The Importance of Listening in Web3 Communities

The Importance of Listening in Web3 Communities

Renowned actor Alan Alda once wrote,

“Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.”

In these few words, he sums up the most essential listening characteristic that is often forgotten.

When working with communities, keeping an open mind is vital, particularly regarding areas needing improvement. Unfortunately, more often than not, feedback that highlights shortcomings is met with dismissal or defensiveness.

Both of these responses show weakness on the listener’s part and are surefire methods to alienate rather than grow communities. Many times, a hasty, dismissive comment has led to the downfall of senior staff or even entire projects.

Within Web3, listening is one of the least developed skills among project leaders. It’s understandable when you consider the drive and determination required to build a project, but it can lead to problems if left unresolved. Knowing when to relinquish some control and when to let others’ perspectives influence your approach can be a daunting challenge.

Forums and social media platforms are some main ways Web3 projects communicate with their users. However, given the confrontational atmosphere that pervades many of these channels, they can sometimes create more problems than they solve.

Marketing doesn’t answer the problem either. While spending money to increase a project’s visibility is essential for growth, it’s the human connection with a project that encourages people to stick around.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to automate this connection authentically. While outsourcing some of the work to community managers can help, it still requires input from core team members. The question is how to make that input effective.

Scrolling through countless social media posts may work initially, but as a project grows and time demands increase, it becomes more likely that important comments will be overlooked. To help resolve these issues, we’re developing solutions specifically tailored to the Web3 space.

One of the Zesh apps we’re developing is a feedback system that enables users to flag improvements and recommend and vote on solutions.

Additionally, we’re looking at how to leverage AI to help assign priorities to messages based on their content.

Knowing that team members have limited time to devote to community engagement, this approach will enable them to focus on the issues that give the best results. This could be based on the sensitivity of the topic raised or the importance of the community member based on their previous interactions.

By integrating each app into our other tools, we can increase the overall impact of Zesh on community growth. People raising issues won’t necessarily need to be power users to get the team’s attention. Likewise, teams will be less likely to miss valuable insights.

Streamlining the methods projects use to listen to their communities is integral to our approach. No matter how effective Zesh is at improving communications though, it still requires projects to be open-minded enough to allow their communities to change them.