RE: A Steemit X-Prize - A Competition to Brainstorm Ideas for Promotion and Marketing
Operation Proud Face
Simple. Free. Ubiquitous. Effective.
The simplest and most cost effective method of promoting Steem would be to utilize our profile pics on those other social networks.
Given that we Steemians, each have hundreds of acquaintances who already know, like, and trust us... because, well, we're awesome... we each should be able to leverage our social capital to soft sell Steemit.com
Unlike posting our steemit links on last generation social networks, which can be throttled to reduce reach... a Steemit branded profile pic promotes Steem every single time you interact on Facebook, Twitter and so on...
I think that there should be a standard design for a Steemit promotion profile pic:
* white background
* your smiling face
* @your_steemit_handle
* the Steemit logo
Perhaps there could Steemians who mass produce these for others in exchange for Steem.
Interesting idea:)
Edit: thinking about it more this is simple enough to be an easy thing that everyone can do. If we could have a little automated widget that you could click to generate it even better.
The concern for me would be about how soon social networks would start cracking down on this or if they could crack down on it?
I like the idea a lot though because it is a simple and easy form of advertising which deals with the idea suggested by @winstonwolfe and others where you let others find things out for themselves by creating curiosity.
If 'Operation Proud Face' wins the Xprize... the prize purse can be split between the 1 to 10 steemit users who best implement the idea. Thanks.
Personally I think this is a great, inexpensive idea. It's one of those guerrilla marketing type tactics that rather than directly stating the message attempts to invoke people to ask the 'what is that' questions or perform the search.
Not too long ago there was a billboard in town with just the phrase Use Your Noodle.com or something like that. Not saying what the product/service was in anyway, just 'daring' people to look it up or goto the site itself to find out.
In the case of Steemit, I'm a rather big fan of new non-crypto, non-tech people 'learning backwards.' For example, I tend to wait to explain the Steem -> Btc -> fiat process until they have $ in their accounts and want to actually do their first withdrawl. (Which I personally think is important for new users to do at least once, even if for a smaller amount, to know it's 'real.') This gave me more time before their 'eyes glazed' over since they were more motivated to understand things that were a bit more new/complex compared to what they were used to.