Dash Partnership with Transform PR

[TheDashGuy]

Thanks kot for your efforts.

Though I respect the vote of the community, i want to express my sorrow that we may have lost a good PR agency doing their job for us.

A early entrepeneur once said:

I am a developer and quality management guy, and don't know much about marketing and PR, so I have to rely on others doing it.

And my perception of what we got was good, Dash has never seen such media coverage before like in the past weeks - and i've read a lot during the past 22 months I am working on Dash. We even had coverage in non-crypto media, which is the key for getting known outside of the geek&nerd world.

If the community feels that this is not the way to go I will respect that, but I think we are in failure here: half of the money was well spent.

Hopefully someone will pick us up in the desert

Holger

Then resubmit the proposal and do a smaller amount of Dash over a longer period of time and/or peg it to the USD value of the services and it should pass just fine. And some analytics on the past month might help the crowd vote yes as well.

I hope everything ends up with everyone being happy. Not trying to stir anything up, just keeping it balanced and avoiding "group-think" mentalities. They killed Bitcoin for me.

 

[kot]

BrainShutdown
Well. I am all for transparency. Nevertheless, in this particular case if we do it, it won't work anymore and the project would need to be closed anyway.
There is no way and reason to do the marketing and PR, when everyone knows what you are doing and what are you going to do to impress your Customers.

TheDashGuy
I am afraid you have no idea what are you talking about. Marketing is much more than few posts on the forum, It is well planned and properly executed work to do. I know it from the experience (and we have been also told that very clearly by the agency) that 3 months is a minimal period, after that you can assess whether campaign works or not. So we have planned our project this way with absolutely minimal cost (as you could notice, I have prepared a lot of materials by myself to avoid additional costs). Have a look at the companies and their campaigns in the real world - they are planning and doing media campaigns for years (not to mention the cost).

It is easy to write a lot of theoretical posts on the forum. To understand what is the cost, effort and time needed for such project try to prepare and coordinate the world-wide campaign (with press, internet media, interviews, presentations, meetings, all of the supporting materials, logistics, dozens of people involved and hundreds of other activities) and then execute it. Only after that we could talk on the same level of understanding.

EDIT: I hope that together with the "offer" of NO vote you are offering something to replace this project (with comparable benefits and within the same budget). If yes, you can count on my help with realization.

 

[BrainShutdown]

BrainShutdown
Well. I am all for transparency. Nevertheless, in this particular case if we do it, it won't work anymore and the project would need to be closed anyway.
There is no way and reason to do the marketing and PR, when everyone knows what you are doing and what are you going to do to impress your Customers.

Oh well I don't have the slightest idea how marketing and PR works and so I wasn't talking about giving information about the PR current or future focus. I was just referring to what was already done and closed... does it make sense?

 

[kot]

BrainShutdown
It is very easy to realize what will be the next move when you see all of the previous steps

 

[BrainShutdown]

BrainShutdown
It is very easy to realize what will be the next move when you see all of the previous steps

Oh boy I get it but this way it makes the internal community PR/lobby a lot harder...

 

[BrainShutdown]

My suggestion in this case is to have the general PR budget funding this kind of specific initiatives and don't require new budget allocations. Small steps and compromise. Either way in my opinion you guys are making an excellent work with this Dash revolution. Keep it up.

 

[Lebubar]

Hmmmm, Not cool.

PR and better visibility is really what we need now. (imho)

Is that massive "no" came from the dash/$ debate?

(In which desert are you guys?)

 

[TheDashGuy]

We should just have an incentive program for articles from people, regardless of their standing in this world or title. Reward good content.

There should be a bounty system built that has a public key available to watch the budget be spent for this specific stuff, completely transparent at this point and we can send Dash "rebates" to the actual authors of these articles thus creating a whole market where its incentivized to write a good article about Dash. Once we don't need this anymore it can be voted out and we have seen the ROI with our own eyes. We can watch how successful each article is in the real world and judge for ourselves.


It's really not a hard problem to solve if you put your head to it.

This is essentially a presidential election that never ends, no? Lets run it like a grassroots campaign and just toss on incentives and then you have a decentralized autonomous marketing team.

Pay $40-75 per "quality"* article and everyone will be very happy to do their research and do a dash write up.
*The quality should be determined on DT per article/by "micro" vote of the community. Just like a state law would be approached or something like that.

Pros of this approach: transparent, measurable, decentralized, incentivizes a whole network of people to get involved.

Pros of a single company doing it all behind the scenes (trying to be fair here) : Might happen faster, might be cheaper, might be "better quality"

Anything I'm missing in this write up? Any questions I can think out from anyone? This is me being helpful, not harmful as you've requested, so don't come at me with attitudes please. I FULLY understood what i was undertaking when I started opening my mouth. but for the record I do not own a masternode, I did not make this decision I merely informed the community of my opinion as an active member of Dash. So where did I go wrong? By being rude? Well I apologize for that, but its a two way street. There is no end game here, just me doing my part. Its a thankless task to speak the truth(in my mind obviously) 24/7 but it's all i know how to do. So forgive me.

Edit: And for the record, I never mean't to "insult" anyone personally this is just politics sometimes, things get heated. I still love you all. Dash most of all. Maybe more than alot of people here it is starting to feel like. Just standing up for the little guy! If you felt insulted by me, PM me and I will personally apologize and give your opinions honest thought. Just a fiery soul, it's not natural for me to filter myself for anyone. Trust me, my girlfriend HATES it sometimes. haha.

edit: and they called me a troll who doesn't know PR/Marketing... haha can we let this go now people? Please?

 

[alex-ru]

BrainShutdown

TheDashGuy
I am afraid you have no idea what are you talking about. Marketing is much more than few posts on the forum, It is well planned and properly executed work to do. I know it from the experience (and we have been also told that very clearly by the agency) that 3 months is a minimal period, after that you can assess whether campaign works or not. So we have planned our project this way with absolutely minimal cost (as you could notice, I have prepared a lot of materials by myself to avoid additional costs). Have a look at the companies and their campaigns in the real world - they are planning and doing media campaigns for years (not to mention the cost).

It is easy to write a lot of theoretical posts on the forum. To understand what is the cost, effort and time needed for such project try to prepare and coordinate the world-wide campaign (with press, internet media, interviews, presentations, meetings, all of the supporting materials, logistics, dozens of people involved and hundreds of other activities) and then execute it. Only after that we could talk on the same level of understanding.

This is a real problem ... Most people have no idea how marketing works, and especially PR ...
PR - it's always the case of the experiment, and the result is not guaranteed! Moreover, the experiment is a long-term: during long period, eliminating inefficient places and approaches (predict outcome in advance 100% rarely possible - everything is learned only during the tests), there are no clear metrics to measure progress, etc.

Yes, the lack of control (in opposite to usual case of purchasing goods, etc.) and the need to rely on trust - is unpleasant and unusual for most of us - but it is inevitable with PR - there is simply no other way.

The only effective PR - is a hidden PR. Publishing reports of PR-work - at times reduces their results and even makes them negative. It's small area - very few people who had experience with it. But who is doing this in practice knows no other way simply does not exist. You have to take risks and do spendings, including inefficient spending.

The only way to increase efficiency and reduce risks - do it on a regular basis, accumulating experience and constantly "adjusting" the company. Ordinary people never done it personally, and they think that PR-people are just trying to cheat them. And the only way - is to trust the professionals (even if they will deceive you in final).

I've earned my living with CPA-marketing for many years - it has similar principals to PR:
1. You spend $ 1000 for testing-1 and get $ 800 loss.
2. You adjust campaign and spend another $ 1000 for testing-2 and get $ 300 loss.
3. You adjust campaign and spend another $ 1000 for testing-3 and get $ 10 loss.
4. You adjust campaign and spend another $ 1000 for testing-4 and get $ 100 profit. Congrats - you are professional and found profitable scheme after just testing-4!!!
5. Now you can set budget of your found campaign-scheme to $ 100.000 and earn $ 10.000 protif.

This how it works and this is the only way to do it (except some rear luck cases). There is no way even for super professionals to earn $ 10.100 profit without this "$ 1.110 losses during testing".

How does it convey to the general people? I dont know...

Dash do need to organize PR-work professionally - let's support this proposal!

Not doing it may save us several thousands of DASH, but it will deprive us of the time = "first mover advantage" = competitive advantage.

mnbudget vote-many a425e35fa2db7c55b0b0d8cb430b9df9925cb7cc1b9322d3635ec4c744121b00 yes

 

[tungfa]

We should just have an incentive program for articles from people, regardless of their standing in this world or title. Reward good content.

There should be a bounty system built that has a public key available to watch the budget be spent for this specific stuff, completely transparent at this point and we can send Dash "rebates" to the actual authors of these articles thus creating a whole market where its incentivized to write a good article about Dash. Once we don't need this anymore it can be voted out and we have seen the ROI with our own eyes. We can watch how successful each article is in the real world and judge for ourselves.


It's really not a hard problem to solve if you put your head to it.

This is essentially a presidential election that never ends, no? Lets run it like a grassroots campaign and just toss on incentives and then you have a decentralized autonomous marketing team.

Pay $40-75 per "quality"* article and everyone will be very happy to do their research and do a dash write up.
*The quality should be determined on DT per article/by "micro" vote of the community. Just like a state law would be approached or something like that.

Pros of this approach: transparent, measurable, decentralized, incentivizes a whole network of people to get involved.

Pros of a single company doing it all behind the scenes (trying to be fair here) : Might happen faster, might be cheaper, might be "better quality"

Anything I'm missing in this write up? Any questions I can think out from anyone? This is me being helpful, not harmful as you've requested, so don't come at me with attitudes please. I FULLY understood what i was undertaking when I started opening my mouth. but for the record I do not own a masternode, I did not make this decision I merely informed the community of my opinion as an active member of Dash. So where did I go wrong? By being rude? Well I apologize for that, but its a two way street. There is no end game here, just me doing my part. Its a thankless task to speak the truth(in my mind obviously) 24/7 but it's all i know how to do. So forgive me.

Edit: And for the record, I never mean't to "insult" anyone personally this is just politics sometimes, things get heated. I still love you all. Dash most of all. Maybe more than alot of people here it is starting to feel like. Just standing up for the little guy! If you felt insulted by me, PM me and I will personally apologize and give your opinions honest thought. Just a fiery soul, it's not natural for me to filter myself for anyone. Trust me, my girlfriend HATES it sometimes. haha.

edit: and they called me a troll who doesn't know PR/Marketing... haha can we let this go now people? Please?

More wisdom from the marketing genius
we are running grassroots campaign since 2 years
why this does not work any more i explained to you before

you can write as many articles as you want
PUBLISHING is the issue !

kot
good effort man
we will march on

 

[TheDashGuy]

More wisdom from the marketing genius
we are running grassroots campaign since 2 years
why this does not work any more i explained to you before

you can write as many articles as you want
PUBLISHING is the issue !

Why are you attacking me sir? We're past arguing, the community decided for me. I can't even vote yet so I don't see why you are targeting me personally. The community voted.

Let them vote on this idea too, why is everything so authoritarian with you so far man? Let the network be the network and do network things. I get its faster to just say "this is how we are going to do it" but people want to choose for themselves in this decentralized community.

 

[tungfa]

We're past arguing, the community decided for me.

there we go, finally you said it then
was that what is was all about ?

 

[TheDashGuy]

there we go, finally you said it then
was that what is was all about ?

Did you not read the post you just quoted before this one?

There are better ways to run these PR campaigns that include transparency and ROI: (not saying this is exactly correct, perhaps each article is worth a different amount, but its a start in the right direction imo)

Such as:
"There should be a bounty system built that has a public key available to watch the budget be spent for this specific stuff, completely transparent at this point and we can send Dash "rebates" to the actual authors of these articles thus creating a whole market where its incentivized to write a good article about Dash. Once we don't need this anymore it can be voted out and we have seen the ROI with our own eyes. We can watch how successful each article is in the real world and judge for ourselves.


It's really not a hard problem to solve if you put your head to it.

This is essentially a presidential election that never ends, no? Lets run it like a grassroots campaign and just toss on incentives and then you have a decentralized autonomous marketing team.

Pay $40-75 per "quality"* article and everyone will be very happy to do their research and do a dash write up.
*The quality should be determined on DT per article/by "micro" vote of the community. Just like a state law would be approached or something like that.

Pros of this approach: transparent, measurable, decentralized, incentivizes a whole network of people to get involved.

Pros of a single company doing it all behind the scenes (trying to be fair here) : Might happen faster, might be cheaper, might be "better quality"

 

[InTheWoods]

tungfa

I understand there are things that can't be revealed ahead of time but some metrics can and should be provided like for example: how many hits/impressions were generated by Terpin PR, how many leads were generated, how many interviews were booked, how many articles and so on. No need to get down and dirty with very specific details. Perhaps presenting such metrics would make people feel more inclined to vote yes.

 

[Jeztah]

Did you not read the post you just quoted before this one?

There are better ways to run these PR campaigns that include transparency and ROI: (not saying this is exactly correct, perhaps each article is worth a different amount, but its a start in the right direction imo)

Such as:
"There should be a bounty system built that has a public key available to watch the budget be spent for this specific stuff, completely transparent at this point and we can send Dash "rebates" to the actual authors of these articles thus creating a whole market where its incentivized to write a good article about Dash. Once we don't need this anymore it can be voted out and we have seen the ROI with our own eyes. We can watch how successful each article is in the real world and judge for ourselves.


It's really not a hard problem to solve if you put your head to it.

This is essentially a presidential election that never ends, no? Lets run it like a grassroots campaign and just toss on incentives and then you have a decentralized autonomous marketing team.

Pay $40-75 per "quality"* article and everyone will be very happy to do their research and do a dash write up.
*The quality should be determined on DT per article/by "micro" vote of the community. Just like a state law would be approached or something like that.

Pros of this approach: transparent, measurable, decentralized, incentivizes a whole network of people to get involved.

Pros of a single company doing it all behind the scenes (trying to be fair here) : Might happen faster, might be cheaper, might be "better quality"

Do you have any real world marketing experience? Do you understand what a cohesive and highly polished PR campaign is? Do you know how to run one?

Unfortunately you are dreaming if you think it could be accomplished by this community on it's own. Always pay a professional for things you are not a master of, it's cheaper in the long run. I fear the potential missed opportunities we are closing the door to.

 

[TheDashGuy]

Do you have any real world marketing experience? Do you understand what a cohesive and highly polished PR campaign is? Do you know how to run one?

Unfortunately you are dreaming if you think it could be accomplished by this community on it's own. Always pay a professional for things you are not a master of, it's cheaper in the long run. I fear the potential missed opportunities we are closing the door to.

Thank you for your thorough input on my idea. I look forward to your continued constructive criticism.

 

[itscrazybro]

I am very sad to see this opportunity float past us. The results of this were obviously showing, we do not need complete transparency of the process when the outcome is completely transparent itself. If you have been following dash, you would have realised things have picked up big time in terms of media coverage etc, people are mentioning us left, right and centre. This is not just a coincidence, this is obviously the outcome of a great pr campaign.
We have all the transparency we need with this, just analyse our media coverage and compare it to the coverage before the campaign. We have a great chance to position ourselves as an industry leader, I would hate to see us take the foot off of the gas because we cannot see the details off how the pr firm performs their magic.

 

[Solarminer]

This is a real problem ... Most people have no idea how marketing works, and especially PR ...
PR - it's always the case of the experiment, and the result is not guaranteed! Moreover, the experiment is a long-term: during long period, eliminating inefficient places and approaches (predict outcome in advance 100% rarely possible - everything is learned only during the tests), there are no clear metrics to measure progress, etc.

Yes, the lack of control (in opposite to usual case of purchasing goods, etc.) and the need to rely on trust - is unpleasant and unusual for most of us - but it is inevitable with PR - there is simply no other way.

The only effective PR - is a hidden PR. Publishing reports of PR-work - at times reduces their results and even makes them negative. It's small area - very few people who had experience with it. But who is doing this in practice knows no other way simply does not exist. You have to take risks and do spendings, including inefficient spending.

The only way to increase efficiency and reduce risks - do it on a regular basis, accumulating experience and constantly "adjusting" the company. Ordinary people never done it personally, and they think that PR-people are just trying to cheat them. And the only way - is to trust the professionals (even if they will deceive you in final).

I've earned my living with CPA-marketing for many years - it has similar principals to PR:
1. You spend $ 1000 for testing-1 and get $ 800 loss.
2. You adjust campaign and spend another $ 1000 for testing-2 and get $ 300 loss.
3. You adjust campaign and spend another $ 1000 for testing-3 and get $ 10 loss.
4. You adjust campaign and spend another $ 1000 for testing-4 and get $ 100 profit. Congrats - you are professional and found profitable scheme after just testing-4!!!
5. Now you can set budget of your found campaign-scheme to $ 100.000 and earn $ 10.000 protif.

This how it works and this is the only way to do it (except some rear luck cases). There is no way even for super professionals to earn $ 10.100 profit without this "$ 1.110 losses during testing".

This is a great post. There are a lot of us that need to see this type of logical thinking.

We need to understand what we can actually use as a benchmark. It seems that pointing to news articles is a common statement and is supposed to give us an understanding. Unfortunately, again, I don't understand what is good/ok/bad amount of postings. Are the changes we see significant or are they the result of a general growth curve.

For example (this is more of a general growth curve)
October 10 article.
November 30 articles
December 50 articles
January 80 articles.

For example (this shows that something significant started in December)
October 1 article.
November 3 articles
December 90 articles
January 205 articles.

We could use x unique visitors dash.org each month.

Even these types of metrics are not the end goal. The end metric should be adoption. That could be merchant adoption, user adoption, exchange adoption, etc.

On today's Tatiana show the one message that they kept asking was where can Dash be used? Maybe this needs to be a part of the marketing focus. I would be happy to help with pictures of the Dash N Drink or Wifi Portal devices to help with new releases. I see showing new products and technology a much easier way to explain Dash and give people ideas how it can be used.

 

[acidburn]

Did we loose this opportunity?

 

[kot]

TheDashGuy
You wrote "the community decided for me" - this is fine. As I wrote, I respect the result of voting.
So far you actually did not offer anything to vote for (only against our actions) but I really hope you have a solid plan how to gain comparable results the other (possibly better) way. Otherwise it would mean that our competition should be grateful for this - we have just lost a big competitive advantage and quite a lot of budget (as these coins will be simply burned).

Now it is time for you to act as a responsible person and do. Do not write what we should have - it is pointless (we should have hundreds of things - everyone knows that and everyone could write dozens of posts about it). Just make it happen instead. It looks like you are able to inspire a lot of people - inspire them to do, lead by example. Explain what is your idea, submit the proposal, gather the team, build plan and deliver the solution - easy (when you type it on your keyboard). I think many people count on you (me too, as a part of this community). As soon as you give the real alternative (not the theory), you have my full support and help.

Solarminer
I will try to gather some numbers and present them as suggested. The irony is that we did not even close the first month of the contract and we are forced to break the work. The first monthly review was planned on 16th of February. At the moment I can only say that during the single Miami conference week we have had 5 publications in major crypto-media 1 in econotimes.com around 10 interviews and unbelievable number of contacts with really influencing people form the industry. I do not know the historical numbers (and I guess no one is gathering them and do statistics) but January was very impressive for me, comparing to the entire year 2015.
To give you some understanding on how we were working with them and what was our goals, I believe I can show the project charter after the voting is closed.

 

[TaoOfSatoshi]

It appears this initiative is back to being funded...

 

[JGCMiner]

It appears this initiative is back to being funded...

As it should be. Especially considering the coins will be burned (pointlessly) otherwise.

 

[TheDashGuy]

Not even going to take the time out of my day to respond to everyone about this sad sad sad situation. I will just say this:

First off: My rant is posted here - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.new#new

Secondly kot, I'm saddened you don't see the value in a fully funded Dash jobs economy. I guess a centralized company will save our ass without providing any sort of analytical proof or calming the community by supplying ANYTHING, obviously the voters feel the same way. Otherwise they wouldn't have voted it out in the first place. It's a thankless job to be the guy speaking for a minority, but golly does it work. I will gladly take on this burden and keep on keeping on.

Keep trying to censor me! Proves I'm doing my job right. Hell you might as well IP ban me if thats that case, would solve your problem altogether no?

 

[David]

obviously the voters feel the same way. Otherwise they wouldn't have voted it out in the first place

The PR proposal is presently scheduled to be paid, with 1601 yes to 626 no.

 

[TheDashGuy]

The PR proposal is presently scheduled to be paid, with 1601 yes to 626 no.

Keep picking out sentences and ignoring the rest, like I don't know what you are doing.

Stop being a one sided individual, maybe you can sleep better at night. I know some part of you sees my point, you just refuse to break ranks from your little posse to say so because it would reflect negatively on you.

Straight shady.

 

[kot]

Not even going to take the time out of my day to respond to everyone about this sad sad sad situation. I will just say this:

First off: My rant is posted here - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.new#new

Secondly kot, I'm saddened you don't see the value in a fully funded Dash jobs economy. I guess a centralized company will save our ass without providing any sort of analytical proof or calming the community by supplying ANYTHING, obviously the voters feel the same way. Otherwise they wouldn't have voted it out in the first place. It's a thankless job to be the guy speaking for a minority, but golly does it work. I will gladly take on this burden and keep on keeping on.

Keep trying to censor me! Proves I'm doing my job right. Hell you might as well IP ban me if thats that case, would solve your problem altogether no?

I see the value of fully funded Dash jobs economy very well. Therefore I expect you to act as a responsible person and start doing things instead of writing posts and saying what should be done. As soon as you really DO things, you have my respect and support. Writing another post means nothing to me.

 

[TheDashGuy]

I see the value of fully funded Dash jobs economy very well. Therefore I expect you to act as a responsible person and start doing things instead of writing posts and saying what should be done. As soon as you really DO things, you have my respect and support. Writing another post means nothing to me.

I started watching Evans videos on Dash on 12/1/2015 and since then here is a list of the things I have been doing, which for the record is more than all of you sitting around calling me a fucking troll. So forgive my language for feeling slighted.

My personal website/blog about DASH with a link directory, video library etc: http://www.thedashguy.com/
My twitter with 510 posts in under a 2 month period( I MUST be a troll huh?) https://twitter.com/TheDashGuy
My instragram (originally started out with this): https://www.instagram.com/thedashguy/
My DT account with 629 posts, 539 likes on my posts in under 2 months: https://dashtalk.org/members/thedashguy.4535/

Not to mention I did dashndrink.com for FREE
AND I did thedailydecrypt.com for FREE.

edit: Oh an I can now say I was "responsible" for blowing up the shitty use of the budget on some half baked PR Company.

And I was called out for "chatting too much on slack" must count for something. Right?

Is that not enough for you in my TWO WHOLE MONTHS I have been here? Literally watched my first Dash video on 12/1/15....

 

[Sapereaude]

Did we loose this opportunity?

I'm worried that might happen.

 

[Jeztah]

I'm worried that might happen.

Votes: 1132 Yes / 1100 No
Will be funded: No

(this proposal needs additional 316 Yes votes to become funded)

 

[Sapereaude]

Votes: 1132 Yes / 1100 No
Will be funded: No

(this proposal needs additional 316 Yes votes to become funded)

Did I miss something? How is having a professional PR firm a bad thing? I am honestly flabbergasted, losing this could set Dash back months...