it and it was something for them to Rally behind they created a bunch of like awesome memes for us um you know animated ones and related to other memes like really high quality stuff one guy got his girlfriend to do like a piggy photo shoot for us uh I thought that was pretty amazing people created piggy cookies and piggy donuts and piggy I guess those are just sausage rules and we have a handdrawn unique piggy artwork that people did and uh some guy got this meme 69 million is program people are spamming it in the telegram chat um just tons of community participation clearly they love this message and they were just um really interested in like participating in this meme we got Nan piggy even uh at one point we turned piggy into an AI agent cuz that was like kind of hot so he was just like yapping about things and we even got the community to kind of go and ask him questions and like interact with him uh just for fun and again people love this stuff so those are some examples of some case studies of using a meme pretty simple mean like Bears pigs simple to engage your community um and now thinking specifically like what are some like tactics you can use to actually do this in practice well first let's think what does your community want number one they want to make money okay so let's say you know hopefully your your product or your token or something is is effectively doing that and we're not going to focus on that outside of making money what are the other things that your community wants well it's these things they want to have fun they want to make friends they want to feel important they want to have a sense of belonging they want to contribute to some kind of mission right they want to feel like they're part of something so you want to use memes as a tool to give them those things and here are a few ways that I think that you can go ahead and mify your community uh I have meme accessibility to be in the arena trying stuff and the meme flywheel as I'm calling it number one meme accessibility an important thing is mainstream appeal again we were just looking at bears and pigs like um really easy things for people to latch on to to create unique content around like that you're starting super simple and you can build on top of it but at the base level it's it's a pig um and we got some feedback from people that they really like the piggy memes uh because even people outside of crypto it has like this mainstream appeal uh memes should be easy to create easy to share easy to remix there should be a super low barrier to entry for people to participate in Your Meme um and you should even reward low effort participation so like in the case of bear chain you have ugab Booga right it just real quick to shoot out of ugab Booga and it R away you're part of the community you're your part of the culture you're part of the meme and through all this you just want to create a cult right you want to be to super easy for people to get into your cult and difficult for them to leave your cult and you can do this through having accessible memes uh you know the most accessible meme I think in recent memory it's a dog with a hat on it right like it doesn't get much more simple than that and you can mutate this meme you can just put a hat on something else now it's a pig with a hat or whatever uh and then this thing almost ended up on the Vegas sphere um but not quite I don't know exactly what happened there but don't worry about it uh in the arena trying stuff what I mean by this is just do things and see what sticks um if it doesn't work scrap it if it works double down don't overthink it you just want to do it uh and you want to lean into the absurdity right look at Bear chain they're about bears and ugab Booga and they're not taking themselves seriously and their Community doesn't want to be serious they want things to be light and fun right so lean into that absurdity find what works seek Community feedback like nobody's going to tell you how to engage your community better than your community so just do things and see what works ask your community what do you think of this and if you find something that works like in our case pigs just go all in on pigs um and you know this is even a meme in and itself trath there you being in the arena trying stuff and but I think it's true right like in his context maybe not the best but generally uh in the context of trying to find memes that are successful and VI within your community just try stuff and then finally uh the meme fly wheel is very important so you need to empower meme creators um you do things like meme contests have easy to follow templates for them to get started make it easy to participate in Your Meme and then reward these this participation right um share the memes on the main project social like don't be afraid to share your community's contributions um and then a big thing that I think is important is like intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation right so extrinsically you can reward them with um you know money like we'll give piggy tokens to people who create content as a way to incentivize them to do this but you ultimately want them to be doing it um because they're having fun doing it it's giving them that sense of purpose of feeling part of something and you really want to like feed into that so uh you know really simply you know this is the meme flywheel it's nothing too special right but basically Community creates memes you reward the memes and now um Community sees that their efforts will be rewarded and they're just going to keep creating more memes building on top of the memes to create uh you know super memes and hopefully this eventually kind of takes off without you having to to guide it that's the goal right you want to be able to like hands off communities meming for you right they are like your best um marketing channel essentially in summary memes are a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols practices and memes are the infrastructure of web three culture because we as an industry are internet native anti-establishment and these memes can be used within crypto as a coordination mechanism Financial instrument and they are an important competitive Advantage for crypto communities and your community wants to have fun and feel important so we use memes as a tool to help them have fun and feel important and um to do that we want to make sure that memes are accessible we want to try stuff in the arena and we want to utilize the meme flywheel and that's it thank you