tl;dr: First it will be influencers and top-tier artists. Then, all of us will have personal branded tokens. How it might look.

Back when I wrote the Decentralized Marketing Organization book, I said that

“Smart contracts, asset programmability, [and] scalable governance….[are] the unique competitive advantage that cryptostartups have over entrenched competitors.” (p.16)

One area where we may see this play out in the near term is in the emerging area known as “Social Tokens.”

What is a Social Token?

A social token is really a “personal brand” with crypto-native features added to it.

Taylor Swift is a personal brand. So is LeBron James. So is Kim Kardashian. You get the idea.

Each of these individual-centric brands has fans, followers, and is looking for ways to “monetize” those relationships.

Given the way that social media platforms work today, that’s not so easy. After all, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube would rather keep the bulk of that money for themselves.

If a personal brand wants to sell premium access to VIP fans, say content on substack, that works today. However, if the VIP wants to access exclusive content on YouTube or have immediate rights to a discount via eventbrite for an event, it gets clunky.

This is where “social tokens” come into the picture. They are another component of the “unbundling of trust.”

By removing the access rights from the platform (substack or YouTube) and decentralizing it to the user in the form of a token held in a wallet, those “tiered access rights” become portable across the web.

Why Social Tokens Will Be A Thing

In The Bull Case for Social Tokens, Cooper provides some strong examples about how social tokens have moved from concept to reality.

He highlights how Grammy award-winning artists, NBA players, and other influencers are using tokens to build community and revenue streams by giving their fans a share of the community ownership (I could easily see some SEC ruling at some point in the future, as an aside).

But imagine this…a Telegram group where you must be a paying subscriber on Substack, Patreon, or Unlock Protocol in order to even have access rights.

So, let’s say that the NSM blog starts to offer a premium subscription. You buy an NSM token and it gets you exclusive content.

However, it could also get you access to a chat for other premium members. Sounds interesting, eh? Well, according to Cooper…

“Using tools like CollabLand, social token communities have boomed with a native integration to restrict access to those holding a predefined amount of tokens.
Both on Telegram and Discord, a bot monitors a user’s connected wallet to keep track of the token balance.

Drop below the threshold and you get the boot. Acquire more tokens, and have your roles, privileges, and permissions updated as a result.”

The possibilities are really endless as the Web 2 gets connected to Web 3 capabilities. Many call it Web 2.5.

Whatever you call it, the opportunity to monetize communities across existing channels AND created tiered levels of membership is going to get easier and therefore more attractive and lucrative.

In The CMO Primer for the Age of Blockchains, we talked about how this new tech changes loyalty options for marketers.

Social tokens are just one example. It’s going to be fun.

And yes, one day, we’ll have an NSM token. :)