The Thing About Marketing Steem

How to market Steem is something I've thought a lot about. Just for fun, I've created loads of Steem related images like the one above, and with a more serious attempt I made my entry for the sixty seconds of Steem competition.

The thing is, I feel like there's a bit of an issue here. In the messages I've come up with before it's really about selling the "potential" of Steem, and I do think that Steem has a ton of potential, but I think that's something you might be able to sell to investors, not casual users.

What we currently have I think is a hard sell for a casual user. When you think about it, in order to market something, you need to be offering a product, service, or solution, or some mix of these.

Do we have a product? Is Steem the product? What will it do for them? How will it improve their lives?

Do we have a service? Some dapps do for sure. Fundition offers a service, but Steem itself is not a service.

Do we have a solution? Yes, we do. You can monetize your content...only Steem is not very good at that. At least not at a serious, you could live off of your earnings here way(this is relative of course)

All of this to say, I think when we talk about marketing Steem we need to frame that conversation not from the perspective of, how can we get people on Steem, but rather...

What products can we offer people?

What services can we offer people?

What solutions can we offer people?

Of course I'm going to circle this back to continue to campaign for my idea of improving the UX for donations on Steem frontends.

I think this is a low hanging solution we can offer to people that is still on brand for the current narrative we have out there anyway which is you can get paid for posting content on Steem.

This would allow for a use for Steem for a casual user. This really just makes me irritated about the whole DLive BETRAYAL all over again because I think this would work best with live streams. I know we still have Vimm, but not being able to save your videos in all reality means that's not really ready for prime time yet.

*edit As I was writing this I realized I hadn't been to Vimm in a while and what do you know

They already have have I'm talking about, and guess what? People are using it!!! THIS! THIS! is a valuable service and solution we can offer to people. Not just being able to send the Steem, but having it visible that YOU sent it and having in visually reflected in the payout, really happy to see that there.

This also addresses in part the issue of the 7 day payout, as donations wouldn't have a time limit.

So anyway, if you think this idea is stupid that's fine, but I think we should all be brainstorming ways we can use Steem to deliver some value to the outside world other that just the opportunity to invest in a super risky asset that is down like 95% from it's all time high.

Thoughts? Let me know in the comments, and thanks for looking/reading peeps!