Background
This month, the reddit Ops Team continued with our strategy as outlined in our last forum post here. The goals of the reddit operation have always been to “increase engagement with the NEAR community.” Our more specific goals include:
- Increase trust and investment in the NEAR token
- Educate NEAR stakeholders (developers, token holders, crypto enthusiasts, creators, etc.)
- Provide updates on community events, product developments, and price movements
- Create content that drives engagement with the community (memes, discussion posts, question posts, news articles)
Towards these ends, our efforts can be broken down into 4 categories:
- Creating and maintaining a network of accounts for content distribution
- Posting on the r/nearprotocol sub
- Posting on other subreddits about NEAR
- Hosting AMAs on the NEAR sub
These efforts are broken down by each team member, each of whom will provide an update below.
Cek
We have seen a noticeable increase in growth - measured by comments of non-Reddit ops team members, the number of members joining the sub, interaction on AMAs, etc. - on the r/NEARprotocol sub in the month of August. Since the beginning of the Reddits Ops team, a large portion of the content has centered on initiating conversation about token price points with $NEAR holders. Especially with the recent spike in price, this topic has been successful in sparking discourse among NEARians on Reddit. For instance, on 8/21 we simply posted: “Is anybody selling?” and received 15 comments where people overlapped their opinions and shared their firmly held price points. We plan to continue targeting content towards token holders and provoke conversation about NEAR token price trends. Additionally, as memes are an integral part to any sub on Reddit, there has been good reception on our #MemeDropMondays. We will keep sharing meme-related content each Monday to show off Swine Guild’s creative memes and any other relevant memes created by community members.
The primary goal for the upcoming month is to narrow down the target audience and have a specific group of people in mind for each post. In addition to continuing to disseminate important information and news within the ecosystem, we will address four particular target audiences with community questions: token holders, developers, creators/artists, and other NEAR project users. For token holders, we will initiate communication about token price movements and why users HODL their NEAR. Posts will also ask about price predictions by certain time frames and encourage holders to continue to do so by talking about the certainty behind NEAR’s potential as a top 5 coin. Since the call with JC last week, Çek has been furthering his knowledge on software development in crypto and opportunities in the ecosystem so that developers can be a primary target audience on the sub. An amateur developer persona has just recently been made, and they will serve as a medium for baiting questions about how to build on top of NEAR, etc. Çek also has a solid background in NFTs and minting, so we will capitalize this by placing a larger focus on creators and artists that use NEAR. Posts will discuss UTD news on NEAR working with Mintbase & Paras, promote certain NFTs and projects that are available for sale, and obviously continue to shit on Eth for their high gas fees associated to creating stores/miniting and how they impede creativity. Lastly, infographics and events on NEAR projects, ranging from RefFinance to Aurora, will be shared to include the peripheral audience of users of such projects. Having less of an expertise on these projects, Çek will collaborate with Sue to get more insight on topics when he feels that it’s necessary to generate concepts on certain aspects within these projects.
Going forward, we will continue to be receptive to the activity on the sub and the advice of any insiders within the ecosystem. Also, as suggested by JC, certain posts will be shared to Telegram groups such as the Degens as well as to the market distribution channel so that more attention (comments, uplikes) can be placed on posts that we believe will initiate significant debate/conversation. Finally, we will set up link trackers in September so that the number of views of each post can be measured and allow us to understand which types of posts are having more success on the sub. This will be used to establish content view KPIs for Q4.
G
In order to ensure the daily activity goals on r/NEARProtocol are met, the central focus has been establishing and maintaining a core baseline of around 20 accounts. The biggest challenge was circumventing reddit’s bans and shadow bans. By gradually integrating steady activity on each account first via commenting and then through posting, I have found the most success.
With these accounts well established, efficiently tracking community trends and growth is possible. By tailoring the posts accordingly, karma and organic community interactions should continue to thrive.
Spreadsheets documenting the posts for the month of August including updated accounts and all posts from r/nearprotocol with corresponding users and dates:
Moving forward, the goal is to concentrate on curating additional accounts with individual personas. These accounts will be dedicated to reaching specific target audiences across reddit. The upcoming month, the target audiences with primary focus are developers, creators/artists, and NEAR project users. In order to reach these audiences, I’ll continue to collaborate with Cek to contrive content and initiate activity for accounts with a developer persona, two different NEAR token holder personas, and an NFT artist on paras/mintbase.
In addition to these accounts, an official NEAR reddit account has been created. This account will be used to answer questions and provide helpful resources and information regarding the NEAR ecosystem.
Seth
This was a difficult but enlightening month for the “other subreddits” side of the reddit operations. We encountered significant problems early in the month with getting substantial posts past auto-moderators on several different subreddits. Our first attempt at remedying this issue was to remove external links, and change our writing style in the copy. There was some success in this strategy, but there were clear problems in mobilization as well. In response to this, Sue and I reassessed the best methods for dissemination. Toward the end of the month we set up an arrangement with Lol Son, a member of the degens with his own group of redditors who are prepared to help us with engagement. 24 hours after the first post was distributed by Lol Son and his team, our post received 16 upvotes and 34 comments. This is a dramatic increase in our engagement, and we are confident that this arrangement will ensure that future posts will get similar amounts of attention. This effort is being conducted in tandem with my own to create separate personas on reddit who each interact with the posts as well. In the coming weeks, as these personas become more established, we expect to see more organic growth as they each become part of different reddit communities. We believe this is a strong demonstration of our ability to adapt to problems, and that we have used what we have learned to set forth a strong framework that is already proving its worth.
We will also have an addition to our monthly schedule in order to drive even more organic discussion about NEAR and its associated projects. Sue and I will be collaborating to create a long, detailed, calculated post that we want on the front page of a major subreddit (i.e. r/cryptocurrency). We will reach out to the developers of a project on the NEAR network and coordinate with its marketing and content creation teams to ensure we have the best possible material for the post (this includes infographics, quotes, data, etc.). Sue and I have already spoken with Aaron Ting from Octopus Network, and have begun work on this post for next month. There is further promise for mobilization here as well, given many of these projects have their own marketing teams. Aaron also demonstrated potential interest in creating a more streamlined process for this kind of content creation and promotion, and offered his help in bringing multiple projects associated with Octopus Network to engage with Sue and I in a similar process. This has potential to drive large amounts of engagement and will be a large focus in the coming months.
Finally, our mobilization has improved dramatically. As discussed above, Lol Son has substantially helped organic engagement. My personas will provide this growth as well. I have also gained access to more than 5 separate telegram accounts including the official marketing group and the degen chat. In the event of our large monthly post, we anticipate access to even more networks of people via the project we are covering, and anticipate we will be able to reach the front page of a subreddit at least once every month. Listed in a google doc in the comments are the posts from August and a brief synopsis of their content for your review. Our 8th post of the month is scheduled to be posted tomorrow.
Sue
My responsibilities include interfacing with the NEAR core team, hosting the AMAs, and collaborating with other members of the ecosystem to facilitate marketing distribution. This is all pretty straightforward except for the AMAs, the process for which is outlined below.
AMAs
Twice a month, the reddit team hosts AMAs on the r/nearprotocol sub. We encourage participation through our marketing channels, and reward those who garner a response to their questions. This month, we had anticipated hosting Octopus Network and Illia. However, due to scheduling conflicts with Octopus Network, we had to postpone their AMA, thereby pushing back the schedule. This coming month, we are planning an AMA with Illia and an AMA with OPGames.
Originally, we were awarding first, second, and third place designations based on upvotes. However, since we failed to remember that democracy doesn’t work on the internet, we quickly noticed that a number of accounts were consistently ending up in the top 3 slots. It was clear that an upvoting ring was gaming the system. Starting with the Octopus Network AMA, top comments are decided by the AMA host. We also learned that many people spam the comments in an effort to get an answer, so we will also be limiting each user to 1 comment per AMA if they wish to collect awards.
KPI status:
On July 31st, we had 1,276 subscribers. We shot for 1500 by the end of September, but were told to increase the stakes to 1,750. As of today, August 31st, a month prior to the end of Q3, we have a total of 1,964 members. As the late John Prine would say, “Pretty good, not bad, I can’t complain.” We hope to round out quarter 3 with 2,200 subscribers in the sub.
For the month of August, our KPIs are as follows:
-Host 2 AMAs with 100 comments on each
-Achieve 2,250 members on r/nearprotocol by the end of the month
-Get NEAR content to the front page of a major crypto subreddit
-Achieve a minimum of 50 karma for each account
-Place link trackers on our posts to provide a foundation for Q4 view KPIs.
Budget
Last month, we proposed a budget of 2,000 NEAR per month. This breakdown of funds was meant to cover the expenses of each of our members, but we neglected to account for reddit AMAs. We pay out 190 NEAR per AMA, so at 2 AMAs per month that comes to 380 per month. In order to compensate for this quantity, we propose a budget of 2,380 NEAR per month going forward.
Note: Last month, Sue paid out 3 AMAs worth of NEAR (570 NEAR), two from July (Ozy and Matt Lockyer) and one for the August Octopus Network AMA (can provide wallet screenshots upon request). We suggest a continuation with this model of backpay, since that is our current compensation arrangement. Therefore, we will only be requesting 190 NEAR on top of our 2,000 baseline this month. Next month, we will again request 380 to pay for this month’s AMAs.
Edits:
Looking through the post, I think we hit on all of JC’s suggested additions except for
*Links to similar, previously funded forum proposals
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Total requested amount in USD and NEAR (price based at the time of posting)
On our call yesterday, it was reiterated that the backpay for August will be coming in previously agreed upon token amounts, and that the new policy is starting for September. We had agreed that the payment for August will be 2,000 plus 380 for AMA payments. See the note above about the AMA backpay to understand why we are asking only 2,190 $NEAR for this month. -
NEAR Wallet ID / DAO
sue.near / Marketing DAO -
Wallet owner’s name
Sue D’Nimm
I will send in another request for funding now.
