How to Start a Movement – Strange Experiences in Marketing
I’m going to tell you two stories, both of which happened to me in the last year, experiences that have made me look at marketing, content, community, and purpose differently. I will explore the special dynamics that led to the creation of something from nothing in these two cases, and point out how and why specific things worked. What I hope to provide is a playbook for starting a movement from nothing, with two examples of different ways to do it that I have been involved with.
1. PDAP - The Police Data Accessibility Project What began as a typical data-driven content marketing project for a domain my company owns, quickly snowballed into something much much bigger.
It began when I realized that my local county made all police arrest and traffic citation data public. This included all of the meta data on the arresting officer, the arrestee, and the circumstances of the arrest. With this data aggregated for a single county, it was possible to essentially do individual level police officer analysis, to see how they were actually behaving on the job. Outliers could be identified easily, and hard questions could be asked.
After doing a blog post about this, along with the data analysis of my County, I made a reddit post linking to the blog. This is where the first few lessons come in:
The story needs to be compelling (the idea that we can police the police with existing data is an exciting one for some people)
Who the story is interesting to is extremely important. The message needs to matter to the audience. In this case, my post went up on r/privacy, a large community dedicated to individual privacy, with a focus on tech privacy. This story resonated with them, as it flipped the paradigm and suggested that it was possible to do predictive policing on the police themselves. If you want to start a movement, you need to capitalize on early traction.
After posting my blog post to reddit(https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/gm8xfq/if_cops_can_watch_us_we_should_watch_them_i/), it went viral within the community, giving authority and interest to the idea itself. I followed up with this post (https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/gr11aw/i_think_i_accidentally_started_a_movement/), which was well received because of the first. Here, I played up the story, and made a call to action. This was the chance to seed a community, while the hype was hot within the subreddit.
So, I started a slack group, and started directing people from my reddit post to the slack. Over a few days several thousand people joined the slack channel. From nothing there were dozens of people collaborating, organizing, thinking critically about what it might look like to collaboratively try to Police the Police with data.
While the initial buzz on reddit wore off, a remnant of the few thousand that joined in those first days remained committed to the project long term. Over the following year, what started as a reddit post became PDAP.io, a legitimate 501c3 non-profit, working every day toward more accessible and accountable police data, having written scrapers and aggregated hundreds of departments so far. The energy captured in those first few days was extended to become something much much bigger, by a handful of true believers who joined and saw the potential, based on a single initial post, and one follow up post.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 17.9 ms ] thread2. Dogebonk I briefly got into crypto in 2018, and left shortly after, disillusioned with how unpredictable and volatile the whole space seemed. In the last few months, however, I’ve found myself back on the hype train, trying once again to try and grasp how the blockchain and Web3 will change the world. I’d watched with fascination this year as NFTs and Memecoins started taking over, even though from afar it seemed like a total shitshow. That assesment wasnt far off. What I was wrong about however, was that there were few to no opportunities there, and what really shook me was that once I got involved, I realized they were doing marketing on a level I’ve not encountered in my 15 years as an agency owner.
I’ll preface the rest of this story by saying what I’m about to tell you is among the riskiest bets you could possibly make, and it is something I treat as a moonshot, and not as something guaranteed. So please do not take this as an endorsement, instead look for the commonalities in this example and the first.
Still, what I’m going to tell you about is the most impressive and unusual thing I have witnessed as a marketer.
About two weeks ago I stumbled upon a Reddit post for a new memecoin that I assumed was a scam, but it got me thinking. I’ve been casually investing in crypto for a few years, but always stuck to the primary players. I’d watched the memecoin and NFT frenzy with amusement, but honestly thought it was ridiculous. And truth is, it is more than ridiculous, it is the wild fucking west with everyone high on crack.
After witnessing the rise of Shiba Inu after Dogecoin, I felt like I needed to understand how exactly millions of people were deciding to make these seemingly insane investments. Is it all just pure speculation? Well, sorta, but there is a lot more to what is driving it than just the promise of money, and the community dynamics and the content they create are what matter here.
Back to the suspect new memecoin. What I stumbled upon that day was a memecoin called Dogebonk on the frontpage of Reddit, where people were griping about a Billboard they had purchased in Times Square. Having known about the power of a single viral post to drive the creation of communities with common goals from my experience with PDAP, I wanted to see if the same process was happening here as well.
I joined their telegram, and was immediately hit with a rapidly scrolling chat of memes. With a few thousand members, 1/3 of them were active in the telegram at any given time. I’ve been working in digital marketing for 15 years, and have very rarely seen such levels of community engagement. This was all within a day or so of a single viral post on Reddit.
It hit me, memecoins are simply the monetization of memes. Take an existing meme, and a community that already exists will pump out those memes quadrupole time if they think their memeing will help grow the coin. ( which it will if enough people in the community do the same).
What you get is a flywheel that is essentially a viral marketing machine, with individual community members promoting the coin in such variety and scale, any marketing company would be paying millions per day for an equivalent reach. This attracts more fans of the meme, more investment, and more members to continue to grow the community and thus the value of the coin.
When you pair a quality meme, with the power to monetize that meme as a coin, the limiting factors are the quality of the meme itself and the skill of the marketing of the community.
At first glance, dogebonk sounds as dumb or random as any other memecoin, but as I’ve found, there are some critical differences.
The first is the meme quality. What makes dogebonk as a meme intriguing is its extensibility. Because it is an “active meme,” a dog bonking another dog, that action can be capitalized on in a way that other memes can’t. This subtle difference is striking when you look at doge or shiba vs dogebonk, the volume of memeing is vastly more common in dogebonk. The more f...