How will we measure the effectiveness of marketing and PR by members of the community?
Proposal - We need to set up a system that reports on and recognises success from individuals and teams that generate awareness about BitShares. That system needs to be open, transparent and accessible by all members of the BitShares community. I think this starts with the community having access to public facing web traffic stats, but over time it will need to become much more than this. Those that can demonstrate success in increasing awareness are then in a position to be rewarded (tips, donations, fund-raising etc). If they are particularity effective they may attract enough attention and goodwill in order to get voted in as a marketing delegate paid by the DAC. I'd like to lead this initiative if people think it's a good idea. I've also already set up a public facing GetClicky traffic stats profile for http://bitshares.org - just need someone to post the tracking code on to the live site and we'd be golden. I've got a few more thoughts on the mechanics of how we could track things below.In order to coordinate our marketing effort I think it's important that we try and funnel people/prospects to one place and one place only:
http://bitshares.org/With the BitShares SuperDAC almost upon us it would seem sensible to have the re-branded BitShares SuperDAC client software downloadable from
http://bitshares.org. In light of the re-brand I'm assuming we'll ditch
http://bitshares-x.info in favour of the above and this would be a very good thing IMHO. Can someone in the know provide clarity on what the plan is here? Later when there are other more specialised/focused software clients interfacing with the BitShares API I think it will become necessary to also have some form of client/app directory feature on
http://bitshares.org.
This suggestion does not stop members of the community building their own websites or apps that drive traffic to
http://bitshares.org (i.e. creating a marketing node higher up the funnel). MethodX and others have already been very successful at this whilst trying to market the old BitSharesX brand/DAC. I just want to highlight the need to focus energies and traffic towards one place - this will be important going forward.
I haven't heard much suggestion of things being otherwise, but having one endpoint for all marketing activities has lots of obvious and practical benefits, perhaps SEO being the main one - don't dilute your Pagerank score across multiple domains. If the community agrees that this is the way to go then it would also allow us to quite quickly try to put in place some way of capturing and then measuring who is being the most effective at providing inbound traffic and thus awareness about BitShares. This could be measured by simply using your BitShares username as a referral ID whenever you are engaged in sending traffic to the BitShares site, whether that's just a simple signature on the forums or a full blown mini campaign (e.g. your referral link would look like this
http://www.bitshares.com?citizen=psuedoscops). Further down the line, individuals could register domains that could also be picked up and associated with individual BitShares user IDs - thus negating some need for ugly params in the URL when doing bigger campaigns. I heard mentioned that someone was building a site that would allow delegates to register? Perhaps as part of the registration process they would be give a unique URL
http://www.bitshares.com?citizen=delegate.xeroc)and maybe an embeddable html widget. Delegates and others could then use it when linking to the site and engaging in marketing activity related to BitShares. There's no need to set anything up or register though, in order for it to work you can just substitute your own BitShares ID in the link ans start sending traffic. More on how we can easily track this in the short term below.
In order to see if marketing efforts are being effective I think we need to have some public facing live web statistics for
http://bitshares.org that we can access and use to measure success. I've used a number of services in the past Google Analytics, GetClicky, MixPanel and KissMetrics. Sometimes it's worth using a combination of them. GetClicky is probably the most accessible and therefore a good candidate for public facing stats for BitShares, it would also allow us to detect the referral ID mentioned above and have a league table of sorts that show who is generating the most awareness. GetClicky would also allow us to see where traffic is currently being referred from elsewhere on the web. They also provide heatmaps and a live view of current users to the site and where they are coming from is depicted on a nice world map. I think it would be really helpful for the DAC if those wanting to add to the marketing push had insight in to all of these kind of things, and some deeper stats stuff too, via a public facing BitShares traffic portal. It would allow us all to see what is currently driving the most traffic and those with the skills will be able to identify what is working and also identify where we might have some shortcomings. I recognise that GetClicky is not open source, I'd be happy to consider open source options providing it competes on features with GetClicky.
Assuming BM and the team approve of this it can be set up almost immediately by installing the following code I've pasted below on the main site. Just add it to the main WorPress template before the closing body tag. I understand if someone else wants to set this up, my post count is perhaps not high enough to be trusted yet, but I do already have a fairly dormant paid GetClicky account and so it would seem sensible to put it to good use. The code below is the asynchronous JavaScript ans so should not impact page load times at all. It has already been set to be public facing and the URL for access is here:
https://clicky.com/stats/?site_id=100787377It would be great if the public stats could be collected from the day that the new BitShares SuperDAC was born. Just paste it in and public facing stats becomes live
<script type="text/javascript">
var clicky_site_ids = clicky_site_ids || [];
clicky_site_ids.push(100787377);
(function() {
var s = document.createElement('script');
s.type = 'text/javascript';
s.async = true;
s.src = '//static.getclicky.com/js';
( document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0] ).appendChild( s );
})();
</script>
<noscript><p><img alt="Clicky" width="1" height="1" src="//in.getclicky.com/100787377ns.gif" /></p></noscript>
</body>
</html>
Going forward from this I think we need to focus on measurement and reporting of two things:
Awareness
Conversion Goals
My proposal above deals more with awareness. Conversion goal measurement might require some more definition, thought and would probably require a bit more implementation to implement. I'm guessing we could consider the download of the client software and creation of an account to be a successful conversion, but I think that it should be extended beyond that with multiple 'Stretch Goals' (i.e. how much BTSX/BitAsset is held in their account after one month etc etc, a $1m vs a $10 conversion may be given different weighting)
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