Patron || You Deserve Full Control Over Your Audience.
There are a myriad of factors that influence our social behavior. While it may become very difficult to pinpoint these factors as we grow older, we can clearly state that as a child, most of our decisions were influenced by our parents, sometimes, brutally!😂🤣
An observation of the interactions between parents and their children however, could give us hints as regards how other persons, peers or not, could also influence our decisions or persuade us to do certain things. Authority is the attribute, that makes them able to influence us. Also, likeness which implies shared similarities and experiences we have. The most important is Reciprocity, doing for others or being nice to them because they've been to you as well.
Reciprocity explains why even our peers can influence us. Coupled with authority & likeness, it can be a powerful marketing tool. As a matter of fact, these are the underlying reasons why Social Networking Services (SNS) influencers have been realized by companies or brands to be effective marketing tools.
SNS influencers are persons with SNS accounts with huge followings and are capable of having an impact on the behavior of this persons who follow them on social media. Influencers usually have a large following across all their accounts, be it Facebook, Instagram, Youtube etcetera, because fans like to be constantly updated on "what's up" with the influencer across all media.
Having such a large following is seen by marketers as an entry point of their products into the market. As such, they find ways to get these influencers to put their products before their audience, especially if it's one right for their products. They could either go directly, that is, establish communication with the influencer or go through an ads agency, which could be the SNS e.g. Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter, Snapchat, etecetera.
Do not think that only celebrities are the only social media influencers. Through these SNS, with the right effort in content creation and positioning, anyone can be become an influencer. In other words, although not only celebrities are SNS influencers, SNS can make influencers, celebrities.
Problems Faced by SNS Influencers
Using this social position to earn an income, has somewhat problematic for these influencers. The reason for this, to an extent can be asceibed to, since influencers became realized as effective marketing tools, the space of influencers has not really been assessed for improvements. If you may, you could say that it is a social sector still at its infancy. And so, it still lacks fluidity between involved parties in this marketing, transparency and even the tools to make the market more effective.
Some of the problems faced the social sector of influencers includes;
• Delayed Payments: Influencers usually don't get paid immediately, and no one know where the fault lies. Whether it's the agency or the brand. SNS Users who have created an audience just for this are usually discouraged, especially when they eventually don't get paid at all and they find themselves going down the creativity death spiral.
Other times, the problem is not with the agency or the brand. The funds may have been released by those two, but gets stuck somewhere along the line in the payment systems. Scenarios like these usually take multiple working days to resolve and these limits SNS influencers.
• Influencers Have No Influence: Influencers barely even run the show. After painstakingly building an audience, agencies take advantage of this, to get contracts from sponsors and when they do, they pay off influencers who do all the work with an ant's share of the revenue that was raised.
Like a slave to a master relationship, agencies determine what should be put before the influencer's audience and what not to. This is sad because, it's the influencer's audience and not the agency's. Take Youtube as an example, they determine what ads will be run on your videos and the Influential Youtuber has no "influence" over this. This relationship is however buried under the stipends given to influencers.
• No Concrete Agreements: Research has shown that, usually at the eleventh hour, clients which could be the agency or the direct sponsor, change the objectives of the entire marketing activity. Usually with a condition of reduced payments or no payments at all, if the conditions are not met.
In addition to the vaguely set agreements, Influencers have also reported that Brands are crippling their creativity as they monitor and dictate what they should do and not do with their SNS channels, even when it's not their sponsored post, claiming that it might affect the results of the sponsored posts.
Sometimes, this forces influencers to take down whatever sponsored post they've put up for that particular brand and also quit working with agencies or directly with brands. They just stick with their own digital products and all other means of revenue generation they have come up with, that doesn't involve any other external brands.
These problems faced by SNS influencers point to the need for a thorough reassessment and then restructuring of this industry to achieve fair relationships between significant parties involved. Especially when the market that could open up to this industry is estimated 2.5billion user large and still expanding.
A solution to the aforementioned problems is not far into the future anymore, as a project, which as been ranked by Forbes as one of the projects that look out for in 2019, has assessed the industry and proposed a new structure it has dubbed "the social media sharing economy", which has been modeled after the famous Airbnb platform. This project, goes by the name... Patron. 😎
What is Patron?
Patron is a blockchain based social media sharing economy of influencers. Patron gathers all SNS influencers scattered around globally, categorizes them and ranks them, so that they could be searched for when their services are needed, probably for marketing but this is not solely it's aim.
"I cannot wait for the release of @patron_io a sharing economy for influencers founded by Japanese and Americans. It's a global platform!"
JasonDerulo's (14.9m Twitter Followers) Tweet
It aims to arm up influencers with the right tools to be able to operate independently, free of any agency. One of the means Patron does this, is through its evaluation system.
Patron evaluates the listed influencers on the platform, which are also called hosts, by a set of methods which properly defines an influencer's capability and by this, calculates the influencer's worth which is expressed by a monetary value (in digital currency).
Patron's Evaluation Methods
By these methods, Patron judges and determines the worth of the influencers listed on its platform. From the results of these scrutiny methods, the hosts are also ranked.
Dissemination Ability / Reachability
This method of judgement deals primarily with that attribute which makes an influencer, an influencer. This is the number of persons in his following - the audience. The larger the audience, the more influential, an influencer is likely to be, hence the higher the rank or worth attached to an SNS influencer with a large following.
Another consideration under this category of judgement would be, the influencer's or host's versatility with social media platforms. Hosts with more digital presence tend to reach out to more users simply because of the difference in taste of end users, who could choose to be in one social medium and not another. So, Patron hosts which reaches out to a broader demographic of users definitely has a higher dissemination ability and would score him/her more points of worth & rank. Those of two of the factors which would surely be considered under that criterion.Power to Engage / Engagement Capability
On this evaluation method, Patron will consider the engagement from both ends i.e the followers' responses to the influencers' contents and the responses of influencers to the followers' responses. This judgement category will help measure REAL influencers from "ghost-followers" influencers, who probably gained a huge following from, "follow for follow".
This is also an excellent category to measure the homogeneity of an audience and the content consistency of the influencer. An influencer who has not settled on yet on a particular niche would attract persons of varying interests to his following. Such influencers would have a reduced engagement in his/her contents, as only fractions (possibly a very small one if the influencer creates contents across a broad range of niches) will be interested and engage with that released content. A consistent content influencer however, usually gets large engagements in his created content because of the audience of homogeneous interest, the influencer has built.
The higher the engagement and rapport of an influencer with his/her audience, the more desirable the influencer will be, for whatever purpose he is needed for, hence more worth & rank on Patron.Trust / Evaluation of Users.
Trust, they say, is the greatest human motivation and it is only developed when influencers satisfies their followers expectations. It could be via the created contents in quality, it could also be via all the promises made to the followers that was met, all the events (webinars, podcasting etcetera) which was successfully arranged with impressive quality.
Every single time, an influencer meets a need he has promised to meet, he/she builds trust in the relationship with the audience. A trustworthy influencer has more impact on the behavior of her audience more than an untrustworthy one. Such influencer can easily sell an idea, service or products to his audience because they trust him to always deliver. Such influencer will definitely have more worth than the dubious ones on Patron.
Why Patron is Blockchain-Based.
The blockchain serves more than just a single purpose on Patron, which are all relevant especially in eliminating the aforementioned problems experienced by SNS Influencers. Some of these purposes include;
a. The blockchain provides the "trust network" necessary for Peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions. By this, Sponsors can directly transact with influencers without any need for third-party payment systems. The digital currency utilized by the ecosystem will be easily transferred from the sponsor's wallet to the influencer's without any need for middlemen, as the network algorithm records, authenticates and achieves all other objectives that third-parties were previously needed for.
b. Basing Patron on the blockchain allows it utilize the new era of digital contracts - Smart contracts. Smart contracts are used to control the flow of the digital currencies associated with them with pre-set conditions met. This will be replace agencies, as it will serve as a medium where the goals of the marketing campaign between the sponsors and the influencers are interpreted in the form of conditions which will allow the contract disburse funds for the job done automatically, when the conditions are met.
c. Patron being blockchain based, allows it to create its currency named Patron Coin (which will be discussed later) which could be used for different purposes which builds its sharing economy. Incentivization is one of this essential purposes. Followers incentivize the influencers for their contents, influencers can also incentivize the followers. The platform by this currency, can also reward followers for writing reviews of their influencers. The currency can also serve as a license to access Patron's services and opportunities. So in general, being based on a blockchain gives Patron more control of its economy by utilizing a currency of its own.
Although modeled after the sharing economy introduced by the Airbnb and Uber, basing a sharing economy on the blockchain is a novelty Idea of Patron. It's an Idea which will metamorphose the previously known sharing economy of Airbnb or Uber, because the blockchain facilitates value transfer between parties on its network by eliminating third parties. This seamless flow of value coupled with the cryptoeconomics which are designed to build ecosystems via incentivization will fasten the development of Patron's sharing economy.
So, now that we know how Patron evaluates her influencers and the ingenuity of being based on the blockchain, my guess is, the question lurking in your mind now takes the form, "What services do Pat offer exactly?"
Patron's Services
Patron is an influencer sharing economy. It basically standardizes the way brands or sponsors interacts with SNS influencers. In fact, one could imagine Patron as Airbnb where accommodation space is shared out to a guest user for a fee.
On Patron however, it is the "audience space" that is shared out for a fee to sponsors & brands which are also called the guest user. So primarily, the service Patron provides is the standardization of this audience share in the form of Contracts. As regards this, Patron provides three (3) standard contracts of SNS influencers' audience share on the platform.
- One-time Audience Delivery Contract.
- Monthly Billing Brand Exclusive Ads PR Officer Contract.
- A Year or More Influencer-Brand Agreement Contract.
One-time Audience Delivery Contract.
This can be likened to the normal pay-per-click or pay-per-view tools which are currently the main tools to generate revenues for influencers in collaboration with brands. Brands get influencers to put up their ads or a content that markets them before their audience.
The terms and conditions implemented in the smart contracts with automatically disburse funds to influencers each time a milestone is reached could be different, depending on the agreement between the influencer and the brand. It may be as mentioned i.e pay-per-impression or it could be payment just to put up the ads, with other incentives for the engagements the ads get. In short, this contact-type allows brands get influencers carry out a specific activity beneficial to them.
Monthly Billing Brand Exclusive Ads PR Officer Contract.
This contract type restricts an influencer to promote a particular brand. The influencer becomes like a brand ambassador who relates with the public about a brand's product and services whom he/she has signed an agreement with. In the One-time delivery contract type, an influencer could work with as many sponsors as possible within any time frame, as long as the activity he/she is hired to do gets done.
For this contract-type, the influencer's audience is purchased for a length of time he has agrees to. This means that, the influencer only puts before his/her audience contents that market a particular sponsor, in addition to his regular audience engagement contents. The influencer becomes a brand ambassador, using his wealth of followings to generate revenue for the sponsor he works with. Acting as a Public Relations (PR) Officer as well, he would provide feedback to the brands about their services and products.
On the contract-type, he is paid on monthly basis for the services rendered.
A Year or More Influencer-Brand Agreement Contract
This contract time is much similar to the previously discussed one. In this case however, other influencer rights are purchased including potraits rights i.e using the influencer's image in ad campaigns. This contract-type is more synonymous to being a community manager for a brand than being an ambassador because it may involve using the influencer's skills to build a whole new community or manage existing ones for the products and services of the brand.
A contract-type like this also creates an economy for agencies which currently exists to negotiate and then exchange (sell off or rent) influencers under them, just like in the football leagues.
The Payment on this contract-type could be weekly or monthly as agreed by the influencer and the sponsor.
These functions or mechanisms of Patron injects value into the influencers ecosystem directly, by creating an economy around them. It gives structure to the industry which was before now without form or previously void. You could say that Patron is a hub where sponsors meet influencers and this yield so many benefits for both sponsors, influencers and followers.
" Check out @Patron__official, the only global platform where brands and creatives like me can meet up"
Sanaalatan's(4.2m Twitter Followers) Tweet
![Pat_Dapp.png](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQme3MgGMVoUBuYvbKDQuxEPGEo84L9eP4sriZyY5531oZA/Pat_Dapp.png)
Need a Sneak peek? Check out Patron Demo
The App on Android & IOS is Coming Soon.
Additional Services.
√√ Patron Academy : This is a service which on the platform where regular social media users could learn from the wealth of influencing experience. Using the currency of the ecosystem to access this services, fans could get the the training required for building an audience, when you're done with the workshop, Patron provides a digital certification to prove this. Also, influencers could also access influencing consultancy services here.
√√ Patron Live : This is a feature on the Patron app which lets fans follow their influencers just from one app. There will be no need of downloading multiple apps to be updated with their favourite content creators. Influencers can make live broadcast from this to their audience in all the major social media supported. Patron Live supports more than 10 active apps, including the leading ones such as Facebook Live, Youtube Live, Periscoop Live (Twitter), etcetera.
√√ Patron's Crowdfunding 2.0
&
√√ Patron's Messenger
Benefits of Patron
Patron's platform is a pivot point for the three major agents in the field - Sponsors, Influencers & Fans - and to each, it sprinkles some benefits they wouldn't find elsewhere.
=> For Sponsors (Guests), there's a cost reduction in the marketing budget, as the the middlemen are eliminated via the blockchain technology. P2P transactions directly the parties involved makes this possible, as the blockchain network eliminates the need for any third party, in credibility and security.
Also, the categorization, global SNS ranking system and direct communication which Patron provides allows sponsors to easily search for an influencer who can reach the desired demographic of people for more effective marketing. Patron also ensures transparency of this by making the profiles of influencers visible to sponsors, in addition to the reviews by the influencer's audience and other sponsors the influencer has previously serviced.
=> For Influencers (Hosts), Patron is a channel to connect with guests who could be sources of additional revenue. This connection however, is intermediary free, hence in bargaining for their services, influencers can freely set their terms for providing services. You could say that Patron makes takes influencers from being slaves they used to be to agencies, to being masters of themselves.
Do you know what this freedom means for influencers? It means increased revenue - a revenue set themselves or a compromise from the negotiation with the sponsor, It means no content harmful to the host's audience will ever be put up because he'd determine what post will be put before them.
=> For Followers (Fans), they get unlimited stream of the contents they tuned in for as hosts work with guests of their choice. Satisfaction hence, meets expectation, therefore more trust in the fan to host relationship.
In addition to great contents, fans are rewarded for reviewing hosts by the Patron platform. Hosts could also incentivize fans for their engagement, directly.
We must also not fail to see how this reduces the cost of products and services for fans who are usually the end consumers of products and services marketed by guests.
Use Case
Billy has been a clown on Twitter & Youtube. He makes all these hilarious Jokes about movie characters which people really seem to enjoy because it has earned him over 50k followers. Being only a student who was from a not very financially buoyant background, He already started looking for ways to monetize his SNS influence. He could barely find any way, what supported him a little were the ads that were already being run on his Youtube channel.
This didn't make him too happy, as what he was earning was only a little and to makes things worse his followers were declining. He did a little investigation and noticed that the ads being run on this video content were either too much or too "mature" for his content. Sadly, there was nothing he could do because he needed the money.
He talked to Jeremy about this. Jeremy was a Social Media influencer as well. In fact, he shared the "monetizing your influence" Idea with Billy.
Then again, he had another Idea. This time it was Patron. He got Billy an account on Patron. Before the end of a week, he got two deals, but they were only One-Time deals. He was getting discouraged, he had no clue what was wrong, why he wasn't getting more deals.
He checked Patron's ranking system and discovered that he was way dowwwwn! "Aha! that must be the reason why", he said to himself. He got some PAT and attended the Patron academy to brush up on his influencing skills. After a month of training and implementation of this in his Social Media activities, he not only doubled hisbl following on almost all his social platform, he had more engagement from his followings and trust. This skyrocketed his ranking on Patron. Since then, Billy has had multiple successful contract deals and now he's a community manager for a Comic Brand. He saw Jeremy the next day, and Jeremy asked about how the SNS influencing was going for him, Billy smiled and replied "I grew the moustache, now they respect me".😂
Patron's Tokenomy.
Patron utilizes her own digital currency, Patron Coin (PAT), which is an ERC20 token which runs on the Ethereum Blockchain. There are 400 million Patron coins in the total supply, of which 240 million was distributed in the ICO and 160 million reserved for the team for strategic long-term development of the project. The tokens reserved for the development of platform will be on lock up for two months after the ICO closes.
PAT is needed to use the services of the Patron platform likena license. PAT also can also be used to get access to Patron influencer's academy where anyone can be trained to become an influencer from the wealth of knowledge and experience which the team has garnered.
Patron has successfully concluded its ICO and its token - PAT - distributed as shown in the chart below;
PAT is listed on major exchanges including CoinMarketCap (PAT ranks 394), HitBTC, YoBit, Latoken, Coinvest, Idax etcetera where it can be acquired with other cryptocurrencies. PAT can also be purchased directly from fiat with a credit card. Buy PAT with credit card.
Patron's Philosophy
One interesting attribute about the team behind this project is their founding philosophy. The philosophy indicates the team's commitment to the project, not to make a quick buck, but to create a splendid platform which will be on the same stage as Facebook, Youtube and all other great products, in order to prove to the world that what the Americans can do, the Japanese can do as well.
The team with all the experience they've gathered in the past years aim to "raise the the Japanese flag" to the world. In my opinion, this is a mindset that can really create a great product because of the pool of determination and collaboration (from all Japan devs who also want this) from which that statement emerge. It's Japan to the world! 💪
Patron Team.
The team of experts from Japan & USA is led by Atsushi Hitsatsumi, the founder, who also is the major driver of the founding philosophy. He is also the founder of EXTRAVAGANZA INTL, INC. and is a well established businessman in Japan. He teams up with many other reputable and experienced persons to help bring Japan to the world stage through Patron.
Patron Advisors
PS: This is not the entire team & advisors , You could see the entire team in the whitepaper. (Link Provided at the end of this Article).
Patron Partners
Patron Legal Partners
Patron In The News.
Patron's Milestones
To wrap up this discussion, I'd like to point out that Patron takes a proven sharing economy strategy introduced by Airbnb & Uber and applies it to the social media influencer space, coupling it with the blockchain to shut out the failings in the influencing industry as it is now and the sharing economy it borrows a model from.
Patron makes influencers who they truly are, influencers. It gives influencers freedom from agencies via the platform and tools needed to negotiate directly with guests as regards what will be shown to the audience they've built, how it will be shown and the cost to get it shown.
Considering this, and all other benefits it rises up for influencers, making truly them respected and independent, it's not far to see why the icon of Patron is a moustache. I'd say it will signify the pride of an influencer.
Japan to the world! ✌✌
Thanks for Reading.
More Information & Resources
For further explanation of the Patron Model, See the Videos Below;
• Patron Website
• Patron Whitepaper
• Patron Telegram
• Patron Facebook
• Patron LinkedIn
• Patron BitcoinTalk
• Patron Demo
All Images used are credited to Patron..
patrontwitter
patron2018
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Regards appreciated @ ced000, great piece of work!
The fields of applicability of the blockchain are infinite. It seems to me positive that the time that people invest in the SNS in a more productive way where both sponsors and inlfuencers benefit is used.
What other applications can we find for the blockchain? The limit is the imagination. What do you think?
All best, Piotr.
Yea, it's application are infinite. There are so many niches where third parties are involved. This is why it's applicability Is so vast. Good day Sir Piotr.
It's always great to know that you're still around my dear old friend @ced000 :)
Yours
Piotr