Marketing Update: Week of Feb 12, The Foundation From Moving From Sandbox To The Real-World

Is there something specific you would like to see? (Besides price going up which isn’t something the marketing team or NEAR Collective controls.) Can you give me more context on what it means to “do more” for the token economy?

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@Tinsman such as this proposal below:

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Hey Jack,
We have growth campaigns in motion and also have been working with strategic partners behind the scenes (including Blockfolio, onboarding a new PR agency, running ads on Twitter and Brave.) April is when you’ll see a wider push across advertising campaigns as this aligns with the brand refresh and new website. We’ve had to do a lot of work to try and optimize our sites, improve messaging, integrate SEO, and improve funnels.

There’s also a guild for tokenholders and this might be a better conversation to have with them. With regards to marketing, we had been testing out driving folks from our website to Telegram but made the strategic decision the past few months to switch to Discord instead.

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In fact, although Discord has many advantages, it cannot replace the telegram. Many people are used to using telegram. The Telegram channel has too few members and has not grown for six months. It has a negative impact on NEAR’s image, and I also suggest creating a NEAR Chinese telegram channel.

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I also think that there are few exchanges that list NEAR, and it is better to let more exchanges list NEAR! For example, the exchanges in Japan and South Korea, coinbase, kraken, bitfinex…
I want to ask by the way, is there any progress on coinbaser asset custody?

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Hey Victor,
Marketing doesn’t lead exchange outreach. That’s another team. I agree that we all want to see more exchanges supporting NEAR and I believe it’s super helpful for everyone in our community and collective to be vocal and share that we would like NEAR supported. I hear you and would also like to see this too. I will tell you Asia and America is a focus for regional growth for NEAR.

I do agree there’s activity on Telegram (especially around token speculation) and from what I can tell, our community leads and community have been managing this pretty well and are actively engaging with folks there. Growing our Telegram base is more of a community team led effort than a marketing priority for Q1. Telegram needs 24/7 management strategy in order to be successful, so we’d only want to start a new channel if there was support for it.

I will say that the Marketing Team is currently hiring for a Sr. Social Media Manager and we are working on a decentralized social media marketing plan with outreach in places like Reddit/Subreddits, BitCoinTalk forum, Telegram, and Discord. If you have more ideas on this, we’d love to hear them.

We’re also looking at forums such as ForumEtereum, Cryptocurrencytalk, and ChainCodeDevs to see if there’s more engagement opportunities there. In April, we will also begin rolling out some A/B test campaigns across social (that coordinate with the launch of EVM+Bridge, bounties, and our new brand/website refresh.)

As for any custody programs - until we are told otherwise - the Marketing Team sticks to our NDAs and chat about programs when our partners give us the greenlight.

Hope that helps.

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Good one, very well designed concept, thanks!

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Yes please move away from current branding :pray:. It was certainly an initial turn off for me. The suggested branded suggestion is fantastic. I hadn’t actually thought about branding as an archetype, so its neat to see. I would argue that for the front have branding inline with explorers but for those that are willing to participate, certainly the creator.

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Hey Joshua - Thanks for jumping into the discussion. It’s helpful to hear the current branding was an initial turn off. We’ll be sharing more shortly on the evolution of the explorer archetype so I hope you keep giving us your perspective on it.

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The idea of constructing the brand identity through archetype is brilliant. And I am in strong favor of running brand iterations through the test groups, e.g. using https://surveymonkey.com/ .

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100%. We are working with the agency now on getting a shareable drive for conversations, assets, iterations, etc. It’s important that our partners, community, investors, internal teams and wider ecosystem have transparency, understanding, a way to share feedback/contributions, and a guide through the brand refresh. I love the idea of Survey Monkey. Consider it done. Thanks, Max!

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Let me tell you the truth, the telegram management is terrible! Not only is the number of people small, but the atmosphere is also very poor.

I hear you @victor - thanks for the feedback. My perspective is that @nima and the community team are a small and mighty team doing an amazing job trying to be everywhere at once. Same with marketing team. (Both our teams are actively hiring as we scale!) Telegram hasn’t been as much of a focus compared to other areas and it’s worth the NF marketing team and community team having a chat about how to improve this experience. Sounds like this is a place you find value in and we’re underdelivering there. Is there a specific Telegram community you like a lot and think is well run? That will give us some more context and perspective. It’s a bit crazy trying to navigate Discord, Slack, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Forums, etc but I think feedback like this helps let us know where folks prefer to roam.

Thanks,elrond cardano solana zil…

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You should raise this question to NF. This is a marketing strategy and NF’s understanding of the crypto market. Tinsman and the team has done a very good job.

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Yeah, a few of these for sure have developed active communities over the years in TG. I get where you are coming from on this. Our team is chatting about this so thanks.

This is simply outstanding, I found a reference to the strategy I’m following, Thanks :grinning:

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Awesome! @jiten123321 If you have feedback and/or ideas – shoot me a DM or put it in the forums here. I’d love to hear more from you on it.

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As a user & hodler & dev in training, I just want to comment a few observations and thoughts after reading through the thread:

  1. I really like the current brand of Near, the rainbow, nearkat, the logo, the color schemes etc. It’s refreshing and awesome. But I don’t think I will be alienated by a different brand, what’s most important to me is the technology and the team’s track records. I am happy to see that there will be efforts for social media, PR, marketing etc, I think near is really great and just not enough people know about it.

  2. I want to caution this point: in the slides the brands listed are mostly non-crypto brands (except for Ethereum). But I think there is a fundamental difference in how crypto world operates compared to, well the default world where Target, Nike and Apple live. The explorer archetype is an great summary of crypto & defi crowd, but the vibe I get from the general community though, is that no one wants to be put in a box. This is the ultimate wild west, everything is dynamic and changing, one week in crypto equals one year on earth. No one really knows what is what and what’s going to happen next. Crazy stuff happens every day and everyone is just winging it. Because of that, putting near in one box or a few boxes might not be very effective or a good investment of time or money.

  3. Due to the nature of the uncertainty and warping-speed change happening in crypto, it’s very disorienting and hard to stay on top of things. That’s why the Near attributes of dev friendliness and openness are distinct and awesome features that make near stands out. I just want to emphasize how much I like that as someone new-ish to crypto.

  4. This is just to repeat point 2. The key feature of crypto right now is dramatic rapid change, a desire and vision for change and sorely lack of infrastructure builders to meet the demand for change. Whereas in traditional world, a brand needs to appeal to the users, in crypto at this point in time, the brand needs to mostly appeal to builders and devs. If there are good projects and ecosystem, the users and liquidity will come, everyone is dying to fill their next bag… Yet devs tend to be smart and weird people lol, their taste could be significantly different from average target or apple users.

Just wanting to put my two cents out there.

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I read this on my phone a few days ago and realized I never responded back to you. This is great feedback. Thanks for taking the time to write it up. We hear you and we think you’ll appreciate the next few updates from the brand working group.

Thank you. Keep the feedback coming.

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