MaidSafe Marketing Strategy H1 2018

There are lots of great ideas coming directly from the community on the Forum about how you would like to see MaidSafe engage with marketing during the course of this year. In order to pull that conversation together, we wanted to outline very broadly the key objectives for us in order to give everyone visibility of our thinking. The starting point for the first half of 2018 is the following:

MaidSafeCoin / Safecoin

The last year has been crazy in crypto land. Valuations have rocketed, often without seeing any obvious reason for the spike. Whilst weā€™re fortunate to work daily on a project that attracts so many who view profit as secondary to the positive improvements in society that the SAFE Network will deliver, the price and standing of MaidSafeCoin (MAID) today does matter. Like every project, weā€™d like nothing more than for our supporters, many of whom have stuck with us for a lifetime (in crypto terms) to be rewarded for their hard work and patience. But, in addition, thereā€™s no doubt that a rising price in MAID will be one of the most effective ways of capturing interest.

We want to continue to grow the community - attracting developers and also those with less technical backgrounds - as this continues to be one of our most valuable assets.

Consequently, we need to get MAID listed on more exchanges. Discussions are ongoing and will continue. We hope to be able to announce some news soon. However, due to the overall explosion of interest across the scene, many of you will understand just how much work is facing the exchanges today. Weā€™ll update you as soon as we have definite news but this is a continuing theme this year.

In addition, this year we will be bringing the focus more strongly onto Safecoin itself. Unless youā€™re a day trader who is focused solely on short-term speculation, itā€™s important that everyone who either has or is buying MAID understands the value and benefits of Safecoin once it launches on the network and the tokens are exchanged.

Messaging around SAFE Network

Our focus will be on publicising the key benefits of the Network (in addition to the usual messages of privacy, security and freedom) in H1 2018 across a variety of mediums (articles, interviews, talks, meetups).

Very broadly speaking, these will revolve around the following messages:

  • No blockchain - and so no problems of scalability (unlike blockchain-based networks, e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum) and increased privacy
  • Proof-of-resource is more eco-friendly than Proof-of-work
  • No transaction fees
  • Near instantaneous confirmation of transactions
  • Confirmation at network speed using Close Group Consensus
  • Multi-layered encryption on SAFE - compared to the lack of encryption with Bitcoin
  • Farming will be more inclusive than mining (able to be carried out on individualā€™s mobiles etc)

In more general terms, we will be pushing the ā€˜SAFE Networkā€™ brand, as opposed to the MaidSafe company branding. Although we can see both sides of the argument, MaidSafe (the company) will ultimately just be one of many companies that is working on building applications on top of the Network once it is launched and autonomous. We need to ensure that newcomers (who will vastly exceed the current community on launch) identify with the SAFE Network.

Any confusion that existing people have over MaidSafeCoin including the word MaidSafe should disappear upon the launch of Safecoin. In the meantime, our marketing materials will continue to reinforce the Networkā€™s connection with MaidSafeCoin across many different areas.

Community Engagement Project

We have already kicked off the Community Engagement Program and, as per the Weekly Dev Update, weā€™re looking forward to seeing voting open tomorrow on the first proposal for the animated Safecoin video RFP. Weā€™ll tweak a few parts of the process moving forwards and weā€™re also working on finding a solution to address the current transaction costs on the Bitcoin network which will make it easier for community members to support the projects that they like with donations. As a result, over the course of the next few months, weā€™re looking forward to seeing more projects get proposed, funded and delivered under this process.

SAFE Network Academy

Itā€™s crucial that we make it as easy as possible for people to find out what they need to relating to the project. Many simply donā€™t have the time to engage with the Forum etc in the early stages of investigation. A big thrust this year will therefore come in the form of pulling all of the disparate pieces of knowledge together into a format thatā€™s readily accessible.

One of the key parts of this will be the SAFE Network Academy. This initiative will involve the community but with the close involvement of MaidSafe (at least initially) in order to ensure that the materials contain the most up-to-date material at all times. This is such a key area for us all, that the plan is not to launch something that is perfect from day one but instead tackles the biggest questions that newcomers face.

Platforms

With extra resource and the amazing continued support of the community, weā€™re now expanding our online presence in a more measured way. We plan to review and report on metrics about community growth more regularly moving forwards.

For everyoneā€™s benefit, however, our focus is on the following:

  • Website redesign of www.maidsafe.net in Q1
  • SAFE Network Forum: the default platform for discussion (run and owned by community members)
  • Reddit (r/safenetwork): the primary focus for Q1 2018 (run and owned by community members)
  • Twitter (@maidsafe): please support us here as far as possible via likes/retweets - using the #safenetwork hashtag is really useful for the community to ensure weā€™re all sharing effectively

In addition, we have community members working hard at the Telegram group and the SAFE Network Slack. Weā€™re also discussing various options for video updates moving forwards and increasing the quantity of blogs and other written content. Weā€™ll share further thinking on this (and other platforms) very shortly.

Roadmap

Undoubtedly one of the biggest questions that we all receive! As you know, we have a very basic roadmap on the current website. For newcomers (and to paraphrase a comment from the Forum this week), the challenge that we face here is that the Network canā€™t launch until all the testing is finished - and we canā€™t make that estimation until the tests are carried outā€¦

Weā€™re going to look at how we can make this clearer on the new website for newcomers with more detail and weā€™ll then share this across the various platforms.

Community events, conferences, meetups

One of our challenges has always been running events too far in advance of the launch of the Network. However, it does make sense to put the foundations in place now in order to give people the ability to find SAFE Network advocates around the world as the interest continues to build.

With a little more resource this year, weā€™ll be increasing our visibility. As always, weā€™d love to see members of the community pulling together events around the world which we will support as far as possible. Often this involves paying for the meetup.com registration and a few t-shirts but please contact @dugcampbell directly if you want to discuss further. There will be a more detailed post outlining our current thinking here in the not-too-distant future. Likewise, if there are events that you believe that we should be at, please let us know. Provided we have the budget and the resource, we will do our best to be there.

Hopefully this gives a little more information about our plans over the next couple of months. Weā€™ve shared what we are able to at this point in time but of course everything remains open to feedback. Thanks to each of you again in the community, however youā€™re engaging with the project in advance for your support remotely. It really couldnā€™t work without you. Hereā€™s to a great 2018!

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I think it would also be important to advertise some actual use cases of the SAFE network and the things possible on the SAFE network which are not possible on the clearnet. I think for most beginners it is difficult to understand the potential of the SAFE, because there are so many things it can do. Most people donā€™t understand the meaning of ā€œautonomous data networkā€.

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All the above is phenomenal news! Itā€™s also awesome to have a sense of what messaging to focus on and push! :smile:

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Great to see this sort of post as part of the weekly update!

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Shouldnā€™t this the likes of this and the Reddit post be linked to Reddit too? I think these announcements should get maximum exposure, as they give great insight into how the project and team are progressing.

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Finally some great news from Marketing teamā€¦ carry of guys.

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Might be worth bagging a safenetwork twitter handle - Iā€™m just going through them now. Unfortunately the most obvious ones are all taken but Iā€™ve just registered @_safenetwork and there are a few other variations still available.

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I registered this one a while ago: https://twitter.com/safenetworkorg :slightly_smiling_face:

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Ah OK. Good work. :slightly_smiling_face:

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This is all excellent news. I love the academy idea, especially when it focusses on farming; because people have questions about how exactly that will be done, and what resources they will need to gather, and when they should be prepared to farm, etc.

Great work!

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Excellent to read what is planned in this regard.

Have you thought about what should happen to the wiki? I think it either needs a more or less complete overhaul since it still contains a lot of outdated information and it is missing a lot of information or it should be taken down.

@frabrunelle and a couple of others still made some changes, but it should be aligned with the overall strategy since it shows up very high in the search results.

Feel free to reach out to me to discuss how you want to go forward with this.

PS: Although I havenā€™t posted on the forum in quite some time, I havenā€™t lost interest, quite the opposite :wink:

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@dugcampbell Absolutely spot on. You have nailed pritty much everything that needed to be addressed in my opinion.

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With the focus on SafeNetwork instead of MaidSafe does it not make more sense to redesign and push safenetwork.org ?
Surely having maidsafe.net as the new sparkling all singing all dancing website is going to keep promoting what is meant to be avoided.

Must be something obvious that I am missing?

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Good point and maybe @dugcampbell can look into this

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Guys, voting starts tomorrow.

To start 2018 MaidSafe Marketing off right, I put all 3 of my current MaidSafe marketing & community outreach proposals together into one,

and it ends up still costing less than the other proposals, which are only aimed at creating a single 2-3 minute video anyway.

Please vote for my main proposal here, and then the MaidSafe community will get all of the following:

MaidSafe really needs this. It can be at least 5x bigger easily this year just because more and more people are getting into crypto, decentralization, freedom and these types of things, and MaidSafe will blow everything else out of the water, while blockchains continue to snap :stuck_out_tongue:

VOTE FOR IT!!

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The way I see it is the company and the community (and in fact the world) share the technology, but as a profit making entity MaidSafe will at times have additional priorities. We need to ensure returns for our equity investors and therefore looking for commercial partnerships with companies will be a focus. For example, supporting SAFE Networks running inside corporate networks. Recruitment is also a major factor and motivating highly talented and qualifies individuals to work for the company (not the network) will also be a focus. So there will be much shared between SAFE Network and MaidSafe and we look forward to all pitching in on these together, but also some differences hence the need for slightly different messages and approach.

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Great news!

What about a Telegram Group?

Telegram activity is one of mainly things that a ā€œcrypto-investorā€ looks before invest in a cryptocurrency. Also will be great have a channel to chat fluently with the community members .

Hi Martin - thereā€™s actually a SAFE Network telegram group up and running today. Itā€™s currently linked at the bottom of the maidsafe.net website (Telegram: Contact @safenetwork) :slight_smile:

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In addition to twitter, #safenetwork is also an active IRC channel on freenode.

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we need to get MAID listed on more exchanges.

Please have a look at https://bitclude.com/ It is new cpryto-exchange opened Jan 2018 based in UK. I believe there is chance to get listed there (MAID/Fiat). As they are new there wont be need to pay enourmous fee to get listed I hope. Plus given how fast crypto exchanges can grow client baseā€¦ in several months it could be decent size exchange.

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