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Dash World: Evolution in Marketing (budget proposal)

GreyGhost

GreyGhost

Well-known member
Foundation Member
I am happy to inform the community that the Dash World: Evolution in Marketing budget proposal is out for the vote @ https://www.dashwhale.org/p/DashWorld

Discussion is also going on over on Slack @ https://digitalcash.slack.com/messages/dashworld/

This is quite a big proposal, so I will share only its first page here:

Dash World: Evolution in Marketing

Dash Evolution’s giant leap toward the creation of a new type of decentralized crypto-currency makes the project even more exciting than ever before. The problem: the world does not know about Dash yet.

Need

Dash marketing efforts are falling far behind Dash’s innovations.[1] Its numerous improvements over the Bitcoin protocol such as InstantX, PrivacyProtect (formerly DarkSend), 3rd network tier, decentralized governance and funding by blockchain[2] are all revolutionary steps toward the permissionless, P2P (peer-to-peer), decentralized society dominated by the Crypto-Economy.

Even more than Bitcoin, Dash challenges the ways we shape and manage society. William Gibson famously quipped: "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.” Dash offers tools for the future of today but the knowledge about it has yet to be distributed. Dash needs to establish itself as digital cash for the new society of the future we create together.

Direction

This solution-focused proposal aims to tackle the matter from different angles and to align Dash’s technical genius and enormous creative energy coming from its community and the Darkcoin Foundation with out-of-the-box marketing thinking and actions. Due to the very nature of Dash’s versatility, we propose to think holistically while forking (sporking if you wish) our marketing efforts. We think of and promote Dash strategically:

-- As an exciting, permissionless investment opportunity, via its MN network,
-- As the perfect digital cash for the emerging P2P decentralized economy;
-- As enabler of our right to privacy via its revolutionary PrivacyProtect (formerly DarkSend) feature.

Challenge

“How would you feel if you were sick and your doctor prescribed a medicine without listening to you describe your symptoms first?”
Patrick Renvoisé and Christophe Morin in Neuromarketing

The ability of a marketer to “diagnose the pain” of her prospect is the first step toward meeting consumer’s needs. But how to diagnose the pain of someone not owning or even knowing about a non-tangible asset that emerges from arcane realms of alien binary strings language as a solution to the mathematical puzzle, a.k.a. DASH? (when capitalized we’re referring to the currency, when in lower case, to the project) If there isn’t a clearly defined need for our product we ought to invent a narrative creating it. The best way of creating a need for Dash is to sell its STORY.

Think of our marketing “sporks” as our stories.

We suspect a lot of people would like to own a bank and therefore, our first story is a dream of financial independence....

NOTE: Should you wish to peruse a nicely formatted PDF document of this proposal, please go to http://document.li/N4Fz

Thank you for taking your time considering Dash World: Evolution in Marketing (hasthag #DashWorld)

GreyGhost



[1] Source: Dash v13 Evolution by Evan Duffield https://www.Dash.org/binaries/evo/DashPaper-v13-v1.pdf
[2] Ibid.
 
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I applaud your efforts in this. But I personally would like to see the budget go less to marketing and PR proposals and more to innovation, e.g. software and hardware projects.

It seems like 90% of the budget proposals are for marketing and/or PR, and I think that what we need to stick with is one of Dash's core values. Innovation. Let's get Dash into retail. Let's build systems which enable people to use Dash better, instead of just marketing a system which is still pretty unusable for most non-technical people today. That's my opinion of spending budget money on marketing in general, not just this proposal.
 
I've just started reading the document. It's very well thought through. You say that if the community doesn't like a particular line item after some debate it can be changed. Is your plan to let the community decide how to get the most we can out of the funds?
 
Another multi-month PR campaign budget is just asking for trouble especially before we nail down this de-funding issue. Nice document but right now we can put this budget to better use. If it were possible, I would rather spend the entire rest of the budget on getting Evolution features implemented more quickly (or get anything that actually improves the product) over more PR.
 
As they said on Dashwhale.org:

"This proposal does not require a contracts system like what is proposed in 12.1.

All of us, myself, Dr. BobLQ and The Vanbex Group understand that voting out is possible. Any change in Masternode vote does not put the proposal’s owner on the hook. If the proposal is nullified, all written, oral or assumed agreements are nullified with it as well".
 
nmarley said:
I applaud your efforts in this. But I personally would like to see the budget go less to marketing and PR proposals and more to innovation, e.g. software and hardware projects.

It seems like 90% of the budget proposals are for marketing and/or PR, and I think that what we need to stick with is one of Dash's core values. Innovation. Let's get Dash into retail. Let's build systems which enable people to use Dash better, instead of just marketing a system which is still pretty unusable for most non-technical people today. That's my opinion of spending budget money on marketing in general, not just this proposal.
Click to expand...

What is the most exciting part of the plan is a leading force behind "Dash World: Micro-economy of Dash" idea. This proposal aims at UNITING all the efforts that further the cause.

Point in case of is a former PR effort: “Dash: a superior digital money alternative to Bitcoin”[1]. What we read there -- and perhaps like -- is in fact a STATEMENT, not NEWS. News media need real NEWS, not propaganda. Better examples would be:

-- Dash demonstrates crypto to fiat exchange via Lamassu ATM machines that is XY times cheaper / faster / easier than conventional ATMs
-- Dash presents its purchasing power in the real world by selling soft drinks via its soda-machine.

These are NEWS. Than we amplify the message,

In fact, Dr. BobLQ and myself are already working on a prototype (much more expensive, aiming at attracting outside funds) that would incorporate DASH, as currency of the Internet of Things. So why not skip this proposal outright and move toward it? Because what's needed in Dash Project, in order to get wider acceptance is a Paradigm Shift, not only outside, how others perceive us but within as well.

I see no other way how can we mutually educate ourselves -- and move toward the same goal of establishing DASH as the superior digital currency for P2P upcoming Crypto-Economy -- but to start with what's proposed. I do not intend to waste the community's time and money on publishing a blog here and a PR there; I want this proposal to be worthy of Dash's tech genius and to help it steer the wild waters of the emerging world.


[1] Published at: http://goo.gl/XxRMft
 
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miner-48er said:
I've just started reading the document. It's very well thought through. You say that if the community doesn't like a particular line item after some debate it can be changed. Is your plan to let the community decide how to get the most we can out of the funds?
Click to expand...

When I wrote "... to align Dash’s technical genius and enormous creative energy coming from its community" I mean it. What I see is that our collective brilliance is almost our enemy that needs to be made our greatest asset. What I mean by that? There are so many initiatives coming from the community (p. #7 of the PDF), one better than another. But these linger isolated. There's no focal point that unites them and that's needed.

The underlying idea of the proposal is to create it and to find a way to amplify marketing and business value of all these initiatives. If we go to an event, we present how DASH works in the real world. If we present it, we create a video, if we have a video, we use video transcript as indexable content (google does not index speech and images in videos), and than we see how to create business out of it. And we promote that business.

So yes, new ideas coming from the community will be listened to and for sure adapted.
 
I think the time is ripe for re-organizing our marketing/PR efforts, not saying we need to get rid of anything but a re-organization should be something we all consider. The team we have right now is great but I truly feel they are spread to thin with way to many tasks to handle and not enough time on their hands.

If you read this entire proposal you will realize that it covers many things we as a community have been discussing for the last 2-3 months. Would we not do a better job if all the marketing people were actually communicating and speaking with each other?
Would we not be more effective if we could team up with one another and get things done?
Wouldn't we be more effective by opening the doors to people who are willing to work on this project and help it become successful?

The details are in the proposal, I ask that you actually read it before making some kind of decision. If you have questions simply ask them. If you have objections state them. If you want something changed in the proposal request it. If you think this is a joke I strongly encourage you to take a minute and try to figure out if our current marketing efforts are enough for you.

If you look at the proposal GreyGhost breaks down the costs in a detailed manner, this is the type of transparency that is required when spending large amounts of money. I 100% support this proposal and I hope that people can open their eyes and realize the good it will do for for DASH.
 
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Please don’t get me wrong, I think this is a good proposal, but in reference to the complaints fired at the Transform PR group, the Vanbex Group seems to be offering the same crypto websites to publish at. And only 1 per week. How would they be different from Transform PR?

The Vanbex approach includes the following:

1. Positioning Dash in weekly media stories published in Crypto news

2. Community Outreach

3. Solidifying market position

4. Dash speaking engagements at events/conferences

It seems to me that Transform PR did the same things. Although granted, you have provided a nice outline on what to expect. However, I think the Dash Core team have had similar outlines from Transform PR as well. Is this company a lot cheaper? I take it they won’t do any managing of the campaign, but rather, simply do those items above, and otherwise you would direct marketing?

I do like your idea to coordinate everyone in the community’s efforts in regard to marketing, but I’m not sure how it can be done better than it has been. It sounds good - to coordinate everyone - but what does it really mean? Who will do the coordination? We have people doing that, like Tungfa, so please make sure you're able to be supportive and not disruptive of what they've been building. We could use more people on this, but it won't work if a new team barges in and displaces / wastes all the work that has been done to date, so please keep that in mind.

I also really like your strategies for trying to get businesses like Airbnb and uber or a new version of them using Dash, and improving the website in search results.

I take it that the events you plan to participate in, will require separate funding. If this funding can’t happen for some reason, do we have a backup source? I’m sure it could be repaid, but you see how the budget runs into short falls time to time, so in order not to lose out, we may need a secondary source to pay for some of this stuff?

In the end, I still find the criticisms of Transform PR to be unfair (and smacks of subverting to gain the project) but the fact that you would be doing all this work is like having an in-house marketing division, which is great. Although we already have a marketing team, it’s obvious they’re stretched thin. I’m sure the Core team members would support you every way they can, and it’s good to expand, so I think I’m convinced and will vote for this. But please work with our existing marketing team, don't just take over, please :)
 
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My mom can't use crypto. She probably never will, at this rate. But she can use Facebook. Amazingly, somehow, she's able to use Facebook. If it were as easy as using Facebook, she might play with it. She'd probably even have fun using it to buy all her little knick-knacks and such.

My wife is a little more tech-literate. She's started her own blogs, bought domains, paid for hosting on WordPress, etc. Pretty good for where she started a few years ago. But Dash is scary for her. She doesn't want to mess anything up or lose her money somehow.

And about 5 or 6 months ago, I was talking to my father-in-law about Dash. He already has some Bitcoins, and he understands the technology at a high level. So when I explained the masternode incentive, the budget system, anonymity and InstantX as advantages over Bitcoin, he got pretty excited about Dash, and wanted to buy some. But there wasn't a wallet on iPhone or a lite wallet for OSX/Windows. He keeps his Bitcoin on Breadwallet, so he's used to just memorizing a seed phrase for his backup. Electrum-Dash wasn't quite ready for general use back then. And he wants to keep it on his iPhone. So needless to say, he just wasn't comfortable getting into Dash until the ecosystem was a little more mature. (E.g. lite clients for different platforms).


I'm not trying to say that marketing and PR is bad. Just that I think that our focus should be on innovation and engineering for the next few months, then once it's a bit easier for "regular" people to use and hold Dash, then switch focus back to Marketing/PR.
 
Nathan, I appreciate your points.

However, if one would dig a bit deeper through about 30++ pages I've written for the proposal, one might realize it represents much more than some ordinary "marketing & PR" mambo-jumbo. It gives our JOIN EFFORTS, be its technical, sociological, innovative side, a STRUCTURE. It places all creative energy on the boat that sails in one direction and spreads the message. It aims at creating excitement without and within. It does not want for many a valuable project to linger in a limbo alone, trying to find its place under the sun on by itself, its gives everyone and every effort a space in the Dash World: Micro-economy of Dash it, the proposal's approach, strives to achieve.

Yes, "our focus should be on innovation and engineering" but does this mean we are not sure about real value in already monumental progress Dash's technological genius has achieved thus far?

Do we really have to wait to market specific, fairly developed features of Dash Network, such as
++ masternodes,
++ its property as digital cash,
++ its PrivacyProtect (a.k.a. DarkSend)?

-- Do we really have to wait to fix SEO (Google search optimizing) for dash.org which gaping holes do not bode well for the project as whole?

-- Do we really have to wait to start working internally to find and develop the new products to use for marketing and to be a part of the emerging P2P crypto economy Dash should be able to power as its currency?
 
GreyGhost said:
Nathan, I appreciate your points.

However, if one would dig a bit deeper through about 30++ pages I've written for the proposal, one might realize it represents much more than some ordinary "marketing & PR" mambo-jumbo. It gives our JOIN EFFORTS, be its technical, sociological, innovative side, a STRUCTURE. It places all creative energy on the boat that sails in one direction and spreads the message. It aims at creating excitement without and within. It does not want for many a valuable project to linger in a limbo alone, trying to find its place under the sun on by itself, its gives everyone and every effort a space in the Dash World: Micro-economy of Dash it, the proposal's approach, strives to achieve.

Yes, "our focus should be on innovation and engineering" but does this mean we are not sure about real value in already monumental progress Dash's technological genius has achieved thus far?

Do we really have to wait to market specific, fairly developed features of Dash Network, such as
++ masternodes,
++ its property as digital cash,
++ its PrivacyProtect (a.k.a. DarkSend)?

-- Do we really have to wait to fix SEO (Google search optimizing) for dash.org which gaping holes do not bode well for the project as whole?

-- Do we really have to wait to start working internally to find and develop the new products to use for marketing and to be a part of the emerging P2P crypto economy Dash should be able to power as its currency?
Click to expand...

It actually looks really good! I'll try and get it printed off and read it more in detail some time this weekend. Thanks GreyGhost.
 
Just to let you know ladies and gentlemen – if there would be any questions / comments today and tomorrow – I will be slow in responding because I am attending The Logan CIJ Symposium in Berlin (most of the attendees could benefit from PrivacyProtect, a.k.a. DarkSend anyway so I am there for the cause) and will most likely have no Net access.

The schedule is from 9:30 AM to 10:00 PM, so basically I’ll be out for the whole day and will, if needed, catch up as soon as I can.
 
These two questions keeps popping-up in private conversations;

What is the SEO stuff in your proposal?
-- SEO needed for dash.org requires modification of meta tags, adding Schema Microdata, SEO Yoast plugin etc.

Why is this SEO stuff important?
-- Schema Microdata helps STRUCTURING the data for Google’s better understanding what’s the site all about. It gives the site a “legitimacy” of structured info;
-- when you google you see the results on what’s called SERP (Search Engine Results Page) Google gets that info from Meta Tags. If you do not have Meta Tags your result is a poor presentation.

Point in case:



Obviously, if one searched for “dash crypto” the snippet would include this bit: “… 2016; Dash invited to 2nd SATOSHI ROUNDTABLE – Private Crypto Retreat ...” The question comes naturally: is that the most relevant info about the Dash Project?

Snippets like the one from the screen shot come from Meta Descriptions. Alas, 145 pages on dash.org do not have them, thus the poor presentation in the Google search results.
 
camosoul, over there at the proposal's DashWhale page wrote this comment:

"Be useful in the world. That's how DASH gets exposed.
Quit talking about it and do something worth talking about.
Paying for PR/Advertising is for people who don't actually have a product. Decent products sell themselves.
Ever seen a Tesla Motors Advertisement?
Exactly.
To continue talking about all the nothing DASH does only makes it look more and more ponzi...
Hype + Inaction = Ponzi."

To which I replied with:

"Tesla is an interesting phenomena. One should not confuse "advertising" and "marketing." Every action Elon Musk does is marketing. Not to "advertise" is a marketing strategy also. However, there's a huge difference in between a tangible, innovative car that you can put on the streets and an intangible item like Dash that lingers in the arcane world of binary digits. Moreover, everything Dash or its community do in a public sphere, be it Alex.ru videos, Raptor73 graphs, Anarhapulco presentation, Evan's interviews etc., is indeed marketing.

Dash World, especially its "Micro-economy of Dash" segment does not advertise. Instead, it unites all the efforts, structurizes them and injects enthusiasm that than propels creation of useful tools and services within its ecosystem.

As much as I disagree with the statement implying Dash's inaction, I also somehow doubt the $189.06 billion on ads spent in the US alone in the 2015 were done by the people "who don't actually have a product."

This Tesla video is also quite a marketing tool, a remarkable work worth sharing:


I find this certain discrepancy in between complacent presentation of ourselves (best example of it is my favorite TaoOfSatoshi and his We Are Dash Nation article (published on March 17, 2016) and harsh criticism of Dash's "all the nothing it does" quoted above quite puzzling.
 
As we're counting down to buster Dash Round Table: Ep.02 that is streaming live on Mar 26, 2016 (Budget Proposal Interview with Dr. BobLQ and Lisa Cheng of Vanbex Group about Dash World @ http://dashroundtable.org/episodes/ep02/) here are two Slate Presentations as a segue to the discussion:

Dash World: Evolution in Marketing @ https://slate.adobe.com/cp/QzVGY/
Dash World: Micro-economy of Dash @ https://slate.adobe.com/cp/GPU5F/


photo.png
 
If you own a masternode and don't have time to read this proposal you can listen to the interview here,

This should help you understand the goals behind the Dash World Budget Proposal.

Also I'm wondering, why are none of the core guys showing feedback here? I see many other proposals getting discussion, It looks like greyghost is talking to himself here. If you don't like it speak up. If you like it speak up. If you don't wanna vote that's cool it's your choice not too. But if you are going to vote at least do your due diligence and read the proposal or listen to this interview.
 
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