内容标签：以兴趣为工作互联网 CC English 翻译 2021-09 2021

Design Gachapon Interactions for Crypto Community

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Nov 19, 2021 • 4 min read

After learned Octopus Network Accelerator's Community Management session, I rewrote my 扭蛋、桃厂和社区运营 article into English and added some new spices.

Gachapon

For anyone who had visted Japan, they should be familiar with "Gachapon"--this kind of product has an egg shaped case, with small, delicate toy inside, each one has a price tag normally a couple hundred yens(2-6 USD), and sold by vending machines every where: shopping mall, bus station, convenience store... Its history can track back to 1960's gumball machines which imported from US, but different from its US version, Japan importers added cheap little toys with gumballs, to lure kids to buy or even collect them. Along with Japan's economic booming in 1970s, its toy and animation products are at peak of both popularity and quality, the candy disappeared, left only the toy part. Toy makers put lots of creativity and hard work on it, some gachapon are based on very famous movie/animation IP, some are original designed, the consumer expand from kids to adults, and export to many countries. All gachapon are very small and cheap, but if you study it carefully, for example this one, you can see it has great details and very good quality. These little gadgets reflect the Japanese company's high level of creative design, 3D moldel, marketing, and plastic processing abilities. This industry consumes very few materials and energy, yet it provides so much fun and satisfaction to so many people.

One of my favourite gachapon "Koppu no Fuchiko", a small office lady in many costumes but all can put on the edge of a cup.

Canned Peaches Factory Community

This is a WeChat(No.1 Chinese social media and messaging app) group established by a movie media, the total members are about 200. It's weird that instead of discussing movies, the group members developed an odd cosplay routines everyday. Someone made up a whole canned peaches factory organization chart(picture shown below), and everyone in the group willingly get one role from the chart and play it in the group. Every morning, people lined up to send one word "ding" to simulate punching in to the job as old days. In lunch time, women "workers" show-off their cute bento pictures, and the "factory chef" send cooking gifs in the time line. Near off work time, the "club manager" hand out promotion cards to lure male workers to visit the club, and send waiteress/escort girl recruitment ads to female workers... It's really fun:)

Crypto Communities Management

As a product manager, by study gachapon and canned peaches factory community, I conclude one tip for crypto community management: along side with generating guiding information, inspiring good user generated content, some times we need to design gachapon interactions for community to boost positive emotion, which should follow belowed principles:

Proof that Tony Stark has a heart
Like Tony Stark's power comes from arc reactor. Every interactions conducted by community manager should embrace the core value of this community all the time. The core should be short and straight forward, like "make our coins value up", "found new fun/function in our game/product"...
Small and Cheap
Like gachapons or the canned peaches factory workers send "ding" to punch in every morning, this kind of interactions should be light-weighted, and very easy to participat, it will be better to be some kind of routines for the community members.
mini fire department picture I took in Yokohama, Japan, 2019
Emotional Management
Gachapon interactions should target on community members' emotion requirements, make them feel welcomed, safe and connected, these kind of feeling can glue users to stay in our community, become the real advantage of our project and form barriers against competitors.
Don't push to the extreme
But be advised, don't push these easy routine interactions to the extreme, if it generates too moch information, it may turn to noise and block real important messages in the community.