I’m excited to be working with the rest of the BitShares community to make BitShares a success in 2015.
Recently, there have been comments made on the BitShares forum about me and that it seems like my involvement with BitShares is eerily reminiscent of the former BitShares Marketing Director, Brian Page. I know that it’s no secret that many of the members of the community were not impressed with his performance as the BitShares Marketing Director; however, what seems to be unclear to members on the BitShares community is exactly what my role is supposed to be within the BitShares community. Thus, I’d like to take this opportunity to clarify.
Since Brian’s departure, the community decided that it would be in its best interest to decentralize our marketing efforts, which means that I am not the BitShares Marketing Director. I have never been the BitShares Marketing Director, nor will I ever be the BitShares Marketing Director.
With last year’s merger between BitSharesX, DNS, and VOTE, due to my marketing expertise, extreme passion for politics, and deep desire to make a major difference in the world, I was brought on specifically to work with BitShares to develop a blockchain based voting solution that could be integrated with the BitShares blockchain. In just a few short months, I have successfully promoted the idea of developing a blockchain-based voting solution, creating awareness of and interest in the innovative approach, here in the United States and abroad.
I have spent a considerable amount of effort researching the voting industry, reviewing voting legislation, and networking with legislators and election officials at all levels of government within the United States, in an attempt to assess the current landscape, gain support for our innovative solution, and identify opportunities for its implementation in the public sector.
Upon developing our proof of concept voting system and demonstrating the technology at an industry conference in California (CA) this past December, we received an official endorsement from a well-respected Registrar of Voters, which is prominently featured on the home page of the Follow My Vote website (
https://followmyvote.com). Legislators and election officials in Virginia (VA), our home state, have also been very supportive.
Despite the overwhelming support, the reality of the situation is that each state in the United States has laws governing what types of voting systems can be certified for use in elections, which are extremely outdated due to a false paradigm. This means that certain laws will need to be changed in various states, in order to allow for our voting system to be piloted, certified, and adopted.
Although official government elections are proving to be a long-lead opportunity for us in the U.S., the good news is that legislation seems to be the only barrier to entry. With this in mind, we intend to shift this paradigm and bring this legislation up to date by educating legislators and election officials in the U.S. about the advantages of leveraging 21st century technology to improve the democratic process. We have also begun to look outside the U.S. to seek opportunities for adoption.
We were recently invited to Oslo, Norway to speak about our voting solution at a national summit. According to this study (
http://bradblog.com/Docs/YearInElections-2014-Final_021115.pdf), Norway is the world’s leader when it comes to electoral integrity, whereas the U.S. currently ranks 45th. Hopefully, once our ideas our introduced there on a national stage, we’ll be able to gain entry to government sponsored elections much quicker. In the meantime, we’ll be focusing on building grassroots movements in both countries in an effort to expedite the process.
We’ve also started to look into ways to implement our voting solution in the private sector. We’re actively exploring alternative use cases for our voting solution, such as market research/opinion polling, online petitions, people’s choice awards, and proxy voting. We will be sure to keep the community updated on the outcome of our efforts here in the days ahead.
Follow My Vote has just gained access to a small portion of the vested stake that was allocated to us as part of the merger, which we have yet to spend. To ensure we are all on the same page, these funds were specifically allocated to Follow My Vote to ensure my commitment to this joint venture and to support the development of a voting system that will be integrated with the BitShares blockchain.
It goes without saying that I have a vested interest in ensuring the BitShares market cap continues to grow, as it will increase the value of our development fund and allow us to accomplish more with our allocation. With this in mind, I’ve agreed to get involved in directly marketing BitShares and lend my expertise in any way I can. However, being that my time is extremely limited, my involvement in directly marketing BitShares has been limited to the BitShares website and social media.
I was directly involved in getting our new website updated, with Cass leading the charge. My main goal was to ensure that the content was developed and site, as a whole, was transitioned with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Analytics tracking in mind. Now that this has been accomplished, we have yielded to Cass and other members of the BitShares marketing community that are closer to the BitShares brand and more familiar with the core product (BitAssets) to ensure that the user experience and messaging appeals to our customer base. However, we will continue to keep an eye on analytics, implement tracking, and provide performance reports, as needed, to ensure that the BitShares marketing community, as a whole, continues to drive results.
On that note, now that a full month has passed since the launch of our new website, I’d like to provide the community with some monthly performance statistics for Feb. 2015, which are as follows:
Website
Unique Visitors 10,978
Top Landing Page bitshares.org/
BitAsset Whitepaper Views 6,639
BitAsset Whitepaper Downloads 253
BitAsset Whitepaper Readers 1,673
BitShares Client Downloads 1352
Github BitShares Client Downloads 165
In addition to helping out with the website, my team and I have also been managing our social media accounts. rgcrypto and I met earlier in the year, at which point we discussed his marketing expertise. I gave him the opportunity to take over the management of our Facebook account; and, after demonstrating his ability to drive results via Facebook, we worked to get him elected as a 100% delegate. Aside from Facebook, we’re also managing our Twitter, Google+, and YouTube profiles and have provided performance statistics for all of our social media channels for Feb. 2015 below:
Facebook
Total Fans 6,685
Average Likes 263
Average Comments 2
Average Shares 3
Average Total Reach (Organic) 421
Average Total Reach (Paid) 10,051
Fan Base Growth 17%
Twitter
Followers 4,533
Impressions 40,100
Engagement Rate 2.60%
Link Clicks 393
Retweets 179
Favorites 156
Replies 13
Google+
Total Fans 150
Views 1,287
Actions on Posts 88
New Followers 11
YouTube
Subscribers 256
Views 628
Minutes Watched 3,682
Likes 18
Top Video What is DPOS - Delegated Proof of Stake?
An affiliate referral program is another thing that I have been working with valzav to get off the ground. Although we’ve already got some solid tracking capabilities in place, after an internal discussion, we are hesitant to launch an incentivized program until we have true identity verification capabilities in place to prevent would be bad actors from gaming the system. To this end, I’m in talks with representatives from Jumio, a leading identity verification company, to discuss potential partnership opportunities. We are in the process of gaining developer access to their platform to begin exploring their API in an attempt to determine the level of work involved in order to integrate with BitShares.
Although we have yet to start a formal incentivized affiliate referral program at this time, I want to reassure the community that we are tracking referral activity. As such, I have provided referral statistics with respect to new BitShares accounts that were registered through faucet.bitshares.org in Feb. 2015:
Referrer Total
www.minebitshares-com 28
rgcrypto 18
bitshares [social media] 9
cass 7
marketing.methodx 7
www-paycoin-ws 7
bitsharesblog 5
bts_traderx 5
index-html 5
beyondbitcoin 4
follow-my-vote 3
stan 3
bitsharesblocks 2
clayop 2
methodx 2
page01 2
bytemaster 1
home1 1
mf-tzo 1
paycoinws 1
refer-o-matic 1
test123 1
whiskey 1
Grand Total 116
I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank all of the affiliates listed above for all of their hard work in February. The community should know that this is a tremendous improvement over January. We had 42 referrals in Jan. 2015, which means we’ve seen nearly a 300% increase in performance.
As a final update, when taking into consideration that I won’t be able to dedicate as much time to directly marketing for BitShares as I originally intended, I’d like to take this opportunity to formally pledge 1M BTS in contributions to a development fund that I will control, which will be setup to sponsor BitShares related marketing initiatives that I consider to be worthwhile. On that note, I will be accepting proposals from members of the BitShares community on an ongoing basis and will work directly with marketers to ensure approved proposals are properly funded.
Let’s get to work!
ak
Topic: Updates From Adam (Read 14582 times)
