It's getting a little bit hard to try and keep up with all the different initiatives for improving the Steem platform. It seems like there's a new group being formed every day and keeping track of all of them is proving to be a daunting endeavor.
Here's a list of the most prominent groups that I'm aware of:
- Steem Business Alliance
- Steem Proposal System/Steem.DAO by @blocktrades
- Steem Alliance - A Steemit Backed Community Governance Organization
After reading through all these posts, I was particularly interested in the Steem Business Alliance proposal, regarding marketing and promoting the Steem blockchain. I'd very much like to help fund or organize different advertising campaigns on many platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook & cryptocurrency-related ad networks.
Excerpt from the SBA introduction post:
Lately I've noticed that there are very few people joining Steem and the overall activity on the platform could be a lot better. Ideally I'd like to see thousands of new people join Steem every day and crowdsourcing a wide-scale marketing effort might be the best way to achieve this.
Utopian Visibility Category
As far as I know, it's already possible to get rewarded for running ad campaigns, since Steem is included in the Visibility category whitelist on Utopian. I haven't seen too many people making use of this and I've personally been put off a little bit by the arguably difficult process.
In theory, it should be possible to promote the Steem platform without spending too much money on it, since you get partially paid back through a Utopian upvote.
Since @utopian-io is a member of the Steem Business Alliance, I hope that they improve the existing Visibility category, so more people would be inclined to use it for promoting Steem through ad campaigns.
Public Resources
Creating effective adverts can be quite difficult, even regular text-based ads need an enticing message to increase click-through rates. It would be beneficial for the crowdsourced promotion of Steem if public resources were made available for people to use in their individual advertising campaigns.
There should really be a central place where people can collaborate on creating the perfect advertising resources, which other people can then use for free. I'm thinking of banners in all different sizes or text presets for Facebook or Adwords advertising.
Comparing the results of each promotional resource can help with fine-tuning each advertisement campaign and it prevents people having to 'reinvent the wheel' by designing new ads from the ground up.
More Crowdfunding for Steem Ad Campaigns
Starting new advertisement campaigns requires quite a lot of funds. Here on Steem we have the option of crowdfunding the promotion of the Steem platform, through Fundition. I would personally be very willing to fund any efforts to further promote Steem on other platforms.
With crowdfunding also comes a lot of responsibility, if I were to fund any promotional campaign of Steem, I would expect full transparency of how funds are spent. It's also preferable that a group or person with marketing experience manages any crowdfunding campaign.
TL;DR
- Increase paid promotion of the Steem platform through paid advertising.
- Improve the existing Visibility category on Utopian (suggestion).
- Create a public database of free-to-use advertising resources (text, banners, video, etc.).
- Organize crowdfunding efforts for paid advertising of the Steem platform.
The intent of this post is to make people aware of the Steem Business Alliance's goals of promoting the Steem blockchain, as well as add my own thoughts about optimizing paid promotional efforts. I'm always open to join any community that specifically wants to organize advertising campaigns.
Due to being a fairly high-profile member of Bitcointalk, I come into contact with a lot of blockchain-related business owners who offer me cryptocurrency-specific advertising opportunities. I would very much like to take them up on some of these offers, in order to promote the Steem blockchain at my own expense.
Comment or resteem if you've found these ideas interesting!
The Steem Business Alliance project is currently being worked on jointly by @oracle-d, @steempress, @steemhunt, @fundition and @utopian-io. I am currently NOT affiliated with them in any way.