This is a repost from: https://medium.com/@cibusworld
Social media marketing has been there with us for the past few years now and is ripe for disruptions through blockchain technology. In a blockchain world, everything that can be “tokenized will be tokenized and everything that can be decentralized will be decentralized”. So is Social Media Marketing; enter CIBUS Social for Food and Dietary Products.
The central theme that will drive social media marketing going forward is Rewards. Rewards-based, or tokenised-based marketing, particularly on platforms that provide decentralised way of reviewing products, is such a great tactic to engage the everyday consumer and incentivizes them to share your brand message. This is taking social media marketing and embedding it on Blockchain Technology.
Studies have shown that millennial consumers trust recommendations on social media when making decisions to purchase, hence Social Media has become a preferred medium of Marketing.
Sponsorships of various brands have been dominated by celebrity endorsements, then the growth of online influencers through their own channels or pages or blogs where they are paid to promote and recommend certain products. However, the last two years, consumers at the end of the spectrum are beginning to take matters into their own hands by promoting their favourite products on Social Media, and marketers who are hawk-eyed have established this as a key to closing sales.
The reason for this shift, goes back to basics of human behaviour and interactions. Human beings would rather trust their friend/cousin/sibling more when deciding to buy a new gadget, beauty product or book, than a celebrity whom behind the back of the minds are being paid to promote the said products. In other words, therefore, many everyday consumers are willing to tweet, pin a brand item or share a Facebook post to their followers, friends or relatives if given some form of incentives. For them the value of sharing a new product with their audiences far exceeds the cost of the incentive.
Providing Value with incentives in Traditional Social Media Marketing
Incentives are an easy and often cost-effective way to gain social media shares that help to get your message or product out there. Getting a new product or service to go viral is what every marketer wants and dreams for. But in order to build a healthy buzz around a product, in the now traditional Social media Marketing, one needs to have people talking about it. To do this, there is need for you to use rewards and incentives.
In many instances with social media marketing, brands, products, services focus on the top few social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. While it’s important to boost traffic and get consumers to share information for rewards on these high visibility sites, there are social networks out there that brands can leverage to further spread the word.
Rewards-based marketing allows you to expand your reach to potential consumers by tapping into audiences across multiple platforms.
Taking an example like influencers, or ads, they cost a certain amount of budget to be published across a few platforms, however, brands can still add multiple goodies to their reward lockers for consumers who choose to share across a wider scope of their networks. This helps boost visibility not only on the main websites, where content is often pushed down by paid advertisements, but also within other more niche networks, allowing brands to reach a wider network of people. This will provide a great potential for widespread exposure through rewards-based marketing.
What’s next for Rewards-Based Marketing?- From Social Media to Decentralised Product Review, a case of CIBUS Social
With the rise of cryptocurrency and the underlying blockchain technology that fuels decentralisation, several industries have been quick to look at how the technology can benefit their sector, and in this case CIBUS Social looks at how marketing of Food and Dietary Products can be decentralised. The objectives of CIBUS Social are:
• Making Food Supply Chain more transparent
Making this Social Integration profitable for all users in terms of earning incentives.
In their white paper, they describe CIBUS social thus : “an interactive social platform connecting with Food sellers, other users, will allow multi-media uploads, and will soon become a global forum for people with special dietary requirements, user reviews, recipe sharing, user reviews etc.
It is a food focused community which will be incentivized (with CIBUS tokens) to create a PULL MODEL to encourage Food producers or sellers to share all its product traceability related information on blockchain. It will be mutually beneficial for both the ends — consumers will get to know more about their food products and food businesses owners will get the consumer’s feedback directly. Visualize a Facebook for food.”
Rewards-based marketing is still an emerging tactic for many brands, but its advancements are constantly evolving to cater to new demands for measurement, immediate rewards and new or emerging platform measurement. CIBUS blockchain is the latest kind of Blockchain that is advancing rewards-based marketing in a new way through its Cibus Tokens (CBT). This will be achieved through the following CIBUS categories:
• A Cibus Blogger- writers of articles or posts about CIBUS ecosystem
• A Cibus popular post owner
• A Cibus Reviewer- Consumers reviewing Food and Dietary Products.
An active user of Cibus World
Note: The above categories will be tokenised and users can start earning CBT tokens which can then be withdrawn to their own wallets in whichever form of Cryptocurrency, but leading the pack will be BTC, Ether, Dash and Litecoin. If you are willing to jump in and try it out, click here.
Benefits of CIBUS Social Interaction:
• To the Seller of Food and Dietary Products, Customer reviews will be helpful towards future enhancements and improvements of a product.
• To the Customer, independence towards expressing authentic feedback.
• To the Seller, Easy to advertise and attract potential customer in minimal cost.
• To both Sellers and Buyers, the ease to get collaborative information from users.
• To the Seller, Getting meaningful insight to improve business policies and help to enhance better customer retention programs.
To both Sellers and Buyers, Inbuilt Social Platform to post and review.
Benefits of social incentive:
● Humans are inherently social beings, and like to be recognized for their expertise and achievements. Recognition via CIBUS Token can be a powerful motivator for social activity.
● Giving people something unique or exclusive in return for sharing can be a powerful motivator — we all want to feel privy to something special by acquiring different badges like CIBUS Blogger etc. As mentioned in 3rd point of above section.
● High quality honest reviews at CIBUS Social platform increases trust with our Decentralized Review System. Authorized Users can review the post and can determine the authenticity via our Distributed Smart Contracts leveraging Blockchain.
● Reviews Given in other linked Social media platforms for the relevant products will also be incentivized if the customer has a CIBUS account.
CIBUS voting system leverage the capability of weighted voting ecosystem:
Vote from different users will be calculated based on the following factors as described by CIBUS in the white paper:
• Each user will be awarded to different CIBUS points depending on their activity on the platform.
• A good honest review or an excellent informative blog regarding products or regular active user will be awarded with some CIBUS points. When these users will vote or review a particular artefact that will carry more relevance and importance regarding incentive calculation.
• For an example a certified CIBUS Blogger will have more CIBUS points rather than a new user, so the vote from a certified CIBUS Blogger will have more priority.
• Another interesting part of CIBUS voting system is stake based voting power. If a user carries more CIBUS Tokens then their vote will have more weightage than lower stakeholders
For more information on how this works, visit CIBUS website
Influence 3.0: The future of Tokenised Marketing
The leading brands and its relationships with consumers are now reaching crossroads, but we are now past influencer marketing and entering into the next realm i call Influencer 3.0- The tokenised Marketing. Blockchain technology is fully re-imagining how brands going forward need to have deeper and meaningful experiences for consumers. CIBUS Social is leading the pack on this front. Marketers of Food and Dietary Products therefore need to be ready to swim with the currents and soar for the this shift to Tokenised marketing of brands is already here with us.
Influencers in the new tokenised Marketing as distributors of content
Going to the future, the new kind of influencers residing on the blockchain and are decentralized, these influencers will shift and are going to be seen for what they truly should be: Distribution channels in a decentralised environment. Food and Dietary Brands will have a standardised metric to measure influencer marketing which isn’t variably linked to the perceived relationship that an influencer has built with their fans, but through the voting system of CIBUS as described above.
Then, how will CIBUS Social achieve this?
CIBUS Social intends to create an ecosystem of social application around food and Dietary Products, a kind of a messaging and calling app that allows you to easily connect with Brands, Sellers, Buyers, Advertisers, family & friends across countries to discuss, sell, buy on the CIBUS Trade platform. It’ will be an all-in-one communications app for text (SMS/MMS), voice and video calls, and files.: MULTIMEDIA MESSAGING: Send video, image, text, and file messages. GROUP & CALLS around the Food and Dietary Ecosystem.
It will provide another specific way to communicate with your friends and loved ones. CIBUS Social will let you keep in touch with anyone who uses the CIBUS application, independent of the operating system that person uses, be it Android or iOS. You can send text messages to individuals and groups, pictures, videos, etc around brands on the platform. In this manner, a new and a more specialised Social Media will be born and Marketers will have a new haven to interact with its potential and current customers. A new revolutionary way to look at Marketing.
As we enter the era of Blockchain Technology and IoT, 2018 might just be the year of what I call the Tokenisation of influencers, first through CIBUS Social. With this, far deeper levels of transparency are going to exist in the influencer world, rather than merely top line metrics such as impressions and clicks. As Timothy Armoo puts it in his blog “We’re going to be seeing metrics that offer more granularity; you will be able to track things like consumer sentiment and audience psychographics, making sure marketers can use influencers that reflect the brand requirements in a much more specific, emotional way. It’s my belief that whoever can bring this granularity at scale to the influencer world wins.” This is true with CIBUS Social, Product reviews will be much better and Brands that will take this route will reap more.
In conclusion, I summarise the future of marketing by this quote by unknown “What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.” CIBUS Platform will allow Brands and Consumers to relate at another level especially around Food and Dietary Products. The decentralised platform will have decentralised and verified Sellers and Buyers that will connect at a more emotional level because of what the platform will provide in terms of ensuring the Food or Dietary products being sold are meeting all the standards and no middlemen involved whose main aim is quick profits at the expense of quality products.
Misoi Jonathan
Chief Officer
ICT & e-Government
Nandi County and Author of the ‘ICT Cake’.
LinkIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/misoijnr/
To know more about CIBUS world or if you have any questions, look them up in our website: www.cibus.world or FAQ or send a support ticket or feel free to email us at: [email protected]