What I want to see is you engage with the real influencers and be like AMA. Just preaching from the pulpet only goes so far. I want to see you engage with crypto twitter and let the leaders of there lead the convo.
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Hi @andyypants, I donāt disagree with you on engaging with Twitter influencers at all, getting that engagement is important for sure. But just to be clear, are you saying that we should stop tweetstorms - i.e. a threaded piece of longer writing on Twitter? Some of the recent ones have specifically mentioned organisations/individualsā Twitter handles as well during the comments (and are at times acknowledged by them). It just gives the opportunity to go into a bit more detail and increase visibility/opportunities for engagement. But weāll definitely being doing AMAās (and the rest) moving forwards.
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Last time I remember any big crypto people coming out in discussions on MAID in AMA like fashion it wasnāt a real positive, see here:
In this case, an ETH dev well known in the space essentially dissing MaidSafe and their hard work. I am a software engineer but donāt have a clue in how to evaluate a consensus algorithm and dissect every edge case and vulnerability that will be run into so I canāt really tell who is right or wrong 
.
Its a conflict of interest anyways, no big crypto team is going to acknowledge other crypto teams for their successes. If anything they will try to take the open source, rework it to their network needs, and deliver to production before the original team launches if they are fast and grind hard enough on their own codebase. This is the world we live in, those who deliver the functionality in production will always get all the praise even if another wrote the original whitepaper on it.
You can see other talks here in ETH forum on Parsec too:
You are never going to see someone like https://www.reddit.com/user/vbuterin coming out and saying āThese people did it! They solved something we have been trying to solve in our own way for years.ā (disclosure: I have no idea if MaidSafe has solved at all what ETH is trying to do with their sharding techniques) Egos too big and lots of pressure on the line for any team involved to deliver. That is why you wonāt see cooperation in this space for some time because right now its capitalistic with every team trying to grow their network and fix shortcomings and scale issues. MaidSafe has catching up to do because no public network globally accessible to all in a decentralized manner, but hopefully all the work they been putting in now to produce a better network that is more feature packed for what it offers and soundly secure so when we do release there wonāt be any OMG this canāt scale at all like we need and we must rewrite the foundation of our network moments. Time will tell.
I personally would love to see actual big teams from well known market cap crypto groups get together and just dialog out in discussions between their networks where they have reviewed each-others code base pretty thoroughly, it doesnāt have to be a friendly engagement necessarily of just praise. I would rather it be a engagement of each team attempting to prove shortcomings in each others designs(technical unbiased moderators required to help the dialog progress, I could see discussions like this getting some seriously heated nerds lol). May the best computer scientists and mathematicians win 
. And in the end what you get out of it are better future designs(for teams that put ego aside and realize there are problems rather than closing their eyes covering their ears going lalala my coins MCAP is more than yours so my network must be better )
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While weāre on the topic of community engagement, is there a reason why there is no presence on instagram? I personally donāt use it but and so canāt comment on the experience but lots of other projects in the space seem to get good engagement to their content. IIRC Maidsafe have some colourful office spaces and giant physical word stands that would look powerful and vibrant in the right setting, exactly the kind of content that seems to get attention on instagram.
Now Maidsafe has a marketing team it should be able to have an active presence on multiple different platforms simultaneously. There is the discussion to be had about whether you would push the Maidsafe brand or the SAFENetwork brand (as there still seems to be crossover branding on current platforms), but iām confident it would compliment the rest of the online social media activity.
ETA: I actually like the tweetstorms. Itās a great place to go for a roundup of relevant news articles from the week. Also, i like that it is tagging people like Sarah Jamie Lewis (whose values seem greatly in line with this project) instead of the virtue signalling crowd who tweet for likes and ego.
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Thanks for your message @boyceiom. Weāre a pretty small team, so weād rather work on a few key platforms then spread ourselves thin and be on every single available channel. Not to say weāll never use Instagram because there may very well be a role for in in the coming months, but for now weāre focused on Twitter, Medium, YouTube, Reddit etc etc. And although it manages to escape a lot of the negative associations, letās not forgot Instagram is part of the Facebook conglomerate!
Plus I like the Tweetstorms too - gives us an opportunity to talk about whats going on in the world around us rather than always talking about ourselves 
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Thanks for your reply @Cgray, although i have to politely disagree with the thinking. Iām not suggesting to be on every single available channel - just the ones that give maximum exposure, of which we wonāt know until they are tried. Instagram would seemingly be one that would need the least amount of time invested to produce results.
And yet your are on Facebook! Since you mentioned Facebook, why do you leave the scammersā comments up on your Facebook articles? Things like āWhat a blessed day for me as I saw the comment and gave it a try with 0.4 BTC and I got back 1.2 BTC.ā have been left as a comment on one of your articles for over a week.
I love the work @DGeddes does on Reddit engaging with other subs, but the SAFENetwork sub could do with a bit of attention of itās own if that is a platform that the marketing dept is focused on. It is not very attractive or welcoming to newcomers. A banner would improve the feel. Links in the community description to the website, relevant Youtube vids, Medium articles, this forum etc etc.
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Haha you got us there. Facebook is a legacy channel we keep up but its not something we focus energy on. Weāve had lots of discussions internally on what to do with this, and weāve agreed just to keep it up but not active.
And the wonderful @DGeddes does epic work on Reddit as well as across other channels. And good shout on a banner and updating relevant links (although this is pretty prominent https://www.reddit.com/r/safenetwork/comments/9x1jc0/safe_network_introduction_and_links_for_newcomers/) but weāll add that to the task pile and make those changes.
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Thanks for the feedback - I esp. like the idea of the banner.
Iāll see if I can maybe prune some of the facebook guff a little more often but as @Cgray says, weāve kind of considered it a legacy medium 'cause, well, you knowā¦ itās Facebook! (he said fully aware of the irony that he uses it himself).
Weāll continue to try and improve things so please keep critiquing when you see the opportunity to do so.
(in a nice way of courseā¦ weāre all lovely people after all 
)
DG
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I disagree, the marketing teams efforts have been spot on lately.
Everything seems so much more polished than in the past.
I donāt want to be a snob but most ācrypto influencersā make my skin crawl.
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THIS
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, oh god if John Mcafee starts posting about MaidSafe I think I would just abandon ship because that would mean they shelled out some dough to him for a shameless plugā¦
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Oh donāt worry, I donāt think a single person in MaidSafe would even consider paying anyone for just speaking our names 
I think it devalues any project and only something a competitor would do to us, I mean pay a promoter of that ilk to make us look bad, but that would just be stupid. In any case I could not agree more with you guys here
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Thanks for the invitation to critique, i hope you donāt regret it 
My delivery may not always come across as nice (i do try though) but hope comments are took in the way they are meant which is to try and help (not hinder) in any small way possible, as I am big supporter of what you are all trying to do here. Iām not very articulate either, which is the reason for my caveman-esque deliveries, 
so bare with.
It was a little surprising to see resources used to branch out to a new platform in Steemit just a few hours after saying the marketing team was already stretched enough over social media platforms. Iām guessing though it was planned way in advance as the account was approved back in November, but it does highlight a couple of things iāve been thinking in regards to the branding.
The whole branding really needs to align. For example, the appearance of the safenetwork branding. Why sometimes use blue for the SAFENetwork brand and sometimes black? This forum, safenetwork.org, reddit and medium all use blue yet safenetwork.tech, the dev forum and (now) Steemit all use black? Sometimes the name is all capitals, sometimes it is only SAFE that is capitalised. It all just adds to the confusion. I think it all needs to align so the branding is instantly recognisable.
I feel there is still this overlap between MaidSafe and the SAFENetwork, whereby newcomers easily get confused as to what the project is vs who is building the project etc. At some point Maidsafe needs to become ājust anotherā development team working on the safenetwork, and so the distance between the two needs to be more apparent the closer we get to launch. It was nice to see this start taking form with the weekly updates changing from Maidsafe Dev Updates to Safe Network Dev Updates, as this is what i was trying to highlight by running the āSafe Network Newsā handle on twitter, pushing out Weekly Safe Network Updates while you were still using the Maidsafe name. Small things, but important to the story we are trying to tell.
And thatās the thing. This project needs to start telling itās own story, consistently. I know lots of forum users roll the eyes at any mention of marketing, and I too when thinking of marketing in this ācrypto spaceā i canāt help but feel a bit nauseous, but it is needed in some form the closer we are getting to launch. I think David has highlighted in other posts the need to not just pander to one group of people, and that we need to attract the consumers as much as the builders and farmers.
We need people to start paying attention. Not for the price, but for the acceptance of the network, to understand what is being built here and to make sure there is enough traction upon launch.
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Some very good points made.
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Hey @boyceiom thanks for your comments, some great points there and I appreciate your thoughts. Re Steemit - just to comment on that quickly, this really is an experiment at this stage - simply to repost a couple of things here and try out a few theories that we have. We donāt intend to spend great amounts of time there at this stage - although of course, like every platform, things can and will evolve so it will remain under review. To give you a feel for it, a simple repost (without further work) of the markdown version of the Dev Update took me maybe 10 minutes all in (logging in, copy paste, couple of settings/tweaks etc). It was part of the usual Friday routine of pushing messages about the update across the various coin apps that we update weekly in order to see whether it justified that minimal time. Current evidence suggests that it might (particularly with messages crafted for a more general crypto crowd) - but as I say, that will be reviewed after a few weeks.
Your point on the branding/unity is spot on. Weāre actually working on something at the moment thatās looking to align appearances across all online materials at the moment as Iād agree that could be better. Obviously before that thereās the work required to agree on design/fonts etc and thatās where the bottleneck is a little at the moment with various other things that have had a more immediate priority across teams. But rest assured weāll get there on that one and itās one that we as a marketing team are just as keen to see as everyone else 
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This is really good to hear!
Just to reitereate the value of this, look at this recent introduction post: Introduce yourself - #763 by eucalyptus āDeveloping on Maidsafeā clearly shows the kind of haziness of current situation.
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