Share your marketing ideas!

Marketing
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Lets assume these people trust SAFE. (many will not at first)

They might make use of the storage. Great we get a lot of traffic. But joe public still won’t know about SAFE or make accounts or interact with APPs because there is no APPs

So after 12-18 months we get a lot of torrent traffic but little else because we did not attract developers to make the next social media or you tube which are 10 or more times the users than are there torrent users.

No We Need BOTH

OR do you want the SAFE network to be known as the new bittorrent platform and the den of copyright thieves?

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Of course not. I am against piracy. Everyone deserves pay for their work. Not being able to afford something is no excuse to steal. There are public libraries to pick up books for if you’re bored ahahha

I agree with you Rob that we need both. What I’m saying is that it’s pointless for us to look for programmers. When torrents sites come, thousands of programmers will come with them. Ok we can find and attract 100 programmers before … ie. below 1% of what will come naturally…

In my opinion, it is better to target the general public and I intend to continue to do just that. :dragon:

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We do need some people to target the general public, so I support you in this, but I feel its a fallacy that we do not need to do some marketing to developers. We need a youtube replacement today, to target the billion or so of the youtube users. One APP would target a billion people. More than anyone one person could.

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And I think the MaidSafe company has to do these basic apps, so to be first and make a profit. And not some random person to be the first and therefore the most successful…

Note: I have shares in the MaidSafe company (from BTTF)

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This has been applied for many years under the table. I had a channel with over 100k home videos for 6-7 years and they deleted it without explanation and warning…

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Couldn’t agree with this more.

Yes, there is far more to marketing than just promotions. The 5 P’s is an old framework, but no need to fix what isn’t broken. An effective marketing strategy needs to bring together Product (i.e. what the MaidSafe team has chosen to prioritize right now), Price (e.g. value and purchasing power of Safecoin), Place (e.g. onboarding channel strategy, key relationships like with exchanges, etc.), People (e.g. customer service team be that for developers or users), and finally Promotion (which should distribute messaging in line with the comprehensive marketing strategy).

I think that the first priority should be fostering third party development on SAFE. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) could be:

  • Tutorial Engagement - Both views (as noted by @m3data) and comments (because active engagement is crucial)
  • Apps in Development - There’s a thread (or two) around the forum about projects in flight, but I think that it would be great to keep a formal list with project start, aims, etc.
  • Hackathon Participation - Hackathons are great ways to seed development, and I think it would be great if this community could band together to support a global hackathon series (more on this to come…)
  • Developer NPS (Net Promoter Score) - How likely are developers to recommend building on SAFE and why (not)
  • Third Party Github Commits - How often are third party developers pitching in to help build the main net (if this is still an option) and participation in debugging/running test nets
  • App Development Time - Time to POC, MVP, Pilot, Launch for third party apps
  • Event Participation - Number of attendees and frequency of meetups, conferences attended (I know MaidSafe doesn’t tend to go to conferences due to time/other resource constraints. It might be a good idea to delegate community members to represent on MaidSafe’s behalf if that’s the only way to have a presence where much of the influencing is happening)
  • Social Media Interaction - Following/Commenting/Sharing

I think it’s crucial that members of this forum proactively rebroadcast and engage with content on other social media platforms–twitter, reddit, etc. That engagement needs to go beyond just liking things. I think we need thriving conversations to happen as well. I regularly search twitter and reddit to see if anyone is talking about MaidSafe, and the commentary is usually something to the tune of “what happened to that one project?” or “is that project dead?” We can change that by bringing the thriving conversation that happens here to other platforms.

@happybeing’s list of challenges facing would be third party developers provides helpful food for thought. We may be in a bit of a holding pattern until many of those challenges are solved. Also, there isn’t much sense trying to get developers working on anything until Fleming launches. At that time, availability of clear documentation will be key. In the meantime, we can start letting people know that Fleming is coming. However, without specifics, we run the risk of sounding like the boy who cried wolf.

On the user/developer - egg/chicken problem, two things:

  1. I suspect the first users of the network will likely be consumers similar in profile to developers (e.g. tech savvy, early adopter types)
  2. Without realizable value on day 1, not only will traction be low, but aggressive promotion is likely to yield negative returns

MaidSafe plans to launch Maxwell with some usable apps; however, we don’t know how long before Maxwell will arrive. During Fleming, I think the best bet would be around building a robust app ecosystem, so that when Maxwell rolls around there’s lots of realizable value for all manner of users. My two cents.

In terms of time commitment…I could allocate ~5 hrs a week to MaidSafe marketing efforts (pending of course, demands of the day job that pays the bills…) :wink:

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If it wasn’t for piracy, we wouldn’t have had Napster, which means we wouldn’t have had iTunes, Amazon Prime, etc. Sometimes laws are just ridiculous and need to be stretched in order for them to be improved or removed.

Arguably, intellectual property is not property at all, just a name which sounds plausible.

Anyway, carry on the debate, but I just wanted to interject a wee point! :slight_smile:

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Is online advertising working? We simply don’t know

https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising/13228924500-22d5fd24

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This is important to emphasise.

I hope that what I am proposing does not come across as some authoritarian centrally planned approach. I’m doing something seriously wrong if my ideas come across that way :laughing:

I’m sharing some perspective having worked in highly effective, self organising product and marketing teams. Also at a grassroots community level, being involved in Occupy and other non-violent civil disobedience based activism. Strategy is an agreed upon approach to achieving a vision. Tactical activities evolve through experiments.

A strategy is not about having a dictated plan. Common ways of working emerge as properties of the team when there is shared and agreed upon purpose. But I don’t think we will get consensus on ways of working and that is ok, disparate activities will always be present.

I think we are talking about approaching it in the same way. All I am saying is those small groups have a higher chance of success if they are highly coordinated in the pursuit of mutually agreed upon aims. Sometime these aims need to be made explicit and clear. Freely associating individuals of course do what they want. I’m an advocate for this and have practiced this even to the extent of small scale anarchy in my ventures. To varying success. Leaderless groups, driven by enlightened self interest, if let to self organised over a long enough time horizon will tend toward common approaches and aims.

Through small incremental changes over long enough time horizons order emerges from chaos.

Ultimately all of this is an argument about effectiveness in the direction of energy. A motivated group of people with the ability to execute towards shared objectives are powerful.

The whole chicken egg problem is also common to platform ecosystems (2-sided and multisided market places). For those interested the Network Effects Bible is good reading. The Platform Ecosystem Toolkit is also full of useful resources and frameworks to think about this.

Agree. The SAFE Network App and Browser will be interesting for people but apps that create meaningful outcomes for people is what is important. Which is why attracting developers and product people is crucial.

But back to marketing efforts.

Teams building on Open Banking and data portability/mobility initiatives. These teams are looking to:

  • De-risk consumer data storage and have privacy and security capabilities reasonably taken care of
  • Be seen as progressive and building trustworthy tech into their stack

These organisations are looking to bring decentralised and human centric tech into their product discovery workstreams. I am working with some large multibillion dollar cap companies that want to use things like decentralised identifiers, explore using uPort, blockstack etc. When the SAFE tech is ready I will make sure it is in their consideration set.

Good to see lively debate on all this from forum members!

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Here is a vision visual for a decent future I put together a few years back. Way out there in the future but it is something I am working towards in the work I do. I have a version with various relationships between the components linked up but it is half baked. I’ll revisit this in my holiday break and do some writing around these topics.

It might seem like a grandiose centrally planned society :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: - I see it more as me trying to visualise my understanding of the convergent trends across our human civilisation and the world we could possibly create.

our%20decent%20future%20-%20diversity%20and%20decentralisation%20win
our%20decent%20future%20-%20diversity%20and%20decentralisation%20win4311×2770 637 KB

EDIT: Super hard to zoom into the detail of this unless you download but here is a mural board you could comment on and zoom with

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It all depends on funding.

A big super bowl ad with BIG BROTHERS EYE on the big screen would certainly get people talking but we don’t have 5 Mil. So I think the ideas have to be cost effective. In fact i’d even re-title the post to “share your on-a-budget marketing ideas”.

  • News Magagzine / Article / Blog site dedicated to SAFE and or related topics. One well written and optimized article could bring in thousands of newbies for very little cost. If the site is consistently spitting out news and articles about the project or how it relates to other topics in the media, think -hacks, privacy etc. And is SEO optimized, linked and well edited (Cost - under $100 to setup, $100 per year to run).

  • More Reddit, more Reddit, more Reddit. Reddit is very popular with coders and programmers as well as with privacy inclined folks. Also one of the largest most visited sites on the planet. This should be obvious to all. There is a ton you can do on Reddit apart from just sitting in the SAFE related echo-chambers. Get out into the Reddit sphere, get into discussions and tell people about SAFE, drop a link, don’t spam, link to news in the privacy, cyber security, technology and cropto subs etc. Read this 11 Insanely Actionable Steps To Get More Reddit Traffic - Startupbros & this Reddit Marketing: How To Self Promote on Reddit And Get More Traffic (Cost - $0 setup, $0 per year).

  • Other sites as per the above Reddit point are Dzone, Code Project, Stack Overflow, Hackernews, Slashdot, Hackernoon (Cost - $0 setup $0 to run)

  • Hackathon, hold a hacking conference and offer money (MAID?) to coders who can effectively hack parts of the code, network etc. (Cost - Under 5k setup if done mostly online).

  • Press Releases, they cost almost nothing, you can write up releases and email or send it to all of the relevant folks at all of the big tech news companies. Even with a small budget you can do it on a larger more professional level by hiring an online PR company (Cost - $0-$1000 one time).

  • Podcast, I know @fergish already does one and I have seen he has some good numbers already. What happens when there is another Podcast dedicated to SAFE and related items and another? And we don’t necessarily need to even have our own podcast, hosts of other podcats are always looking for fresh content or people to interview. Anyone with a big mouth like mine can simply send emails or messages out to podcasters saying “Hey, I like your podcast, this is what we are doing, if you are interested i’d love to come on and discuss it, I think your audience might enjoy it” (Cost - $0-$50 setup, $0-$50 ongoing yearly)

  • Email EDM, I am not sure what will happen to the current SAFE gossip email list but if we can access it and maybe one of us can manage it that’d be great. But also we should continue looking to grow that list. (Cost - $0 setup $50-$100 yearly to run).

  • Social media management and content marketing (regularly AKA daily), I’m doing this one last because I think it is a kind of a general one but also because once I started writing it I realized it could potentially morph into something else…continue: posting on the normy social media networks might seem a far stretch for us (privacy project) but I guarantee you it is not.
    I mean we don’t even need to do it ourselves, we can hire a talented online marketing specialist in the Philippines for $600 a month and they will write content, create images, post, comment, link to social media daily. Think Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Linkedin, YouTube, SnapChat, InstaGram or any of the websites I have posted above.
    In fact apart from anything else, I think this is something we can and should do, if all of us chipped in X amount each month we could easily do this and this way we know we have a dedicated person that is laser focused on doing said tasks each and every day, if interested in this idea quote this part of my post and comment below and we can go from there
    I do not think that this is a BIG ask at all, in fact i think this is very realistic, heck if we really wanted to, we could probably get that cost down to $300 per month by hiring someone elsewhere where the labor is cheaper or still get someone from the Philippines but maybe on a part time basis.
    If all of us regulars here (511 last 30 days) contributed $20 that’s over 10K, that covers us for one year and beyond of daily marketing activities. But lets be conservative and say we only get 100 users to contribute $10 that’s almost two months worth of work. (Cost - see above).

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That sounds great David. I guess now you can ignore my response on another similar thread on Airweave : )

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You get Andreas, thats better marketing than a 100 M dollars. Everything aside, I think he may have already heard about Maidsafe and I believe he is synced with the overall vision so he may very well happily become a vocal advocate.

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Yes, as mentioned recently by @JPL in another topic:

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1)Ask Banksky to paint the Safelogo on a future mural.

  1. Wouldn’t it provoke questions if the Safe logo started popping up on important buildings, sites and monuments around the globe just after release.
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Guerrilla graffiti

Turn the SAFE logo into a stencil and start spraying the Bat-signal errr errr SAFE-logo everywhere

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Perhaps we could us projectors to display the logo on famous monuments world wide. Have great photographers, videographers set up to catch it all. :slight_smile: Animated projection with a bold message. :slight_smile:

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I have had an account with flickr.com just about from when it started. It still is my main online hosted / cloud back up for my photos. It has been quite a data story and I think a good cautionary tale on how data is really treated: as a pawn in corporate money. A start up gets acquired by Yahoo! Then Yahoo gets acquire by Verizon and then they sell to SugMug

flickr-pro
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The CEO of which emails us before Christmas, see attached. Could we onboard this community to the SAFEnetwork to show how data economics gets transformed?

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This is a marketing teardown for Numerai… guess the community could ask these guys for one.

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