You Ask, I Answer: Content Marketing and Web3?

In this episode, Ann asks, what should content marketers be doing about Web3? Well, first, let's quick definition. Web3 is all of the decentralized blockchain-based stuff. So cryptocurrencies, NFTs, uh creator coins and tokens, things like that. What should content marketers be doing about it?

Well, a few things. One, be keeping an eye on the space. Even though it's kind of a hot mess right now, very much wild, wild rest, no regulation, all sorts of crazy scams and pyramid schemes, pump and dumps, rug pulls, you name it. The underlying technology of Web3 is sound. The idea of a blockchain, which is really nothing more than a publicly available encrypted spreadsheet, right?

At its heart, that's really what a blockchain is. Um think about an Excel spreadsheet. Now think about an Excel spreadsheet, everyone can edit uh up to a certain point. And in that Excel workbook, there's an individual tabs, and you know, every time you fill up a certain number of rows, uh and everyone agrees on that, you know, all the changes, like no changes allowed to be made until everyone agrees on it. Once that's done, and then a tab gets locked, um, that's effectively what a blockchain is, right?

It's it's a really big spreadsheet, and there's blocks of data that are uh read-only and encrypted, and that's why it's called a blockchain. Basically just a spreadsheet. There are very practical use cases for this technology. Uh, for example, audit trails. IBM has been talking a lot about this.

IBM has a blockchain application for shipping companies where you have a shipping container and there are sensors in that container that are constantly writing their data to a publicly accessible blockchain that everybody can see. Everybody can see all the data on it. And maybe you buy this cargo container and you specify, hey, we are contractually requiring that this container never exceed, say, 37 Celsius, right? And the sensors are on all the time recording in, and boom, of course, suddenly the container gets too hot one day. Everybody who has access to that blockchain can see, yeah, this container, the recipient should refuse to accept it, refuse shipment because it contractually exceeded that the requirements, right?

That's a really good example of a blockchain. That great use. Another great use that I think would actually be really significant is an aviation one. Right now, services like Imersat and stuff provide satellite tracking of aircraft. But when you have things like the Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 that just vanished and there was very little data about it, imagine sensors on board the plane transmitting their data via satellite to a publicly accessible blockchain that everybody can see.

The National Transportation and Safety Bureau, news organizations, you know, uh, unsolved mysteries hunters, the FBI, you name it. Everybody can see the evidence that is being posted to that blockchain minute by minute. And so the idea of a flight just vanishing, right? Should be impossible because this technology would create this publicly available in you know uh read-only resource that everybody can look at. Um another good example, potentially would be something like voting.

Um identities would be obscured, but you'd have this immutable record that said here's what happened. That's really blockchain is essentially nothing more than a public ledger. So when we talk about content marketing, what should content marketing be doing with these public ledgers? Uh, there's some really, really interesting potential applications. NFTs are one of them.

The current implementation of NFTs, by and large, is stupid, right? It's it's just digital Pokemon. But the underlying architecture is sound. The idea is you have this piece of content, and it comes with a license of authenticity that can be traded. And every time it gets traded, um built into that contract, the creator can get a referral fee.

So if I make, you know, uh dancing monkey, right? Uh, and it's got this license of authenticity that travels with it. And every time somebody buys this thing and trades it to somebody else for a fee, I, as the creator get a piece of it. It's basically royalties. It's a mechanism for collecting royalties that is decentralized, that doesn't necessarily have an ASCAP or a BMI or somebody, uh a licensing authority, Harry Fox, uh administering it and taking a big cut of the fees, right?

So for content creators, movie makers, video makers, professional photographers, um, musicians, the NFT architecture has the potential to be very powerful, right? Suppose that I make a two-minute song, you know, just put together some loops and stuff, and I attach this licensing agreement to it, and it put it on the web. And assuming that we work out all the issues with the infrastructure today, you could take my thing, remix it, reuse it commercially, and every time it gets used commercially that and you collect money, I get money too. That's a great application. It's built-in royalties.

And that's a very appealing potential use for this. For today, most content marketers today, with the current situation, it's a wait and see. Same with Gary Vaynerchuk's V Friends, where you you buy licenses from them, uh, and it comes with like some cute artwork, but the license is really what you're buying, and that gets you into, for example, into their conferences. Uh, and it's like a three-year license. You get a three-year license, and you can trade it, you can resell it.

It's built into the terms. So if you can't go to that conference, you can resell it to somebody else. Uh, you make money, and then the issuer of the license also makes money. So it's like, you know, imagine ticket scalping, right? Instead, you can have tickets that are resellable and fully auditable and tradable.

Think about with airline tickets. So, once upon a time, you could sell an airline ticket to somebody else. You can't do that uh in today's system. But imagine a uh an NFT style system, a licensing system. Forget, again, remember, forget that today's implementations are stupid.

But imagine a license that of authenticity that is your ticket, right? And it's maybe it's it built into an app or whatever. And you sell it and you sell it to somebody else, they then have to authenticate. They then have to authenticate. The airline gets paid again.

You get paid as the ticket purchaser, and then this other person provides their credentials, their you know, known traveler number and all that stuff, and then they can use your ticket. There's some very strong potential there. It's not real yet. It's not live yet, but there is potential, and that potential is very, very interesting. So today, content marketers should be watching, should be looking at use cases, should be figuring out are there small examples or tests you could run that might prove uh the usefulness of the technology.

Get versed in the underlying infrastructure, right? Learn the IT requirements behind it so that when it does become more widespread and it does, and you start seeing practical, boring, mundane use cases, uh you're ready. We have not hit the clay shirky moment yet for Web3. Uh Clay Shirky famously said when something is technologically uninteresting, then it becomes societally interesting, right? You take a device like your smartphone, right?

Your smartphone, this is not a new device anymore. 2007, the iPhone was revolutionary. 15 years later, this is commonplace. But in the process of becoming commonplace, it is now societally impactful. This device is probably more societally impactful than almost any other device that's ever been created for humanity because it connects people and lets people communicate in ways that never have happened before.

So you want to be on the lookout for the boring use cases of Web3. When those come out, then you're really talking about uh applications for content marketers. Really good question. Thanks for asking. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.