Henlo hogs and happy harvest season! Swine Guild decided to mix it up this month and continue to make memes. We are ecstatic about the growth of our guild and the efforts we are making to reach new audiences with our content.
This month, we went multi-lingual, expanding our meme operation to two more languages, while Swine Guild Russia hosted the meme contest. We had more meme requests from projects in the Ecosystem this month than we have ever had before! As we progress, we will continue on our journey to make NEAR a meme empire and elevate the internet presence of NEAR itself. For a quick overview of Swine Guild history, check out our informational video.
Our September KPIs:
- Make more memes than we did last month. Last month we shared 70 original memes, this month we shared 80. @tratt @Gepe @Raul0287
- Get more visibility to the Swine Guild RU folks. In order to do this, we had them host the meme contest this month.
- Host or facilitate another activity relating to NEAR or a NEAR project. We did an NFT meme blitz.
- Bring on meme translators. We have 3 meme translators now, 2 Spanish speakers, and 1 Nigerian pidgin English speaker.
- Scale-up for this month included reaching out to projects to provide meme services to. We got meme requests from 9 different projects. (This is in addition to marketing for guilds and aligning with the Official NEAR Marketing efforts.
Events
- Swine Guild Russia contest - This month, to boost the visibility and engagement with the Russian sector of our guild, they hosted the meme contest. The theme was “NEAR Memes and Schemes” and it was required that all submissions must be in Russian. They had 35 submissions and gained a good chunk of followers from this! We hope to continue this growth in the coming months.
- NFT meme blitz (Sept 29th) - memes can be quickly viewed and scrolled past due to the nature of a Twitter feed and how immediately they often communicate their message. We invented what we call a “meme blitz” where we post memes about the same topic from morning til evening. In the past we have done an Aurora meme blitz, a Meta Pool meme blitz, and our third was a blitz about NFTs on NEAR. This helps our audience to create a more well rounded understanding of what we believe is an important topic within the NEAR Ecosystem.
A few memes from the blitz:
Analytics for Swine Guild Twitter:
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Our Tweets earned 61.9K impressions over this 30 day period
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On average, our account earned 41 likes per day
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We got 294 total Retweets, which averages to 11 per day
Overall account analytics:
Analytics of our [top tweet:] (meme by @Gepe) (https://twitter.com/SwineGuild/status/1435056723560177666?s=20)
What’s New at the Meme Farm?
- We guest-judged the meme contest for Near Meme Daily and the Open Web Sandbox. This contest was centered on the theme of the MetaBUIDL hackathon. We sifted through the submissions and selected our favorites, and with the other two parties, put them through a voting process.
- One order, for NEAR NFT Club, was completed in multiple languages.
- We ventured into new mediums, completing two Tik Tok orders for Debio and ITSMYNE NFT platform.
- We made progress on our searchable meme library! All of our memes have been collected and organized, and with the help of @andrewmamus, they will be posted on their own site by the end of October.
- Swine Guild Russia upped their meme game with the aforementioned meme contest. They continue to create and post 10 memes a week on their Twitter account. @Ralfusha @haenko @YoNota
- The meme translation operation is up and running. Swine Guild has employed two Spanish translators and one Nigerian Pidgin English translator, who run the NEAR Dominicana and NEAR Nigeria pages. @Portes @aklassen @andrewmamus
NEAR Nigeria account analytics:
NEAR Dominicana analytics:
Swine Guild Russia analytics: 
To Infinity and Beyond:
We have a lot of plans, some of which are ongoing and process oriented. Two of the activities we had planned to complete this month had to be postponed because we needed to be able to offload some of our daily tasks to new guild members and allow time for a transition period before @JosePerez and I could move forward. Now that we have a working system, we are more free to take on more administrative and creative tasks that will expand our services as a guild. These are tasks we are looking forward to in October:
- Monthly Meme Contest - Each month we host a meme contest. This month will be no different next month.
- Meme Library - UPDATE: We found out that Andrew Mamus, who translates memes for us, is also a web developer. This coming month we will be working with him to create the Meme Library, a search engine for NEAR memes that the community can access at any time!
“The NEAR library will be a very straightforward affair at first: we will simply scour the web for any and all NEAR memes, and place them in accessible folders corresponding to format or theme. Over time, we hope to provide search-ability features to ensure that the perfect meme is never more than a quick keyword search away. We aren’t promising the Dewey Decimal System right out of the gates, but it’s not out of the question.”
- Meme AMA - Since our original plan to do an AMA this month ran into scheduling complications, we will be hosting our very own AMA on our Twitter. Swine Guild will be responding to each AMA question in meme format. It might be funny.
- One of our current members will be posting regularly on the new Swine Guild Facebook page to reach the audience there and get more people involved in making NEAR memes.
Funding
As you all know, the NEAR Team made a post asking everyone to make their funding proposals in USD in early September. We kind of scrambled for a way to make sure that any extra funding we asked for seemed justified. At that time, we came up with an hourly wage plan/salary for the newest members of the guild we were adding in, but as we tried to implement this, we found that it didn’t make much sense. Since the time I posted that additional funding post for translators in the forum, the roles of those individuals grew as they began seeking more involvement with our guild, going from just translation at first, to posting and creating memes as well. Being in the final payout scale up for Warp Speed guilds, we arranged the budget and realized it was not necessary to ask for the additional funding for the meme translators. We will have sufficient funding to pay all current members according to their current roles this month using the 4th threshold of the Warp Speed Guild NEAR payout.
As we stated in this interview with 4NTS, our guild is production-based and we write our end of the month posts to show what we have produced and how it benefited/reached the community. We work in a more fluid state- that is taking last minute requests from community members, making memes when ideas come to us, and making edits and revisions as we go. We have various moving parts that run independently with only a small amount of oversight from myself, and some members of the guild have different job descriptions or have volunteered to take on new frontiers such as posting on Facebook, getting our contests listed on other sites, and posting content on other accounts. The worth of their roles is found in the expected amount of content produced and consistency in creating good quality work. We are ebbing and flowing with the needs of the ecosystem just like every other part of this community, and we have been consistent, grown beyond our road map plans, and become a well-established and hard working part of this community.
Thank you all for your continued support and engagement! We love each and every of our NEAR pigs and hogs! Stay BOARish 
people. Please remove it. 
