STEEM is getting some decent attention these days. @ned is doing some promotions. We have decent Github activity according to https://cryptomiso.com and there are many new projects being built on top of STEEM like @blockdeals and @musing and it is all great. But that's not enough. There is way too much going on the internet and just building stuff and going on the obvious path and building communities isn't really going to cut it. Most of the promotions involve telling people how they can make money on STEEM. That's just a very unwise strategy. How many of you go to YouTube or Medium to make money? The reality is that only few people are going to be able to make a living off of STEEM blockchain. So don't bother paining unrealistic expectations. What if acting schools advertise themselves saying:

Learn Acting and Earn Millions of Dollars While Traveling the World!!!

Is that a good plan for an acting school. Name me 10 actors on top of your head and I'm sure most, if not all of them would fit the above description. But that is an ideal situation. That's just the top of the pyramid. Now take a look at what happens in 60 seconds on the internet.

It probably took you more than 60 seconds to go through the whole infograph. Now tell me how any of the things that are already being done is going to make a dent in the busy masses than consume and get distracted on the internet? Let's take a bit more different approach. Let's frame tings differently and re-think our marketing. Please watch the following video to understand how important it is to brand and promote ourselves properly.

Hi, Do you know Bitcoin?

If you have been following me you know that I'm no fan of Bitcoin. i consider it a relic (much like dial-up internet) that belong in a museum. But people just know about this relic more than any other more sophisticated stuff. If they don't know about Bitcoin this method isn't going to have much impact. But let's say that they do.

• Now there is this new cryptocurrency called STEEM that is 200 times faster than Bitcoin. They have got this cool new tech called DPOS where they make tiny little blocks of few Kilobytes every 3 seconds instead of larger blocks every 10 minutes.

This is a great point. You can show them http://www.blocktivity.info and let them compare with other networks while telling Bitshares and GOLOS also use the same technology. The next point is fees. I've talked about fees in depth in this post: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@vimukthi/in-depth-analysis-on-fees-and-cryptocurrency-going-fee-less-when-to-burn-fees-when-not-to-burn-fees-and-proof-of-importance-pivx But this time we are selling stuff for dummies.

• STEEM also did a cool thing with Tx fees. Miners are already getting payed for their work. Fees are only needed to prevent spamming the network. But on STEEM you just have to lock some of your funds as STEEM Power where you receive interest and you get to do Tx for free. More funds you lock up more Tx you can do. If you own 0.5% of all SP, you can use 0.5% of the total network capacity. According to this post: https://steemit.com/steem/@lukestokes/if-you-hold-steem-power-you-re-earning-steem-automatically you are getting 1.899% APR at the moment. So it's like owning a stock that pay dividends.

A more complicated explanation would be:

Just think you own a restaurant or an internet cafe. It doesn't make sense for you to pay to eat from your own restaurant or watch DTube in your own internet cafe. You can forget about the fess. Now think you get a bunch of friends as investors and they are also consuming the resources without paying any fees. How can you keep this going without any screwups? You can make a free stuff allowance based on the amount invested. That way, nobody is getting free stuff on the backs of another person. The cost is self-sustained.
Now imagine your company stopped serving customers altogether and decided to just give free stuff to the owners based on their ownership stake. That's how STEEM operate. It's a company that exclusively serve its owners. That's why you get free STEEM when you sign up. If you own 0.04% of all SP you can use 0.04% of the Tx capacity of the STEEM blockchain.

Now is the time for the rest of the cool stuff

Some of you might be wondering why I chose to ignore the social media aspect for the intro. Normally that's what people do first when it comes to promoting STEEM. But I think this is a sub-optimal approach mainly due to 2 reasons.

We already have too many social media

Just look at the very first infograph I shared. People are already dealing with all of that and you want to tell them they need another social media! No! Legacy social media are already more sophisticated in UX/UI and you are going to make people instantly compare. Even if they want a new social media, they are going to think "How is STEEM going to compete? It is the underdog". things brigs be to the next reason.

Framing: STEEM>BTC

That gives an instant king of the hill status to STEEM as a project with a hidden Ace to take over the biggest crypto on Earth. You are doing a favor to your friend by introducing him/her to this new tech early on.

This is why you should keep the stuff like @dlive @zappl etc. for a final blow. After framing STEEM Vs BTC you can show them @dlive or @dtube and say that it is powered by STEEM. If the person is confused or in disbelief, drag Ethereum to the discussion. Tell them that there are many projects built on Ethereum and STEEM isn't that different. STEEM just exclusively focused on social media. Tell them that nobody would want to build a social media application on Ethereum because STEEM is already better for the job.

Show them few examples:
https://steemit.com and https://busy.org = Are like Blogger and Medium
@zappl = Twitter
@steepshot = Instagram
@dlive = Twitch
@dtube = YouTube
@musing = Quora/Yahoo! Answers
@blockdeals = Finding deals online
https://www.parley.io = Reddit
The list goes on.

Finally, The Money

Don't even start with "Social Media that pays its users" and similar attempts. That's just bad. That is also not a good description of how the mechanics behind STEEM works. Look at what happens at the protocol level.

• DPOS is very efficient and it costs very little to run the network. So the miners (who are called witnesses) are only given 10% of the newly minted STEEM. 15% of it goes to paying those dividends/interest I mentioned for STEEM Power holders. The rest 75% are allocated based on the votes by those who hold SP. So all the services will be allowed to use for free without ads and you could earn a few buck if you impress enough people with SP.

• You could make a YouTube video and earn 1-2 maybe 3 USD per 1000 viewers. But since fund are allocated based on the SP held by voters, you could end up making a lot more with a lot less viewers. Steemit also has a very high Alexa rank and your posts could end up on top of the search results very easily.

This is only an Example; But with important Insights

I've never been a fan of brute forcing things. Take DPOS itself as an example. Instead of solving some math to decide who gets to produce blocks, witnesses simply have to earn their votes. No improvements of mining algorithms required. DPOS thinks out of the box and it is currently processing more transactions than the rest of the blockchain technologies combined.

We need to find ways to pull our punches way above our weight class. Just talking about the virtues of the platform doesn't help much. Hundreds of other projects are already doing that. Take a look at these countries on this infograph. Ask how these countries did it.

Japan is always at the forefront of technology and and Singapore is a tiny city of 721.5 km^2 and they thought and approached everything differently. It wasn't the resources that put them on their spots. So don't brute force it with more ads, visibility or community promotions. Become a salesman.

Don't Explain STEEM. Sell it!

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