How Steemit Smart Media Tokens can empower current influencers to become brands in their own right.

think of it as steemit powered micro transactions everywhere. that’s kind of a big deal especially when a lot of ICO’s and other blockchains don’t even have a product yet whereas steem has been running for 20 months already

special move, power move, first mover advantage, whatever you want to call it, today @ned dropped the mic on the steemit community by presenting the recent works from the team and boy, have they brought something that can totally propel steemit to the next level.

even thou it was already next level than before, being able to create your own token on top of the steemit blockchain adds an order of magnitude to the steemit ecosystem — talk about aggressively pursuing things to the next level. this could, if it works mean that you could potentially start to see steemit in a lot more places similar to the way we had websites offering facebook connect. with steem connect v2 in progress this could happen very quickly with the right level of adoption.

firstly before i get into this i just want to say i was really inspired by the piece that @donkeypong did about his story of how a media token could potentially have saved a family newspaper business, tongue in cheek, but still, fantastically written and he’s bang on the money with his blog post, i loved the monthly breakdown he put together and with a bit of tweaking could totally be a strategy put in place for businesses moving forward, i loved that about the piece.

https://steemit.com/smt/@donkeypong/the-day-the-paywalls-died-how-steem-s-smart-media-token-saved-my-family-s-newspaper — i esteemed it as well, i suggest you read that before coming back to this one.

i’ve not read the white paper yet, in fact most of the technical stuff will be totally and utterly over my head so there is zero point in me reading it, just know this, when this news of this launched it seemed someone bought a bunch of steem and the price went up for a short while, i personally think steem will have really jumped by year end as people start to deploy these tokens when we have access to creation, i’m not sure if we are there yet or not but i’m certainly interested in using tokens for those three applications i mentioned, more so than ever i really need to get myself a copy of https://www.sketchapp.com and set about doing the mockups.

if i can get the mockups done before steemfest 2 all the better, i’ll be looking around to find a developer that i can gel with OR i have to get stuck in myself and learn javascript and code that bad boy myself to make an MVP version before finding a team to make it more robust and solid, either way, i was concerned how we would make it work on the steemit blockchain, the tokens are perfect timing. perfect, built on top of what we know of the solid platform of steemit. not only that steemd is being worked on so that’s going to be multithreaded too as well speeding everything up all across the board.

so let’s talk about brand advocates, growth hackers and influencers for a moment because let’s be honest. it’s an absolute shit show. when i first worked through an digital agency who were getting asked more and more ‘who’ their clientele were they soon realised that they needed to develop their blogger outreach. and quickly. i was lucky to have been part of those projects earlier on for nokia phones, this was pre iPhone which came along and destroyed any of the so called ‘smart’ nokia phones of the time.

early influencer marketing involved a budget that was handled normally by the digital agency, they would have 100 well known bloggers and vloggers globally and they would be part of the network who would get devices first so they could feedback on the quality, software, hardware and issues in the devices.

that way information could be relayed back before the final gold master product was in the hands of the consumer. we were very much the early adopter guinea pigs. pushing it to do things it was not used to doing, like live streaming early on with terribly shearing cmos sensor cameras. trust me, it was terrible. we went through some serious pain in the early days of brand advocacy with brands.

also check out - https://steemit.com/smt/@firepower/steemit-s-smart-media-tokens-will-be-the-real-game-changer - an excellent post from @firepower about SMT tokens touching on a few areas in this post.

now we are in a kind of pretty limbo with influencer marketing. we have fashionista approaches to it via instagram, what’s pretty, what’s curated and crafted, building a next level pr hype train to drive awareness to what often turns into a vacuous open ended experience where the product is actually pretty weak and all the budget has been eaten up on the promotion. i personally can’t stand the current model of growth hacking and engagement, it’s all push with pseudo faux engagement.

loyalty + audience + engagement

people are loyal to a content creator for a lot of reasons, probably too many to mention but i could probably rattle off a few.. .

• people like the content they make because of the quality of production
• the people are friendly and easy to relate too
• professional approach to content creation understanding an audience
• regularly scheduled content, people are used to regular output
• you go places that other reviews won’t

imagine if we just tapped into the current no 1 content management system in the world wordpress and offered SMT as a plugin for the existing blogs out there, in fact, why don’t we contact all the popular addons for wordpress plugin chats and get them to integrate SMT into their offering, i’m sure the awareness to the existing audiences of these bloggers will bring audience to the steemit platform, for them it’s huge, especially ones where the content is good but engagement is low.. . as soon as you have that financial incentive maybe we will see more engagement.

no more lonely comment boxes on posts, can you imagine actually having a website where the community WILL get involved because they have the potential to maybe earn for not only doing a review (and a good one) but also for commenting about how something could be done better, maybe even finding a new worker for the business in the process — truth is once we start adding incentives to the mix people take notice. they take notice because everyone on planet earth can identify the cost of time and everyone has their own marker for what that is.

bringing your own ethics to the mix

look anywhere across youtube or instagram and you can see people that are just influencers purely to get free stuff, just to push product. stack it high and sell it cheap has made it in the web from this kind of video marketing because it’s easy to do. think of it seo, video seo for your product, it’s not always good. we have a stack of poorly designed, cheap imitation goods that are frankly not worth the plastic and silicon that’s involved in them.

be it lack of standards or just lack of testing their is so much garbage out there in technology land with a lot of people buying the cheapest and often worst pieces of kit that can not only do the person harm but now with insecure devices and poor security a lot of these things can damage us via ddos attacks and poor developed software on the hardware. the cost and damage is not always obvious.

if you have your own steemit media token then you can start to take control of you as the brand itself. maybe you have your own process of reviewing, only want to work with ethical, sustainable, democratic, philanthropic companies because that’s in your DNA then with your own token you can.

in fact, i think it’s going to be the difference maker between one brand advocate over another because when everything is connected, everything can come back to you on the web, nothing every vanishes and everything can be remixed. if you have an existing audience of followers you can take that audience and expose them to the token idea and gradually onboard them away from the middleman, be it youtube or whoever.

once you have your own media token and your followers/community have bought in to it then the model that you were used to changes, the content will probably change too, gone will be the conforming to the platforms requirements (take youtube for instance) and you can start to use the decentralised web (ipfs) to store your content on around the web. only a few weeks back did i see that EOS was building out an IPFS storage offering solution, this stuff is gonna happen really fast.

imagine being an advocate that can work with the brands you want too, not tied in a prescribed narrative from the brand or agency of what they expect you to say about their product, what if you could say anything, review it or test it in anyway you please and know your are financially not tied to the brand, agency or host of your video to influence the review — in effect your review is decentralised.

token enabled audience development

think museums, think tourism, think stage and screen, think anything that has any kind of community attached to it. you can earn tokens from being part of that community, giving back to that community gives you a better reputation, you are know, world of mouth enabled by the incentivisation of the persons time, effort and content. instead of social media teams cranking out instagram banners, newsletter updates, all kinds of different media that’s often not tracked anyway.

imagine how much of a better connection and experience both the user and the owner could have if the content and output you made was relevant, was required, was voted on by your community as valuable to them and you could finally have a conversation around that content and be paid to engage with it. it’s a motivator for people outside of the internet that only currently use facebook (thinking that’s the internet itself) to do more than post funny videos and be a repeater station. i’m wondering if one day we will wake up and find that facebook has developed it’s own token or coin.

instead of plastic cards at the super markets and petrol stations for buying gift cards for online services imagine if you could engage with the brands directly from the back of the packages, forums and feedback using that nasty qr code system (please something new is needed!) jumping straight into a platform that collects this feedback for the brands and builds a community around it. the possibilities are kinda endless with creating tokens. i know for my own project it’s gonna be like next level trackable charity in helping those worse of in society. it’s gonna be an enabler.

data driven investments from brands in influencers

imagine that instead of just the random smattering of global influencers that we have now it's more like like a stock market. what if, we had a world 500 of the best influencers, what if they all had their own token on top of the steemit blockchain and what if brands could tap into or INVEST into those tokens of those influencers so they have a share in that persons audience, empowering that influencer with hardware, products, upvoting, general support because their audience love what they deliver, the end product, be it a written post, audio podcast or video review. data driven. brands and even agencies could purchase and empower those advocates just by purchasing some of their token.

i could go on and on. . maybe steemfest 2 talk?

i’d love to do one but it appears @roelandp is super busy and currently at a wedding, i’d certainly love to use my current mockup examples of the three apps that i want to build out that i think steemit would give coverage to not only the platform but SMT as well. man, i’m looking forward to steemfest2

SMT’s are gonna be exciting. can’t wait to make one.

have a great day!
teamhumble x