Before You Can Spread The Gospel You Must Create The Word: Steem Marketing and Branding Thoughts
This post is mostly in response to @pennsif's posts brainstorming Steem marketing ideas and I just wanted to weigh in with some thoughts.
There's a lot in my head about this, so I'll try my best to get it out in a way that's digestible. Here are a few bullet points.
- Before you can do marketing, you need to do branding. The brand is what you market.
- It's really hard to brand and market a platform. Think about it like this, when was the last time you saw an ad for iOS? You've probably never seen one. You've seen ads for iPhones, iPads, iPods, or applications built on iOS. You see ads for the PRODUCTS built on the platform. The platform itself is so generic and general purpose that it's hard to create a compelling "story" around it. Although not impossible.
- If Steem wants to "Onboard the Masses", then that's who we need to market to. That means ditch talking points about transaction times, or anything related to blockchain. Nobody cares, actually it's worse than that, nobody KNOWS what the hell you're even talking about. We have to think of real world solutions we can offer to regular people. Luckily, we have those.(sort of)
Real World Problem #1: Deplatforming, Algorithm Bias, Soft Banning, all that jazz.
Solution: The Universal Decentralized Account
(mock marketing message)
Steem is a network of applications spanning social media, gaming, finance, content management and more.
When you create an account on Steem, you immediately have access to every application on the network and new applications are being created everyday. Not only that, but Steem is a decentralized network, meaning no central authority controls your account. You are the true owner of your account and no company, government, user, or anyone else can take your account from you or remove you from the network.
Create your Universal Decentralized Account on Steem today and stake your claim on the future of the web.
Real World Problem #2: Content Monetization
Solution: The World's Easiest to Use Digital Currency: STEEM
*note: I didn't say it was easy, I said it was the "easiest", which is arguable ;)
*note2: Yes I said digital currency, and yes I know there's a difference, and that that's not accurate. I don't care, what's more important is not using words outside their vocabulary in a marketing pitch. A big mistake I see Steemians make often.
(mock marketing message)
More and more it's becoming clear that there is a new oil in this digital age...
Attention
Social media giants and content sharing platforms have so far been the sole beneficiaries of this new economy, but on the Steem network that's all changing.
On these platforms YOU are the product and the advertisers are the customers, the problem is, it's YOU that's creating most of the value while THEY rake in all the profits.
That's the past. The future is you benefitting from the value that you create. The future is a level playing field where algorithms don't get to play favorites. The future is global, censorship resistant, and permissionless.
The future...is STEEM.
So these are a couple examples of how I think you could market Steem. Some key ideas here are that I prioritize clear communication and legibility over accuracy. This isn't a contract, it's a carrot. They can get the details wherever we'd send them to. TBH, I don't think these are THAT strong for the reasons I said above. It's still trying to market a platform and I think it's better to market PRODUCTS.
If we did still want to market Steem, we would have to come up with some sort of brand to move forward with. We can't define Steem in any meaningful way and that's fine, but we'd need to pick a direction for a marketing campaign. A story we plan to tell. Problems we plan to address, a demographic we plan to reach, and some specific goals we plan to accomplish.
"Getting the word out" is not a tangible goal worth spending money on. An example of a tangible goal is
- Increase user signups by x percent.
- Increase traffic to x product by x percent.
The better we can track the goal the better, and it's not worth it to aim for things we can't track because we can't tell if what we're doing is working or not.
NOW, seeing that I think we should market products and not Steem, the next question is which product is ready to be marketed?
In my opinion, unfortunately, none of them. Some are really close, but here is the reality. There are no training wheels. Nobody is going to "do us a solid" and use Steem apps. We are now, and will forever in the future, be competing with the big dogs. That's it, period. If we can't offer similarly useful applications people won't use them. It has nothing to do with fairness, or difficulty, that is the path. We deliver or we don't. We have to be thinking big, about how we're going to become significant in a large part of the populations life. That sounds like a lofty goal, but that's what "Onboarding the Masses" really comes down to.
So when we look at our applications, we can't look at them with Steem goggles on, or even blockchain goggles. What I mean is thinking, "This is really good!(for Steem)" or "This is really good!(for a blockchain app)" I know we already have a lot of stuff that's great compared to other blockchains, but seriously, who cares. It only matters if it's good, compared to EVERYTHING.
As I've said before in previous posts, I think we have the functionality to do just this, but we're lacking the features.
I think the sort of cheap/practically free marketing that we do now is appropriate. Twitter campaigns, individuals making promotional videos, word of mouth, etc. because it's been a long time, I know people are tired of waiting, and frustrated, but we are still not there yet. Progress is being made, but I can't say confidently that I believe in any of these apps in their current state. Like most of you here, I'm excited about the future. About fully launched and ready Communities with all the community types, and a working example of an SMT connected to a Community, and the first Community breaking off and creating its own frontend, SMT's out, in the wild, doing exciting things.
Right now, we can hope to get a few more early adopters, people that want to be in on the ground floor, people that don't mind getting to the party early before the music starts or anyone is actually partying, but we're not ready for the masses.
All that is obviously just my opinion, by all means, feel free to organize marketing campaigns to your heart's content, because I'm just one guy and I'm not any smarter than you, but those are my garbled up thoughts. I hope it makes sense. Let me know what you think in the comments! If you think I'm wrong, tell me why, if you think I'm right, let me know. Let's get the discussion going.
One image "Making Of" my thumbnail
You pointed out some very important aspects about branding and marketing midlet!
I'd like to say something about this:
You focused your post mainly about onboarding the masses. That's one way to look at things, and you covered it very well.
But Steem can be pitched to businesses or to investors directly. For them, a different message makes sense. And I'm sure iOS was pitched to Apple partners at first. It doesn't have to be a public marketing campaign.
I believe in these cases private approaches work better. And for that there's need of people from the same category with whom the pitch is being made to. Investors and business owners involved in Steem who can approach their peers. Developers as well to other developers. They have the authority to talk to their peers about these topics. Everyone else is cheering, including myself.
Agreed. I think that sort of marketing is totally appropriate right now.
"Content Monetization"
I think this is a big issue with steem that can discourage a lot of people, specially professional content creators.
Only 7 days to earn from your content is a really short timeframe. And since we can't put personalize ads to allow a long life time of monetization, it make things a bit bad.
And even worst is that now steemit.inc is monetizing our content, and we aren't recieving anything for that.
@engrave was my hope on that front, but it seems the project is dead...
So this is sort of what I mean by "We lack features" I've stated in the past that with our free and fast transactions, we need to have tips/donations on frontends for posts and comments to also allow people to reward posts with their liquid Steem or SBD and have a similar experience to upvoting.
Also I've talked about turning sharing and beneficiaries into a feature, something along the lines of "Resteem as New Post" which would share the content of a post, but as a new post on another users account with the original poster set to 100% beneficiary, this way posts past their 7 day payout period would be "rebooted" each time someone shared their post in this way. This would mean really good posts could earn forever without making any changes at the blockchain level.
If we wanted to discuss changes at the blockchain level, there could be an inflation pool that rewards users based on the activity of their posts where posts with the most views and engagement received Steem from inflation based on that.
There's a ton that could be done, but people just have to do it.
That's an interesting idea. I'd like to hear some cons to it. I can't think of one that isn't already abused in this 7 days window as well.
Hmm, spam rings for better earnings?
Well this is just a 2 sec brainstorm, a feature this big would need to be thought about a lot deeper and with everything there will be risk of abuse. With more development some counters could be thought up I'm sure.
We're not dead, just still under development.
It's really great to hear this. And I really think you guys have a gem project in your hands. Please, don't let it die.
I think there was one Steem front end that made this possible. DClick I think. The big problem with content monetization on Steem is that content on Steem can only be evergreen for front ends and different front ends have vastly differing domain authorities on Google. Steemit.com has the highest domain authority of all the Steem front ends, which tends to send all the traffic based on Google searches to steemit.com. The front ends can sell ad space for fiat. Content creators get STEEM. Who buys STEEM thus giving it value? Speculators including the content creators themselves.
This is why Steem does not have a particularly good chance of attracting any heavy hitters from mainstream platforms unless a mechanism is created by which ad space can be sold . For small-time content creators who do not have large audiences, earning STEEM is a better proposition than posting on traditional platforms. For example, if someone has less than 1000 subscribers on YouTube, their channel cannot be monetized at all. On Steem, all it takes is to have at least one supporter with a large stake.
I'm beginning to feel that unless an ad revenue sharing model is implemented, blogging will always remain a niche. 3speak with its hybrid centralized delivery/decentralized storage approach, on the other hand, has a somewhat better chance of becoming an attractive niche for various contrarians demonetized on or booted from mainstream platforms.
I imagine you'll see this a lot more post SMT's. Like this is already happening on the Steem Engine tribe sites. They have the option to add ads and the ad revenue is then used to burn tokens.
When you have Communities that have their own SMT's, they'll be able to create their own frontends and economies around their own token, similar to tribes. Then these frontends will be able to add ads, or a multitude of other monetization options and use the revenue to buy back the tokens.
In the future, I see Steem as being your first step, where you can grow and nurture your community for free, then once it gets big enough, you can branch off and create your own token and frontend and start to monetize.
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One of the key features of Steem is censorship resistance. That's a tough concept for the average person to wrap their heads around. People take middlemen for granted. But censorship resistance is absolutely essential to the value proposition of Steem. That is an essential feature of having an account you and no middleman own.
You're right. The issue with marketing that is I feel like it's a problem people don't fully understand the importance of. So it's like you need to educate them first and that's really difficult in an ad.
It's easier to convince someone who is constantly and openly censored to embrace the censorship resistant option than it is to do the same with someone who is just guided with puppet strings, except he/she doesn't see the strings. Censorship is not always obvious to those being censored. So it's hard to sell the censorship resistant solution, if they believe they are ok. Education is important as you said, but how do you reach them? Through censored channels?
Exactly. It's the easiest sell ever for someone who has been censored haha. THEY for sure know the value of censorship resistance, but at this point, that's still a very small group of people relative to the total population.
Hi @midlet, thanks for the mention, and thanks for this post.
I would agree with just about every point.
Marketing/sales is generally about solving people's problems and / or aspiration.
Steem can make a case on each these.
Although what we have to offer is by and large still very imperfect.
But I am very much about doing the best with what you've got, rather than waiting for ever for what you would like to have.
Communities and SMTs will be great, but it will be some considerable time before they are really polished enough to be fully roadworthy and ready to race in the fast lane.
In the meantime others will be racing past us, carrying all those passengers that want to get from A to B in a hurry.
That doesn't mean the Steem bus should stay in the garage and just do little trips around our own backyard.
It needs to give itself a lick of paint, tune up the engine the best we can, fill the tank, publish our timetables, tell the staff to smile, put some signs up that we are open for business, and set off on our journey.
Even it means we have to travel the back roads, and pick up people from some of the less popular stops along the way, we need to start filling the bus with whatever travellers we can find along the way.
Once that bus is filled, and the passengers stay on board, we can then buy a second bigger, newer, smarter bus and start operating more services to more destinations.
I hear you. I think it's hard(read expensive) to get a lot of people to pay attention to a product or service, but I think it's even harder to get them back once they've had a bad experience.
Unfortunately, I think that's where Steem is at right now. Overall, it's a bad experience, that's why we have trouble retaining users. I think you and everyone else whose stuck it out can attest to this.
Of course I'm someone very bullish about Steem, so this isn't meant to be a Steem sucks sort of sentiment. I think there are a lot of great improvements being made, it's getting there, but if it were up to me(it's not, lol) I wouldn't spend money on advertising yet, and to be clear, that's primarily what I'm talking about. Us spending resources to market right now. I think it would be a poor use of our very limited funds in the current state of things.
It will have some element of risk. But not doing anything has a similar or even greater element of risk.
I am hoping @steemonboarding is really going to get motoring now they have SPS funding, and along with other project like the Steem Terminal, and SteemSavvy, they can hopefully begin to up the retention rate.
You said dont market the brand, but market products within the brand.
So that would mean @splinterlands, @holybread @dlease, @keychain and such right?
Couldn't we also market the niche communities/tokens?
Like !beer or the photo tokens etc.
yup, all that stuff.
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