[steem-marketing] What's the state of Steem marketing?
Some of you might remember that a few months back Steemit Inc hired a VP of marketing. This was a long-waited event because the marketing of Steem/Steemit had been pretty much neglected.
We were promised transparency. But did we get it? How well the community has been kept informed about marketing work and plans?
There was a try to get crowdsourced marketing going on with certain tags. Those tags are dead now, nobody is using them and it's been only two months. It seems that it was just an idea that was thrown out there but no effort was seen to actually execute it properly.
The hard fact is that only execution matters, ideas are nothing. Everybody has lots of ideas but most of them will be forgotten very quickly.
While a lot of people are excited about decentralization in these circles, it's not always very efficient way of getting things done. We really should have somebody to be responsible of coordinating marketing efforts. Marketing person should be aware of who is doing what, analysing what is actually working, trying to identify potential niches to focus on, and keep everybody informed on relevant stuff. These things don't happen on their own, it requires constant work. Right now nobody is doing it.
It's impossible to use Steemit for collaboration of marketing, because it still has very limited functionality. Most posts are forgotten in 24 hours. There is no way to subscribe to tags, so it's quite useless to use them.
I suggest using a collaboration tool like Basecamp. It should be open to join for everybody who is interested in marketing. All information about all projects and ideas has to be in one place easily available.
Would love to get involved. I'm sure there's also plenty of Growth Hackers on here too that would have great insight! Not sure if Bandcamp is the best tool but I agree that it needs a separate space.
I would suggest there's defineitly a few things that could be self-organised, for example:
https://www.thunderclap.it
This service is something that people can sign up to, and then all at one time, it sends the same tweet out from everyone's account that signed up. People use this to launch products, promote something, as with a well-crafted Tweet it can get hashtags trending etc.
I also would point to the music fan base of bands like One Direction, regardless of your personal taste about their music, there is a proven record of thousands, hundreds of thousands fans, self-organising to promote albums and singles, doing a lot of the work for the record labels, just out of love!
Of course, it would be great to hear about what is happening that was previously promised and spoke about too, but I don't think this should stop us either!
Basecamp, not Bandcamp. Different services, although the names are similar. =)
Most important thing is that we have a tool for collaboration that actually works and the community can cooperate succesfully with it. I did some research and based on that, I think Basecamp is the best choice.
If we want to make a campaign, for example with Thunderclap, we need to design it first somewhere. If we use only Steemit for it, it's going to be very difficult because here just too much noise. It's hard to focus on the campaign when messages are buried very quickly under everything else.
I think steemit is slowly moving into the word of mouth marketing phase that most things do, i'm starting to see ads and people talking about steemit more and more recently.
The longer steemit is around however, and the longer the community grows the more they'll add, remember how terrible facebook was?
The problem is that there is no deliberate focus on marketing. People just throw some ideas around, and maybe somebody does something for a while, but there is no continuous effort for collaboration.
Facebook started as a service for colleges. College by college it spread through USA until it was opened for everybody. They did great job when they combined marketing efforts with business development. We aren't seeing any of that in Steem.
Ahh okay you mean at the corporate marketing level, i understand that now, iv'e only been on the platform for about 3 days so i'm not the most experienced to comment on their marketing in the past, all i can really say is eventually they'll get to a point where they HAVE to market.
You can't have an efficient decentralized system without organization. Planning must take place even in a market economy.
I honestly think we need to start to not focus so much on Steemit.com or Steemit Inc. The future of Steem seems to rest in the hands of those developers not overly locked into these organizations.
It seems that our VP of marketing has already a new job as Marketing Lead for Santiment.