I have seen many many replies on many various posts all about how people think this should be Marketed. At various stages along the timeline.
I thought it would be a good idea to group all of those ideas in to one thread so the guys at HQ could have a central location for inspiration.
So…how would you market the safe network and MaidSafe in general, to the general public, the mums and dads, the non techies…
I describe this in many ways to different people, but one example is:
A new Internet that never loses any data, a place where you create a website and it lasts forever. Or where you store your private pictures, videos and letters from your family and friends and they stay safe, forever. A network that cannot lose your password or have it stolen from the network, a network where there are no servers to hack.
This network is a network of human beings and their computers but is fully automatic, there is no configuration and no maintenance required.
The network holds your data, your computer does not. If you lose your computer, then it does not matter, if somebody steals it, then there is nothing of yours on it to lose. This is the Internet as it was supposed to be!
Furthermore, if you speak to anyone then it will be private between both of you and not be copied on corporate servers. If you video conference loved ones, you can do so in complete privacy and safety.
Imagine you go out of your house and lock the door and all your possessions turn to dust and fly out of the window leaving nothing behind. Then when you come home and unlock your door, or indeed go into another empty room and all the dust returns and builds your possessions faster than you can see. Your house cannot be robbed as it contains nothing when you are not there, now this is the security SAFE brings you. All of your stuff is there for only you, only when you want. Nobody else has access to it, no governments, no corporates and certainly no bad people. Your data, thoughts, words, and memories are at last yours and in perpetuity. Now you are secure, private and free to live the life you want, not on anyone’s terms but yours.
Now, what are you prepared to do?
I would market it as the new SAFE internet that is unhackable , I would use this word most of the time, unhackable.
Hope this is correct and it really will be unhackable.
Problem is that nothing is unhackable. It is like saying 100% secure, we just don’t know what tomorrow brings. Like the recent hardware issues with Intel AMD and possible ARM show, sometimes even the very CPU is hackable. Also, thing like poor memory wiping etc. can all be pointed at. So yes it would be nice, but pedantic (and possibly correctly so) people would call us out on that by showing such issues.
We can claim no network passwords will be stolen from the network etc. as the network does not hold passwords to access it, or we are immune to server attacks as we do not use servers etc.
I hope that helps.
i know you are right about that, but from marketing perspective, i still believe that this word , unhackable, is good to repeat , as this will bring attention and interest from devs and hackers all around the world willing to challange this statement , and this should only benefit the network in long term.
PS. just to add i got masters in marketing , but never worked in this area after college so cannot say Im good at it.
This is the best I’ve seen so far simple and to the point. How many people get upset when losing a laptop, phone or tablet. Usually it’s because of what is stored on the device and not the device itself that causes the sadness.
My strategy is in degrees depending on the price of MaidSafeCoin:
2$ MaidSafeCoin
I’m starting to work half-time to promote the network around schools, universities and business parks. Mainly with flyers and posters in my town (Sofia).
10$ MaidSafeCoin
I leave my job and start working entirely for the network 
As in the first stage, but in all major cities in my country (Bulgaria).
20$ MaidSafeCoin
I leave my country and go all over the Balkans…
100$ MaidSafeCoin
At this point the network should not need my help 
I agree David we cannot ‘theoretically’ say that but to the common layman, I agree with Starsmick that the word “UNHACKABLE” is the best marketing. The moment we get into ifs and buts, the strong point is lost. The main concerns you highlighted are extremely rare and not software’s fault. The SAFENETWORK in itself is UNHACKABLE. No better marketing then this to general consumers and to get corporate world’s attention.
…my 2 cents : )
From my viewpoint I agree with @dirvine on this one. I’d love nothing more than to stand up there during talks with a slide that just had the word ‘UNHACKABLE’ in full caps flashing on a screen behind me! But the challenge is that it’s a term that acts as a red flag to so many computer security folk. Just look at John McAfee’s recent experience along these lines (Redirect Notice).
Now we have a totally different proposition around what ‘unhackable’ means in SAFE terms. But in my view we might risk getting into an unproductive discussion around details when the real value comes from helping people to see the bigger picture. With paradigm shifts, some people tend to focus on the small details about why things cannot work (which then are proved to be wrong).
It’s a fine line. We have so many elements that are gamechangers, and I see it as our (collective) responsibility in marketing SAFE is to ensure that we never claim something about the Network which we can’t actually prove either way. In other words, let’s avoid alienating those who would react to a word like that because we want them to get involved, not turn away without further investigation.
tl;dr let’s choose our battles - we’ve got so many we can win 
How about “The most secure and anonymous network ever designed!” Pithy, challenging and accurate.
Just thinking out loud after reading the above posts. Tbh the #1 marketing tool to target the masses joining the Network is going to be this…
Get mobile farming a reality, and you have all the global adoption you’ll need and all the young fellas here (if so inclined) get to have their shiny new plastic depreciating rust buckets with wheels and the world gets to keep on spinning #slight sarcasm
That likely doesn’t come in v1 though, but really so what? Doug has it right imo, there are multiple targets (very large ones) the network will have flock to it just by being a reality. Security, Data Storage blah blah blah are all monsters that won’t need much of a prod, they will make the move over to the network if the right problems are solved at the right cost and very quickly.
That old saying about a waterfall starting with a single drop of water couldn’t be more true in this case. The tech savvy crowd is the target for now and likely will remain that way until we see vaults and testsafecoin arrive.
Hit those DEVELOPMENT targets and the tsunami of developer attention will be fast approaching ready to let loose on a truly decentralised network.
Throw in emerging close ties with important projects like Solid and maybe knocking back on useful doors like the NHS again and it starts to become a bit clearer how ridiculously awesome the reach (and value) of this network will be and we haven’t even got to Joe Public yet.
Oh and dear the torrenting folk, the black and grey markets you know those thingy majigs, yeah few lazy trillion in MCap floating about amongst all that, well they’ll all be popping over for a digital beer and saying g’day as well.
Point of this is to kind of say hey don’t get too hung up on judging any marketing effort for the masses so far or in the immediate near future based solely on any prior experience you’ve had either as a marketer or in the industry itself (crypto or I.T) cause well in the end what’s the point of trying to knock a nail in with a sledgehammer?
These efforts have to be carefully planned and executed with quite a long run up that goes well beyond launch.
Many of the critical comments towards marketing here use a bash and barge approach with their thought process, nothing wrong with that, but it’s merely one tool to use when looking at how Maidsafe are and will attack the rollout of the network.
The general public aren’t being forgotten about in the above just merely indicating I think they’ll almost by default be roped into this, in many cases without even being aware their already using the tech.
The network by the stage it reaches these folks in many ways markets itself as the apps folk will be using will be meeting the desired need the user has and you can pick what benefits the network provides to sell the respective app, product or service to them.
As for marketing Maidsafe itself OP, I hope they quietly all slip off into the background mostly working remote (save for a couple of office fronts) with pretty much no attention, fanfare or marketing required. It’s the MaidSafe way but possibly also a wise one.
I’d change it to “The most secure network ever designed!” this has a broader appeal. Then people can discover the anonymity part. Focusing on Anonymity sometimes raises red flags for regulatory bodies and also sometimes people perceive it as a dark market or for dark market. Best to focus initially only on security features as security/hacking concerns are paramount in every consumer’s mind (Equifax, target and several other data hacks) and more recently even the elections, senators web sites etc are all getting hacked by foriegn givt. Something like “Most secure network ever designed” sounds great,
I would never not call it as a ,new internet, as a matter of fact i think it would be good idea to underline that its not the new internet it ,SAFEnet,. BUILD THE NAME. Will take time for people to recognize this name but over time, this word can make its place into the dictionaries. I think that at least in the begining of the Safenet when its live , there wont be huge traffic, as the amount of websites, apps will be limited, the most people will ofc still use of www. and it might be so for a very long time, even forever (the word internet might forever be identified with the www.). Therefore i believe its not good marketing in the beggining to try to act as an alternative to the huge old internet. Maybe SAFEnet should focus firstly on the market niche, as an solution for people, organisations, services, that care about their security and freedom online. Typical Bob or Alice honestly doesnt care, and will use the more convenient and richer in data ,internet,
The “forever” part is something I’d like to see explained more. The fact that anything you put out there “lasts forever” sounds scary, even to me to be honest.
This is why I generally tend to dislike “marketing”. Maidsafe should never ever bend the truth “for the greater good”.
It is an absolute word, I generally dislike these kinds of words. Forever will mean the lifetime of the network. i.e. this solar system only has a few billion years left AFAIK and the universe could end etc. ww3 could mean no electricity for a while and so on. It all becomes huge debates on such words.
This is where I see marketing very difficult. There is a tension between concise (what folk call short snappy statements) and accurate. I recall many times the two logicians Russel and Whitehead (I think) that tried to demonstrate 1+1 = 2 and it took them over 300 pages of work and even then it had to make great assumptions. So diving deeply enough to provable statements then is almost impossible, at least in English. Then you have to choose, that choice is weird if you are totally brutal and that choice is “How incorrect will our marketing message be?” So you can take the tobacco/Pharma etc. companies approach and just downright lie, which seems bad or many of the cryptocurrency space, which is worse in many ways. So it is a dilemma and why it is always simple for egotists or just idiots to argue over a word and it’s strict definition. BTW @sasha in no way am I saying you are doing this here, I am just on a rant
Therefore these marketing choices depend on how incorrect a definition will be, separate from mission statements which are simpler (privacy security freedom/ index all the worlds data etc._ and they indicate a path, but not a destination. Marketing statements will always IMO suffer from being a degree incorrect, but us humans do not mind, as long as it’s correct enough for a simple message that indicates a desire/goal or statement that is open to interpretation. If most interpret the statement as it is meant with all of the correct assumptions then it works, however, most are never all
It is like handing a compass to somebody and saying “it’s pointing North” They take it spin round half way and argue it is pointing South, both are correct, but the assumptions are confused, with some discussion it may become clear of the intent. That is if they try and agree, but if one tries to always argue then you get an infinite debate, where both are correct, but will never agree unless all of the assumptions are clearly defined, then most people will not read it and many will claim, crap marketing etc.
Point being, if you want to pick a flaw in any business, pick marketing, you will always be right Many like that as they can take a high moral position and preach the inadequacies of the people trying to effectively market a “thing”.
That is why I am not a fan of marketing per se’ as it leaves you open to abuse, but it is also a necessary function. The fact it requires you ignore some opinions is a tough one though, the confusion of something described in human language is always prone to this. It is why scientists love maths as the assumptions are fewer, or those people accept the limitations of that language but can express complex things easily as everyone knows the assumptions and maths is less prone to be interpreted incorrectly.
So that is the rant over I do think of these things a lot and I do despair we have room for egomaniacs and greed to thrive in human language and for messages to be obscured in quite dramatic ways at times (the whole WMD Iraq thing as a prime example).
No to try and answer you’re actual question
This is a fundamental of the network that is confused at times.
If you think this way,
If you put data up then it will last forever, but
So it is not a simple position, but I feel that never deleting anything is fundamentally important for us. I care less about typo’s (as everyone knows) but if I say anything I am happy to accept I did and I am 100% comfy changing my mind and for folk to know that. The big issue though for me is to never let the loss of the library of Alexandria ever to happen again, who knows what we lost there?
The price of folk knowing a person’s public statements to me is one that is a no-brainer and we should accept, as I say I feel we already have this but surupticiously, perhaps it is best to have this open and clear?
If by ‘general public’ you mean your average Facebook and Twitter user then I wouldn’t waste time there. That general public uses whatever platform provides them with the applications and services they want to use socially and for work/business.
At this time I would focus on marketing to developers and digital entrepreneurs.
Stress the benefits of SAFEnet to developers and provide them with ever better tools to develop on the platform with the languages they already know.
Stress the ‘bottom line’ benefits of building products and services on SAFEnet to digital entrepreneurs so that they can make more profit.
The entrepreneurs and developers will combine naturally to provide the products and services that will attract the general public.
What you are describing now might as well be the hardest part for myself to convince this (Safe Network) is something good. The plus side of not able to delete anything is as well its greatest weakness I would say. We need an answer for the argument which is.
How can we delete stuff that is harmful in the beginning?
Governments will use this argument to put Safe Network in the wrong corner. Drug trafficking, child porn, terrorists, etc will use Safe Network and there is ‘no way’ for the government to ‘hack’ them.
I do feel that it is worth the costs but we still need to be able to give a very compelling reason to explain to parents why it is impossible to delete that video of their son being abused by their neighbor.
Sorry to put it so bluntly but I do think this is the greatest battle we have to fight, the larger institutions who will see their power diminishing cause the internet is suddenly not for grabs anymore. And they definitely will play it dirty.
Marketing SAFE Network is as well having an answer for the less positive sides that technology like this will have. We need to take responsibility as designers to design something we can ethically life with.
And just for perspective, sometimes forgetting things is a good thing. Our brain is developed over all those years to forget as well which makes life easier.
I still think that the major selling of the SAFE network will be by the APPs that are running on it. A goodly percentage of the public will end up using SAFE because of the APPs that are running on it and not by any marketing of SAFE itself. But I also think that marketing of SAFE itself is needed even if to confirm to the more inquisitive of that sector of the public that SAFE is a real thing. Then a smaller percentage will be those who are after security and anonymity and find SAFE through marketing of SAFE itself (or combination of APPs and marketing).
We seem to have or have had similar interests. 
That was pretty much my point. I’d like the “forever” part explained more so as to minimize confusion. If I’m 16 yeas old, come home drunk and put up a selfie on _my_own_site, I may want to take that down later and for it to be gone, even without me changing my whole ID. As far as I understand it, this will be possible, but I think this possibility has to be explained to the public.