Good day to all you guys. Today I would like to share with you this relatively new marketing tool that is currently being used by a new DLT Fintech company that I am currently researching called Ferrum Network. This new marketing tool is dubbed as the Social Mining System — a new community-driven marketing tool that enables organizations to reward community members that adds value to its whole ecosystem.
To understand this fully let me give you a quick background about the Social Mining System. Social Mining (SM) was created by DAO Maker which is primarily aimed to increase token utilization, encourage community participation and good behavior as well as to incentivize all value adding participants in the community.
As a rule of thumb, the more a participant contributes and the more voting power participants have, enable them to earn more.
So what exactly are these contributions? From the name itself you can easily infer that it has something to do with social media marketing which is partially correct. Basically community members are rewarded whenever they increase awareness about the project. This is done by creating content on the different social media platforms available online such as Twitter, Reddit, Medium, Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, and many other social platforms.
Some of these social media platforms are already integrated into the social mining dashboard such as Twitter, Reddit, and Github (for more technical contributions). Other contributions can be submitted through the “Submit Activity” menu where you can categorize your activity and explain what you did to contribute. These contributions will then be posted into the Community board where everyone can see and validate.
The community can then validate the contribution of each participant. This validation process comes in the form of an upvote or downvote depending on how the community perceives the contribution. How much you can earn from validating depends on the validator’s upvoting (downvoting) power that is directly proportional to the token holdings you have in your linked ERC20 wallet.
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According to Hatu, the CMO at DAO Maker, Social Mining turns the typical community of passive investors into a decentralized engine of systematic value addition that is commanded by the community itself. This is echoed by DAO Maker’s CEO, Chris, stating that such a system will have higher level members with more knowledge, that are more loyal and will be holding a higher amount of token. This only means that higher-ranked users will earn more benefits and responsibilities and also have a higher stake. They are disincentivized to cause problems but incentivized to make use of user influence and reputation to help the project, hence growing token value.
The Social Mining System of DAO Maker was designed in such a way that other projects can easily integrate with its platform. Each of the project can then setup what social media are integrated into the social mining platform as well as what kind of token is to be rewarded to the participants. In this case, we are using Ferrum ERC20 tokens and the current social media accounts integrated in the Ferrum Social Mining System is Telegram, Twitter, Reddit and Github, as shown earlier.
Now that you have some idea about Social Mining System, let use now discuss the specific organization that will leverage Social Mining, Ferrum Network.
Ferrum Network is a relative new FinTech company that aims to build a high-speed interoperable network built for real-world financial applications. It plans to do so by building a distributed ledger network from the ground up, using superior distributed ledger technology (Directed Acyclic Graph) for a more scalable and interoperable network, and a suite of products and services that addresses the many industry pain points that have served as obstacles for mass adoption.
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The Ferrum Network mainnet will launch in 2020 but the team as early as now has been laying down the groundwork with its tireless development of suite of products, business partnerships, community building, and marketing. There are too many details to discuss these activities and thus I will discuss them in a separate blog-post as cramming it here will not do it much justice.
To realize Ferrum Network’s vision, the team came up with four distinct but interconnected crypto-centric products/services: Kudi Exchange, Unifrye Wallet, Infinity DEX and Sub-Zero Wallet. I will be discussing their different uses cases in my future blog-posts when these products are released and when I have sufficient experience using them. As it stands Kudi Exchange is the only product that has been launched and significant marketing efforts have been done to onboard users as well as to expand traction in West Africa beyond its original target market Nigeria.
The team has created a token bridge for a one-click conversion tool for users. However, it must be noted that there is a conversion fee of 50%, decreasing 1.5% per day until the fee is eliminated completely. I am not sure the reason behind the fee but I am confident that the team put up this fee for good reason. These digital assets will all be migrated into Ferrum Network’s native tokens when mainnet launches next year.
The total supply of the Ferrum Network Token is only 331,718,750 FRM. A very low supply considering that each time FRM is spent they are burnt making it inherently a deflationary token and a perfect fit for the Traction Based Reserve Model, the Fintech company’s treasury model. I will be discussing this further on another blog-post as it is one the most important aspect on how they run the company and a clear demonstration of supreme confidence in their technology, talent, and know-how.
Case in point, the Hard Cap of their token sale in which FRM was sold for $0.016 was only $1,120,000 (23% of total tokens). This was sold out in a couple of minutes. While this might be significantly less than what it can potentially make the team has learned to survive with small seed money by managing a very low monthly burn rate. If they can develop the first fiat-to-crypto exchange in Africa that is likened to Coinbase and Venmo of Africa, just imagine what it can do with much more budget.
The Ferrum Network team early on identified several problems why a lot of DLT-based projects fail, one of which is the lack of fundamentals or utility. Most projects just rely on hype, speculation, and marketing but this approach has become ineffective as investors realize that this is not sustainable. Another approach is the field of dreams approach hoping that users will come once you have built the infrastructure, but this fails as a vast majority of the time no one really comes.
To address this problem the team plans to launch with the utility on Day 1 of Mainnet with existing products and users. The approach of Ferrum Network is to build products that solve real-world problems then acquire users for those products then migrate into the mainnet. Viola! Immediate utility on day 1 of mainnet launch. Building these products is already underway as well as onboarding users through partnerships, marketing, and community building.
I will be discussing the different partnerships and marketing activities of Ferrum some other time as the main focus for today is how Ferrum network is trying to build a community are not only passive investors and stakeholders but an autonomous decentralized engine of systematic value creation by leveraging The Social Mining System.
The first thing you need to do is to join the Ferrum Social Mining website here. Once you are done registering. Then set up your profile on the platform. KYC is not required but it better to share some basic information about yourself so that the community can get to know you better. When done, You might want to link your social accounts such as Telegram, Reddit, Twitter, and Github. More importantly, you have to set up your ERC-20 wallet where you want to receive your FRM rewards and the required minimum 5,000 FRM holdings that you should have to be able to participate in Social Mining activities.
Once done all you have to do is to contribute your contents, validate and comment on the contributions of others, ensuring that those rewarded are participants that add value to Ferrum Network’s ecosystem. Some of you might be wondering what you can contribute to add value to the ecosystem. If you are in doubt you can always try to interact first with the contents posted by the official account and community members so that you will have an idea of what you can also contribute. At the same time, you can also help validate others’ contributions and be rewarded doing that.
When I started doing Social Mining the first thing I did was to interact with the different Reddit and Twitter posts of the official account as well as other community members. Then I claim my social mining activities rewards in each of the platforms. I also ask some of my online friends who are doing crypto to do the same referring them into Ferrum Social Mining.
Remember there is a lot of freedom to what content you can contribute. If you know a second language you can translate the contents of official lists. If you are in a social or business network and hold a significant enough influence on that network you can try to invite people to join the different product offering Ferrum has to offer. You might want to introduce them to the concept of social mining, like what I am doing right now, and encourage them to do the same. Try to focus on your strengths, some of the participants make awesome and great contributions by sharing memes and gifs.
That is it for now. I hope you were able to understand what social mining is and what Ferrum Network and what it set out to do. If you have questions about this article please do not hesitate to post your questions below. If you found errors in my content please let me know so that I can fix the issue or problem just call my attention in the comments section.
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