Community-Driven Meme Coins: Driving Engagement and Value

Born from internet culture. Fueled by viral trends. Surprisingly impactful on crypto. 

While often dismissed as a joke technology, the most successful meme coins have come to be worth billions of dollars, and they’ve done it based on one shared principle: community.

Their communities are essentially insane marketing engines, development squads, and sources of (at times delusional) resilience in a market typified by volatility and unpredictability. Community-driven meme coins are not for the faint of heart, let’s put it that way.

This BONKbot guide will explore just how mission-critical community is to the meme coin phenomenon, identifying key engagement strategies, some successful campaigns, and more. 

Let’s go.

The Role of Community in Meme Coin Success

A strong community can be the catalyst for a meme coin’s longevity and overall success. Equally, a lack of community, or a community that lacks connection, will fall flat. 

Community members are essentially brand ambassadors, organically spreading awareness and promoting coins through social media, word of mouth, and even their own content creation, like threads, videos, and of course memes.

Why do they do it?

Well, typically they hold the cryptocurrency and want to see the price pump, but some community members are really just there for the vibes.

There’s another key function played by the community - feedback. Since they really care about the project and want it to succeed, their comments on developments, features, and the future direction can prove invaluable to the founders and managing team.

They can have a lot of influence over the roadmap and will communicate if they feel the project is not aligned with the desires of the user base. 

Now, while meme coins are volatile by nature, a robust community can actually help to weather market fluctuations and build resilience during tough times - especially if they see the managing team all pushing in the same direction and sharing progress transparently.

This helps to drive trust and a sense of ownership in the community.

These are some of the key roles played by the community in a meme coin’s success. They are also clear differentiators between purely speculative projects and community-driven ecosystems. 

Benefits Of Meme Coin Community Campaigns

Here’s how meme coin projects and their management teams are extracting heaps of value out of their communities to run impactful marketing campaigns:

• The potential for cross promotion: GameFi projects, as one example, may look to partner up with popular community-based meme coins to run a unique rewards campaign that drives a mutually-beneficial outcome, like more activity for each project.

  
  

• Brand awareness: A well-executed campaign can generate and amplify interest at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing methods, especially when you consider the viral potential of memes and the passionate advocacy of the community

  
  

• Repurposed community: When significant community engagement in meme coins has been established, the original meme coin may have the opportunity to adapt the support to other ventures, often within the same ecosystem. When launching additional products, services, tools, or projects, the existing user base helps avoid having a cold start problem and provides a foundation for success. 

Successful Community-Driven Meme Coin Campaigns

Let's have a look at a few examples of meme coins that have successfully leveraged their communities as a platform for greatness.

Case Study: Dogecoin ($DOGE)

Community Efforts: The Dogecoin community is known for being kind, generous, and doing good for the sake of doing good.

They run well-publicized fundraising campaigns, like helping send a Jamaican bobsled team to the 2014 Winter Olympics, and sponsoring NASCAR driver Josh Wise at Talladega - his iconic DOGE car holding legendary status.

Case Study: Shiba Inu ($SHIB)

Community Efforts: The Shiba Inu community has also been involved with charity, supporting animal welfare organizations and COVID-19 relief efforts.

The community helped set up ShibaSwap, a community-driven DEX, with their involvement in governance liquidity helping make the DEX a robust and functional piece of the Shiba Inu ecosystem. They then repeated the trick with their support and contributions to Shibarium, an L2 scaling solution.

Case Study: Dot is Ded ($DED)

Community Efforts: With Polkadot ($DOT) losing value and decreasing in mindshare and network activity, some of the Polkadot community banded together and started $DED.

This meme coin united most of the dApps and projects built on Polkadot, banking on the idea that a community driven airdrop initiative could reinvigorate DOT. It works.

So many projects got involved, mini-games were built, campaigns were run, and the Polkadot foundation even gave them $1m to run their project! In the end, a huge airdrop helped provide a temporary boost to the Polkadot community, while forging an entire new family of its own.

Top Community-Driven Meme Coins

As we’ve already mentioned Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and Dot is Ded, we’ll look at a couple of other examples of meme coins with notable communities.

Just a reminder, however, none of this constitutes financial advice. You should conduct thorough research before investing in any cryptocurrency. 

Pepe ($PEPE)

$PEPE is a meme coin based on the popular "Pepe the Frog" internet meme. It gained significant traction in 2023, naturally drawing a lot of attention since it was already a primary meme figure in the crypto world.

Ever since its launch, the Pepe community has become known for its strong online presence, ridiculously good meme creation, and utilization of social media to drive awareness.

The community is driven by a mix of nostalgia, response to recent events, and internet culture. As you can see in the image below, they’re not afraid to make memes about anyone or anything. 

Now, even though the coin’s performance hasn’t quite lived up to expectations, it remains one of the most well known and viral meme coins ever. 

Dogwifhat ($WIF)

This Solana-based meme coin is all centred around the idea of dogs wearing hats. You might think this is infantile or silly, but hey, welcome to the internet.

Dog and cat videos are a staple of internet culture, and that means that dogwifhat’s meme-ability is incredible.

By association, that meant it had a good chance of becoming a successful memecoin, but what really worked for the WIF community was being ultra-playful, incredibly simple, and keeping the community lighthearted, creative, and humorous.

Here’s Dogwifhat celebrating being included in the C50 Coinbase index.

It is also listed on Coinbase, one of the biggest exchanges in the world, thanks to the dedication of its meme coin community in helping it transcend from internet joke to legitimate business and ecosystem.

Final Thoughts on Meme Coin Communities

Community-driven meme coins are more than just internet jokes, they’re a weird and unique phenomenon that has found a bizarre way to tokenize, monetize, and sensationalize collective enthusiasm and social engagement.

Some people think that meme coins are just a passing trend, but as long as communities can unite, laugh, and create together, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t continue (or is there? Read this guide exploring whether meme coins have a future or not).

So, from fundraising for charitable causes to actively participating in ecosystem development, strong communities provide invaluable support and drive awareness.

Always remember that the meme coin market is highly volatile, and investing in these assets carries significant risks.

DYOR - do your own research. 

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