Marketing: Popular Texts and the Use of Open and Closed Channels

I know it’s been a long time since the last #buzz café call, but I had time to ponder on some of the questions or problematics of marketing 1hive. And the questions were mainly these:

  • Use of a hashtag in a positive or a negative sentiment. – How to construct a popular text?
  • Question of explaining what a DAO is. – Conceptional similarity to Bitcoin’s decentralized structure.

Thinking about these, I was able to develop an intertwined approach in marketing, including theory, traditional marketing, and internet marketing all together.

So, we were talking about the use of #hashtags, and the importance of the use of them. Like say when #honeyswap hashtag is used on twitter, we knew that the sentiment in the particular post using the hashtag is not at all important, just the general use of it is our point. After all, we can’t control social media, and as a general rule, there will always be FUD on the internet when the subject is financial stuff, and especially crypto.

Popular Texts – Producerly Texts

This discussion reminded me of what I learned at school and led me back to theory. Basically, the keyword that came to my mind was “popular texts”. So, what exactly is a popular text? Well, one of the most influential cultural theorists and media scholars, John Fiske elaborates on this in his Understanding Popular Culture by discussing two categories of texts, namely “readerly text” and a “writerly text” envisioned by Barthes.

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However, there is a third category he mentions, which is the “producerly text”, and he insists that a popular text should be producerly. And a producerly text should be:
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So, this is just a theoretical basis for the rest of my argument. What I mean is that we should be creating producerly texts in order to get popularity on social media.

Open and Closed Channels

On social media, I decided to make a categorization as open and closed channels in terms of sharing information and triggering discussion. On an open channel, I believe we should be creating a popular text as @D0SH also mentions in opening up a Discord channel for voting on what is to be shared on our Twitter, etc. So, the open channels are for instance Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and other stuff. Then, in our case, the open channels could also be considered as channels where we are not implementing Sourcecred as well.

In those open channels, I believe a more aggressive approach can be followed in order to trigger discussion because the main idea behind an advertisement is not to sell the product but to raise awareness in the consumer. Once the awareness is achieved, we can then direct the user to the closed channel to act out our sales pitch like in a traditional sense.

So, as for the close channels, we have Discord and also Telegram in a way, where information is not shared with a wide range of users but limited to those who are actually on the closed server. Here, I believe what we have done so far has had a rather positive impact on the users as we have been able to develop great teams with our swarms.

Thus, in our closed channels, let’s say it’s #help channel on Discord or in other channels, our approach should be that of a direct, face-to-face sales model where the discussion gets more personal and intimate in inducing the consumer to buy into your “product”. Then, we should be creating a more friendly environment, and our product here should be “education” as our model of “decentralized autonomous organization” is a relatively new concept (though, I believe this is how human beings should have been working on before the introduction of the division of labor based on hierarchies, but that’s a whole different subject, we can discuss this on #cafe or somewhere else lol).

Explaining and Education People about DAOs

So, as one of the biggest challenges we face is the fact that people do not know about the mechanics a DAO is operated. This, I believe, should be discussed in our closed channels once we attract attention on the open channels. I’m not a marketing expert, but I’m sure most people in the #buzz swarm or who have experience in marketing knows this for a fact that informative posts on social media do not receive much traction. One of the reasons behind this is that social media is a tool of entertainment and interaction other than education.

What I propose, all in all, is that we should target the open channels of information on social media with a relatively more aggressive approach, which can trigger at least two different sides on a subject of argument in order to keep the discussion lively on the open channels. Afterward, by leading those who are willing to learn about the project or what we are willing to teach to our closed channels, we can make the sales pitch and get them involved in the community by explaining the specifics of how 1hive DAO is working as well as ways to contribute and get rewarded with the #pollen program and the advantages of xDai chain, or the “products” like Celeste and others to be developed in the future by our community.

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Very fascinating. I will be honest, this is not my field of interest but I am really looking forward to seeing the execution of some of these open vs closed channel marketing ideas.

You all let us know the outcome and I will try incorporate it in intersections.

Thanks

I need your help. Twitter storm plans

I do think that we would benefit from educational links on our Twitter though.
In crypto that’s typically where people go for help.
We’ve been sending them to the Discord, which has the BrightID gate, so that’e pretty unresponsive of us.
Without a potential airdrop there’s not much incentive to deal with the whole !verify process.

If the social media research isn’t crypto specific it needs to be carefully evaluated before applying.

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Yep, great idea about the Twitter storm plans. What I’m proposing here is that Twitter or other open channels can be more flexible. In other words, it can be aggressive, it can induce discussion, it can share memes in addition to those informative tweets. The purpose of the information we share on the open channels should be to trigger interactions.
For instance, let’s say we posted an informative tweet about how to add xdai custom network on metamask. Some of us on the buzz may like the tweet or even retweet it, but some total stranger wouldn’t feel obliged to interact with the tweet, right? Then our informative post is lost between funny cat videos and some political arguments on twitter.

My point is that people were asking about these questions, but we basically shut them down sending them to Discord.
It was cool when Honey was expensive and there was the lure of the Faucet, but now it is not. I even know people who BrightID verified then gave up at the connecting to Discord stage.

People are actively looking for crypto communities to join, and one of the first places they look for crypto is Twitter. Twitter is where crypto information breaks. Twitter is where the discussions are. Twitter is how we find everything crypto really.

How are you going to get people to the open channels without Twitter?
We need to link to articles in the open channels from the Tweets with the infographics.
Tweet those infographics incessantly.
Someone will say “Holy heck, I need to get onto the xdai chain. I heard of that somewhere.”
Then they’ll either remember our sweet sweet branding and recognize that it was 1Hive and find the Tweet and go where they need to be, or they’ll run a hashtag search on Twitter.
You’re forgetting people use the hashtags to bring up just the posts they’re after.
Twitter is used globally for protest communications.
There are ways to narrow your feed.

For instance, someone wants more information on xdai chain.
We have our Tweets hashtagged xdaichain. That means they’ll come up in all of the xdai searches, and at some point someone will need to know how to bridge tokens, how xdai helps ethereum scale, or how to set up Metamask for xdai, they’ll search the hashtag, see one of our beautiful infographics and based on that link to the article, which hopefully is on one of our open socials, and then we’ll have them.

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Yep, exactly. The infographics and all the informative posts should be there on Twitter, readily available.
But that’s only one part of using twitter. We can get on the aggressive side as well while giving information. For instance, I really liked @solarmkd 's this tweet he shared on his own account:


There are at least three layers here in his tweet. First, he is giving information that xDai chain is using much less energy compared to other chains and Visa. Second, he is using an environmentalist approach and raises the question. And third, which I think is more important, that this tweet is also following an aggressive style as it compares other chains and Visa with xDai. As a result, this can trigger discussion and create at least two sides on the argument. Let’s say, people who are against xDai chain may argue that Bitcoin chain is using too much energy for the sake of decentralization and security. And people who are for xDai chain already have the environmentalist card in their hands. But this is just speculation. This may not end like that. However, the main idea is to induce discussion to raise awareness.

Of course, all these should be in addition to informative tweets.

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Do we need a Twitter strategy forum?
I’m down to load the deck. There’s not a lot of news on our niche to Tweet and invite comment on, which gets back to Medium articles.

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