Author Topic: We desperately need better Public Relations: The Call Out  (Read 4907 times)

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Offline santaclause102

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Agree with the OP. This is along the lines of my critique of the March newsletter here https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=3688.msg47825#msg47825
Conclusion was: Keep the explanations simple whenever possible and avoid exaggerations that look scamy.

I would add: Stan tends to make his posts art projects of words, memes and inside jokes instead of communicating the facts as fast and simple as possible.
I have to say that I have a lot of sympathy for Stan's playful way of communicating things but it is not appropriate in many cases. 
« Last Edit: May 24, 2014, 10:15:54 am by delulo »

Offline solaaire

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in the spirit of the callout, i held back some of my excitement about PTS getting upgraded to the DPOS chain. its a fantastic move and the price reflects that. Stan, hyperbole and rabble rousery aside, you definitely should have approached the conversation differently, and im glad you acknowledged that.  keep it simple stupid is right! i think by proposing both ideas at once you made the deal too complex for users to easily digest. i would offer that this confusion undermined the value of the DPOS announcement, which wouldve been more impactful if announced separately. at any rate, whats done is done and i hope that you will draw on this experience in order to better capture value from announcements you might make in the future


Offline luckybit

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It might also help to hire a PR firm to handle all of that. Just a suggestion.
Brian is on the task but he is just one guy and can only do so much. Stan does a good job with the newsletter but will it scale? Sooner or later Bitshares will be too much for them to handle.
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Offline luckybit

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SEE POSTS 2+ IF YOU WANNA SKIP STRAIGHT TO THE FIRST DEGREE BURNS

Here's a cliffnotes version for those who may have missed the original PTS to PTS2 announcement threads:

A couple of days ago it was announced that the bitshares dev team is planning on upgrading bitshares PTS after bitshares XT is completed and released

This news was stealth announced in a cryptic topic titled "Rest in Peace, DA" found on the marketing board.  The topic, created by user Stan, intended to deliver great news to #bitsharesbelievers: Invictus is planning to upgrade the PTS network (via a soft-fork) by utilizing the DPOS tech which they have been developing over the past few months. In addition, it was announced that when this upgrade takes place, there will be around ~$1,000,000 of "windfall" money, and that this extra capital would go in a marketing slush fund controlled by Invictus

As I lurked through thread, some users appeared to like the idea. The current PTS PoW algo has some sustainability issues that are alleviated by upgrading to DPOS. Others observed that by allocating the remaining PTS to themselves, Invictus would breach the established social contract.
Stan continued to post in the thread, elaborating upon and holding his original position: investors should like this announcement because Invictus is in the best position to spend the funds wisely and thus maximize shareholder return.

After a total of 3 topics and 300 posts over the last couple of days, the first two topics discussing this issue have been closed, and all posts Stan made referencing the original million dollar marketing fund have been edited out of existence and can no longer be found. The most recent topic demotes the previous PTS DPOS upgrade announcement to a "proposal", and drops any talk of what to do with the left over PTS, instead deferring the decision to (community?) consensus at a later date.

I do not bring up the fact that Stan edited away the original announcement to cast suspicion on him. I do it because the original post Stan made regarding this (now defunct) marketing fund was more than a little half baked, and responsible for a lot of the FUD surrounding the PTS PoW to DPOS transition. Also it serves as a perfect example of how to confuse and alienate your user base.

You can switch it to DPoS as long as you implement virtual mining so that we can still mine PTS2.0 using a similar process as what the Blackcoin community uses.

You can mine Proof of Stake coins and it has been proven. So I suggest we go that route and go with PTS 2.0.
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Offline bytemaster

I think there is some solid feedback in this thread.
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Offline solaaire

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Anyway, here are some guidelines that might help you make better announcements in the future.

1) When you make an important announcement, don't obfuscate it in a random ass thread
2) If you're going to make an announcement, be concise and thorough on your first attempt. This is the post the most people are going to see by a wide margin. make it count
3) Please, please, please make an effort to differentiate when you're posting on behalf of Invictus and when you're posting a personal opinion. Sometimes you qualify your sentences with "We" and "In my opinion" but I hope you can understand how you swapping back and forth between these 'personas' under the same account can make it difficult to distinguish between the two. I suggest a new handle for when you wanna play Invictus

I really hope the best for this project but I think your expectations of the community are a little unreal. I still have faith in y’all but damn, you guys are still awful at managing user expectations and almost equally as bad at communicating the value of your innovations to users/investors. Why is it that nearly every innovation you guys have implemented so far ends up raising the value of PTS/AGS, and yet y’all still have to fight tooth and nail to convince users and investors that you guys aren’t scamming them with each new idea…  Seriously, what does it say about the state of Invictus’ PR when loyal users that have already invested tens of thousands of dollars into the ecosystem are shitting bricks because Stan failed to effectively communicate the latest value proposition?

Offline solaaire

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After failing to communicate the value of his idea the BTS community in his 40+ posts (conservative estimate) spread across two stickied topics, Stan, relentless in his efforts, creates a third topic. This third topic outlines a straightforward list of proposals based on community consensus that eliminates many of the previous complaints from shareholders. A much better attempt, but sorry Stan, im taking marks off since you used space in original post as a soap box to express your opinion on the current proposal. All things considered, third sticky wins by a longshot.

To be blunt Stan, I totally agree with you that many of your posts are straight up convoluted and fail to convey what you are actually trying to communicate. I'm sure ill come off this high horse looking like an asshole but despite your best intentions, many of your posts end up fueling the FUD through confusion. I'm not saying explaining many these concepts is easy... But if it consistently takes you several posts to properly convey your thoughts on a message board, a medium where you have all the time in the world to triple check your statements for clarity... I sincerely suggest letting someone else handle announcements.

Unfortunately this doesn't seem likely, given Bytemaster is busy in the lab (dont worry, he earns an honorable mention in this topic for the classic "GET YOUR BTSX WALLET HERE" troll thread) and the rest of the newly dubbed marketing crew seems to be preoccupied with whatever it is that they do. (They do things, right?)

Offline solaaire

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I also enjoyed the part of Stan's original post where he took a potshot at PTS miners who support an infrastructure critical to the bitshares operations at this time. I realize that PoW is not an ideal solution, but asserting that a miners work is worthless aka "digging holes and filling them up" is absolutely 100% incorrect considering we need miners on the PTS network until DPOS has successfully been implemented. Please, please, PLEASE consider how some of these statements might come across as arrogant to some shareholders, myself included.

Well, we're off to a splendid start already. Stan spends the next 4 pages of this topic handwaving concerns for the most part. Stan then creates a new topic that provides a bit more clarity, and with a relevant title to boot! Within this thread, Stan laments that "...we usually have to explain all our new ideas several different ways before everyone gets comfortable with it." Later in this same topic, Stan thanks someone and comments, "It's nice to have somebody who can explain things better than my often convoluted attempts!" This thread is definitely an improvement over the first, Stan is more engaged with the community in this thread, but after 15 pages the topic isn’t turning out as planned, yet again. These are not assuring words coming from the guy running PR at the moment

Offline solaaire

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Unfortunately, Stan then went on to claim that this exciting (but completely unproven) DPOS tech will realize a one-time cash infusion of around 7 figures, but according to the original post, Invictus had apparently already decided that all of this money is theirs to spend on marketing as they saw fit. Again, this original UNCUT PTS2 announcement has since been edited out of existence. Could this retracted marketing fund have been successful? Who knows. All I know is that the feel-good marketing jargon found in the post provided zero insight as to how these solicited funds would actually be used. Hand waving and listing off some DACs does not reassure me in the slightest.

Perhaps if the marketing team had a proven track record, the conversation might have played out differently as well, but as it stands we hardly hear a peep from any of em’ about a damn thing. Did you truly expect that a marketing fund of close to one million dollars would be granted by the community to a team of marketers that have spent the last few months doing what? Vacationing to bitcoin conferences? Oh and they managed to spend 22 grand on a website that lasted all of 4 days. And the only thing they have in the pipeline is what? Another website? And you literally expected the community to be gung-ho, bursting at the seams with suggestions about how the marketing team should spend these funds… UHHHH isn’t figuring that sort of stuff out their job? So Stan, tell me what marketing project you’ve contributed to that have seen a 10x ROI? Sorry, PTS and AGS don’t count. While you’re at it, would you mind telling me what used sales car lot you’re employed at?

Offline solaaire

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Now that the context is out of the way (i tried to stay objective) its time for THE CALLOUT

Stan, I’ve gotta ask man, why in the fuck did you choose to bury the PTS DPOS announcement in a thread titled “Rest in Peace, DA”??????? The title gives absolutely zero indication that there is any investment information to be found within the thread.  The first paragraph makes an esoteric forum reference and tops it off with a meme. This. This is the thread that you chose to post insider information about PTS2 a full 24 hours before you finally took pity and made a topic with a relevant title for the rest of us. From your posts it is obvious that you expected these announcement to raise the value of PTS, yet you decided to share this information in an obscure topic so that “you guys would know first”, whatever that means. What in the actual fuck. 

Anyway, once you skip past doctor evil, the first real content of Stan's first post touts moving PTS from PoW to DPOS as a solid play. Admittedly, I agree with this move and I am very excited to see this development play out

Offline solaaire

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SEE POSTS 2+ IF YOU WANNA SKIP STRAIGHT TO THE FIRST DEGREE BURNS

Here's a cliffnotes version for those who may have missed the original PTS to PTS2 announcement threads:

A couple of days ago it was announced that the bitshares dev team is planning on upgrading bitshares PTS after bitshares XT is completed and released

This news was stealth announced in a cryptic topic titled "Rest in Peace, DA" found on the marketing board.  The topic, created by user Stan, intended to deliver great news to #bitsharesbelievers: Invictus is planning to upgrade the PTS network (via a soft-fork) by utilizing the DPOS tech which they have been developing over the past few months. In addition, it was announced that when this upgrade takes place, there will be around ~$1,000,000 of "windfall" money, and that this extra capital would go in a marketing slush fund controlled by Invictus

As I lurked through thread, some users appeared to like the idea. The current PTS PoW algo has some sustainability issues that are alleviated by upgrading to DPOS. Others observed that by allocating the remaining PTS to themselves, Invictus would breach the established social contract.
Stan continued to post in the thread, elaborating upon and holding his original position: investors should like this announcement because Invictus is in the best position to spend the funds wisely and thus maximize shareholder return.

After a total of 3 topics and 300 posts over the last couple of days, the first two topics discussing this issue have been closed, and all posts Stan made referencing the original million dollar marketing fund have been edited out of existence and can no longer be found. The most recent topic demotes the previous PTS DPOS upgrade announcement to a "proposal", and drops any talk of what to do with the left over PTS, instead deferring the decision to (community?) consensus at a later date.

I do not bring up the fact that Stan edited away the original announcement to cast suspicion on him. I do it because the original post Stan made regarding this (now defunct) marketing fund was more than a little half baked, and responsible for a lot of the FUD surrounding the PTS PoW to DPOS transition. Also it serves as a perfect example of how to confuse and alienate your user base.