Figuring out Social Media for SteemSTEM to Reach Out to the World
In the last few months, SteemSTEM has slowly been figuring out the best way to take advantage of social media outreach. Now we are of course no experts in this. I, for example, had 13 Reddit karma points before all this which means I made about 2 posts, I think to fix random computer errors or something. I've only just got an Instagram account and so on.
The more I look into it, the more something becomes apparent; Advertising your product isn't enough anymore.
I'm thinking of having a couple of systems in place:
1
Once a user is selected for our distilled episodes, they should, if willing, write a brief summary that gets published on Instagram. The article or the URL to the article will be omitted, but credit will be given, naturally, as the user sees fit.
This is because Instagram doesn't allow hotlinks to any given site. and the only way around this is to perpetually change your account's description to include a link and I don't think many people will have the time of day to click out to an account and then start opening links. That's not the point of Instagram.
Will this help expand our brand? Well in terms of recognition, probably, but in terms of translating that to users onboarding to the blockchain, unlikely. This will never be the case while things are as they are when it comes to signing up. Until it's as simple as 'username + email', I don't need to worry about that yet. Recognition is what the focus should be for the near future.
2
Reddit is an even bigger problem. As @alexdory explained:
Reddit is a place for people to talk about their passions and interests. It's not a place to advertise in. But Reddit is also decentralized in a way, each subreddit has its own rules, set by its own moderators.
The Astronomy rules, for example, states:
Users posting content from a single site will be assumed to be driving traffic to that site and will be banned.
This is clearly not a place for plugging one's products. Neither are the majority of other subreddits. This makes sense and works for what it is, but it's not useful for our cause.
So, rather than plugging, we should just generally become an active presence in the related subreddits, opening up the karma gates to then publish the articles directly onto Reddit, again giving credit where it's due. We will, of course, continue to publish on our own subreddit but this should also probably expand to beyond simply copying articles from Steem.
3
We should, in general, start encouraging debate and discussion over a give subject of our distilled 'winners', rather than simply posting and advertising that the post itself exists. Whether this comes in the form of a YouTube presence, a Podcast, a discussion-related channel on discord, another reddit function somehow, I don't know, but we are all about engagement and we can't always depend on isolated comments to stand on their own, be replied to once, and then move on. Engagement should circulate, or spiral deeper - you know, discussion. I haven't any solid ideas how to implement this just yet but the key point here is that it should NOT involve Steem directly.
We want to move away from this community of, what, 200 people, and drive our name into the minds of the masses.
Now, we cannot do this with money, and we cannot do this with controversy or clickbait, so we have it a little more difficult than usual because we can, by definition, only report truth and facts, giving us a severe disadvantage. However, I think it can be done if we bounce ideas around enough.
Thoughts?
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I'd prove it, but nobody would read it =P
Sad but probably TRUE! Keep at it, I'm a big proponent of stem even though I'm not actively involved. I definitely think it has a purpose and great potential to draw eyes from outside our ecosystem..
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😂😂 I will read it
i am far from mister marketing and also very short on RC again despite creating this 60sp account to 'just comment' but .. reddit is one thing, its a pop-thing, right
do you know slashdot ?
(opinions might not always be politically correct or popular)
https://slashdot.org/~KingBenny
https://slashdot.org/~shnull
you can 'submit' links to articles and there's actually no guarantee they will be accepted but i have never seen one link submitted that didnt get plenty of reactions (not all PC ofcourse as its not a moderated site as such ... its been my number one for like i cant remember, since commander Taco was still there at least ...)
It's also a bit of a tek-community with a lot of smart-heads so maybe not exactly the crowd you're looking for as its not directed towards the general population but certainly a crowd you might want to address and involve on scientific articles
assuming some is better than none because if they have been number one in 'popular' quite some times they certainly dont have the reach facebook does, but i doubt , in general , most people who fb daily would be looking for particle physics or genetics either ... if you havent already i think you can certainly get more exposure there ...
Cool, for sure every resource helps. That being said, the reason I never got intto reddit until this effort is because it is to aesthetically displeasing for me, I just don't want to spend time looking at it. The site you showed looks much worse, like a 90's forum on windows 95 where people make an account to ask about BSOD and then vanish once they get their answer without so much as a 'thank you'. (I'm bitter).
But, every little helps!
-I think this is great, it is a way to give the community more dynamics and make it more fun and interesting. We in STEM-Spanish formed debates or virtual meetings every week but due to the problems of steem during the last months this has been lost and it has cost me a lot to recover it, since people show little interest due to the low price of the currency.
Could we look for a way to get your attention? ... I believe that the economic incentive is always a way, but currently we do not have the resources to do so, maybe we can get more delegations or large accounts that can join our voting path and so publications can increase their value ... it is a way to encourage ... but it has not been easy for us to get support after the march of utopian. :(
Another idea that I have always had in mind is to conduct an interview with each member of our community and thus give it more prominence. This type of interview must be audiovisual and we can upload it to youtube or dtube, if they are people who speak Spanish we can create subtitles for the video ... as well as the scientific podcast on our discord server we can record them and then create excellent material audiovisual.
steemSTEM is one of the oldest projects in steem and has become a community that has given recognition to large users on the platform, those users who started publishing with our label and were getting recognition and were part of other excellent projects such as for example @freedrika, @mcfarhat, @svemirac to mention any of them. Then you can say that it is one of the most known and respected projects and that currently does not have much support but I am sure that soon more people will come to be interested in this project and contribute their grain of sand.
The economic incentive does not even count IMO. This is not how one builds a strong community. Of course, having more support is always good (and big news may be coming soon), but money should never be the motivation #1. We want to onboard people who are happy to share their passion with others, and for that, we need user's engagement (and retention).
I will think about it. We started with interviews of the team, and stopped there (I think everyone got his/her interview but me ;) ).
I agree that money should not matter, but unfortunately due to this low price of currency this activity has decreased a lot, that is why seeking social media promotion is a good idea and continue promoting good STEM content. But my idea of giving more prominence to common users who publish weeks after week is an excellent idea. Podcasts are a fundamental piece for this, which will motivate them much more and, therefore, this may be the beginning of new ideas that will emerge over time.
On Steem, activity is inherently connected with money. However, I believe our 'core' users do not care much about that aspect. At least, I am hopefully correct :)
@lemouth I didn't interview either =P
But really, if we're going to do YouTube versions of interviews, there should be at least some kind of following on youtube first. A youtube account would need to be fostered into something people would want to actually know about these people. And as much as I'm perfectly willing to take part in that or podcasts, my... well, my voice is boring and I'm clearly not comfortable in my own skin, so I'm hardly an Alex Jones when it comes to presentation! I'm the last person we'd want leading such a thing.
Anyway, I was also going to say what lemouth said. It's very apparent that the vast majority of people do not enjoy blogging. This is why short-form sites like twitter, instagram etc flourish, because people don't want to put the time in to writing or reading. That's the inherent flaw in depending on money incentive. It's helpful for people trying to pay the bills, but its a false following. We only want that minority (which, globally, is still many millions) who have a maintained passion regardless of incentives. That's why @steempress is such a sound idea, targeting the core industry of bloggers out there
@mobbs and @lemouth Of course, we must have a YouTube account and promote on all social networks and our Steem accounts. And when I refer to the interviews, it's not just about the Steemstem board of directors, I mean the recognized users of our community who don't belong to the board of directors and give them the prominence that they feel loved and motivated. And so each user within the Steem ecosystem knows each author more closely.
I have my audiovisual editing team as you can see in the reports in Spanish and I can put them at your disposal, of course, the only disadvantage is that they do not speak English, in that case I would have to be one of you to designate a moderator and we will edit audiovisual content
I know exactly what I have to implement on the app to have this working. Unfortunately... time.... But this will come. In the meantime, the account and project's recognition can grow.
Concerning the third point, I will think about it for what concerns Facebook promotion, which I am putting some effort in since a couple of months ago. I will try to have engagement on Facebook... But actually having the authors of the post themselves helping us could be useful to reduce the load on us.
For sure. It crossed my mind to have the reddit account kind of open to multiple users to contribute to each section of STEM, or for example our top astronomer poster leading the astronomy posts. But then I didn't want to have such unsecure accounts. So maybe in the future there can be steemstem-astronomy, steemstem-engineering, etc. Distant future plans, though.
Anyway I'm focusing my efforts on instagram and reddit at the moment, and I'll get more familiar with twitter at some point too, see what the best strategies work. We'll get there!
It would be great to indeed have our users communicating themselves on reddit. Maybe one dat we will get there ;)
I'm not a core member, but I am highly motivated. I do agree with @lemouth that revenue is not an incentive. And I agree with @mobbs that the sign-up system is crazy. I mean, anything else I want (and don't want) to join is just a couple of clicks. I've actually discovered that I signed up for sites when I just wanted to visit. So yeah, that barrier to engagement has to go, if we want to engage.
Personally, I use Twitter. I don't think people are as averse to blogging, mini-blogging, as you suggest @mobbs. People love to give their opinions. They have responded enthusiastically to the expanded Twitter character allowance.
So--to sum up: don't talk crypto, shoot for engagement. And for heavens sake, open the doors so people can get in.
Just my two cents...not worth much than that. But I try :)
Yeah it's been truly frustrating to me that, of all the technology and programming prowess in the world, 'signing up' has somehow mysteriously evaded all success. It's bizarre.
Glad we're on the same page, I hope the sentiment applies to everyone. The HF might be a good thing, I'm not sure, but tot me it's pretty irrelevant if people can't even get on board anyway. And even if they can, there's still no simple way to actually make the money 'real' for 99.999% of people, so its high time we focus on other elements of values!
Cheers for dropping by again =)
:)
I actually have ideas to improve the sign-up system... So many ideas and not so much time... :/
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It does. You just need 10k followers dumbass
Lol, so practically speaking, it doesn't. You think we'll ever get 10k followers?
Also, if that's true, why does an account I follow with 262k followers still say 'visit the link in our description'? Sounds like fake news to me
I agree, we can for sure have discussion and debates on these topics at these platforms. However, like others suggested user onboarding is going to be tough as steem doesn't make it any easy. Even if people do sign up they can't even start commenting and posting without getting some steem first. Probably something like guest accounts or like those media websites which let people comment through their social media accounts would be nice.
Another thing we can do for popularity is share news about novel popular research. Though that would completely depend on authors' motivation. But I think usually those kinds of links on research news are more acceptable and gets more shares. I might be wrong but that is what I usually notice.
Lemouth has a pretty good way, I think, to go through the guest account approach but there are other priorities to iron out first!
There's a lot of discussion on which diriection to take things and we're making some more changes on the whole that are a little substantial (as you may be able to tell frorm your most recent post rewards), I'm hoping we can have a system of onboarding that just bypasses all the poliitics and issues... but we'll see how genius lemouth can be
Nice blog bro.