@pseudoscops Exactly like an affiliate ID. I love it! 

That's it 

Urget Request:

Great initiative MethodX. Upvoted all 4 threads and negative sounding comments.

I have one urgent request which I think you'll be happy to accommodate so that we can measure the effectiveness of this marketing effort. Can we change the download URL in the reddit posts to point to:

http://bitshares.org/downloads/?citizen=marketing.methodx

I've been working with cass and Brian to bring public facing stats for the http://bitshares.org site that we can all have access to. I've also proposed some basic foolproof ways of tracking who is referring traffic to the http://bitshares.org hub site. See my original post on the subject here (How to measure marketing effort effectiveness and public facing traffic stats...):

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11023.0

Feel free to just use http://bitshares.org/downloads/ or give reddit readers a choice of both. I know some will be uncomfortable with referral links looking a bit spammy in certain situations/posts. You might feel this is one time when the querystring referral code would look out of place. Either way both links with and without would currently get tracked and we'll all be able to see the referral URLs in the traffic reprots. This means that whichever is used it'll be clear that the traffic is from a MethodX inspired marketing initiative.

The benefit of using the querystring referral code is that if it is consistently used then it's going to be easier to aggregate traffic sent by one marketing delegate, or indeed non-delegate - see my post above for more details on this, over time and across campaigns/initiatives. This aggregated traffic can then be associated with a BitShares id via the querystring that will show up in the traffic logs and we'll then be able to have a league table of sorts to show who is generating the most traffic to the main site. I intend to build this league table too.

For this reason, and others, I think it's really important for any marketing effort going forward, community or otherwise, to send traffic to the main http://bitshares.org site where we can capture and measure it. As mentioned in my post, this does not exclude marketers setting up sites like MethodX's great http://whatisbitusd.com higher up their funnels as long as they end directing traffic to http://bitshares.org for the trackable conversion goals that we'll work together to set up.

In order to have an effective marketing strategy we need to be paying more attention to measurement. Metrics will allow us to measure success and also where we have gaps and are failing. Public facing stats is the first step on the road to allowing those with the desire and the skills to help shape our marketing effort so that it is hugely successful. Again more thoughts and details on this in my post - plug plug - please read it if you haven't already     https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11023.0

I'd love for the current reddit marketing efforts to have it's traffic show up in the stats that are being collected as I write this. They won't do that if the link directs people to Github where we don't have, and never will have, any insight in to traffic.

In addition to the public stats, soon I'll be posting up a small one page site where you can subscribe to a weekly email report that top lines the traffic to http://www.bitshares.org.

All of this will feed in to some other work that I'm planning that I hope will help with the marketing effort. Stay tuned.

Metrics, metrics, metrics people. Say it loud now!

Voted   

Its a good idea to use the bter interface for depositing.  You will get a page telling you to send to btercom or to an address, and to include a certain string of characters as a memo, so that they can identify you.

Thanks Ander. Yep I did use the interface from BTER but it looks like Empirical1.1 is right and I totally fat fingered it and sent to bter instead of btercom. Thank the stars it wasn't for a larger amount. I remember it was well past my bedtime - I will be more careful next time.

Perhaps the other guy I recall having some issue did the same thing or maybe there was just a delay. Anyway no reason for anyone to doubt BTER deposits. Sorry BTER for unnecessary bad press.

Not a huge amount of funds (2634.1766BTS) but just realized today that the funds sent below never turned up. Today I'm wanting to send 1BTC to BTER so I can invest a little in the Music pre-sale. I'm worried about the funds not turning up again if I do. I remember reading of at least one other who's funds did not turn up at BTER.



Anyone got any advice. As far as I know their support is in Chinese

I think using a static site framework for the basis of BitShares sites that are not that dynamic is an extremely good idea. The codebase for the site and the content can then live on git(hub) and it makes it trivially easy for people to fork and contribute their ideas. This will be especially true if Markdown partials are used for text content. Localization will become trivial in comparison to using Wordpress I think. IMHO we should ditch WP as fast as possible where practically possible.

Cass have you considered using Middleman (http://middlemanapp.com/ + https://github.com/middleman/middleman instead of Jekyll? I did some extensive research earlier in the year and tried both. I settled on Middleman for my static sites and am really glad I did. It rocks. Jekyll's roots in blogging show and I'm not sure it's always the best fit, unless you are in fact just building a blog.

Either is a good strong choice though. Just through I'd throw my experiences out there.

In the short term perhaps the 'delegate.identity.anonymous' boolean is just that - a yes/no that shows your intention to remain anonymous or not. This still serves a purpose. The fact that we can't easily yet prove someones identity does not mean we shouldn't allow people to flag their intention to stay anonymous.

Proving identity is important but could be handled separately to indicating intention to remain anonymous. Having the latter quickly by adding the field to the public delegate data would be a win in my book. To prove ID in the short term might be difficult, time consuming and not an immediate priority. Most people believe with pretty much 100% certainty that BM is Dan Larmier without needing proof. He's built this trust over time and it's probably this sort of public identity that will get us through and be adequate in the short term for those wanting to run publicly. Perhaps a link to LinkedIn might help - still not proof though I know.

As the BitShares ecosystem matures then trusted third-parties already engaged and required to Know Your Customer (KYC) via passports etc could provide verification of delegates as service to the community. They could then provide a publicly available directory of those verified delegates. This might need two 'delegate.identity.verified' & 'delegate.identity.verifier'. Those third parties within the BitShares ecosystem don't exist yet, but maybe there are other services that I'm not aware of that could be leveraged for the purpose of verifying IDs. Do you need to prove your ID to register an SSL certificate? If so maybe we could bootstrap something together that takes advantage of this fact? Maybe others have more experience here and I'm missing something obviously easier to prove ID.