The first meeting of the Olympia Steem Meetup will happen today, Saturday, March 3, from 2 PM to 4 PM at the Olympia McMenamin's Spar Café. I'm a little bit nervous, and excited to get started. But so far I have one RSVP.
The one RSVP came through the Meetup page, which is cool. So I'm expecting to basically have a beer with another local Steemian, though I don't know who it is yet.
Facebook promotion has been thoroughly disappointing. So far I just have a few page likes, and no one interested in the events. That's a shame, especially because I've been paying to advertise it. On the other hand, now I can comfortably stop doing that as I move forward.
4th & Washington
Spar Cafe
I had high hopes about Facebook ads being able to find people in the local area with similar interests, but apparently not. I suppose I could try adjusting the targeting. I could narrow down the area or broaden the interests for the target market that I advertise to. Maybe I need to change the ad text. Maybe we'll never know, because I don't want to waste any more money on ads that get no results.
I think I need to focus on more real-life promotion. I ought to spend some money on nice-looking flyers to put up around town. There's a 2-week wait for radio announcements on the local college station, but that should be coming soon, too. Maybe Steem T-shirts or something.
I need to think of some more effective local event promotion routes, but they will need to be pretty cheap for my 1-dollar-an-article Steem earnings to cover it. Would a fundraiser post work? Are there whales or incubator projects that will back me? How does any of that even work?
I really think one of the best ways to promote Steem is just through some outreach to organizations, in the form of something like a "How to Use the Internet" tutorial. There are organizations around town that offer free beginner computer classes like that. Maybe "How To Steem" classes should be up there right alongside how to set up WordPress. I'm going to look into doing that. I already have a few organizations in mind.
Right now I have the Meetup scheduled for today in about an hour, and tentatively for every weekend this month. I have one yes and one maybe, so we'll see how it goes. I tried to have a Bitcoin meet up locally years ago, but I never got more than one person at a time. It can be hard to build momentum with these things sometimes.
I feel like Steem will be more interesting for a meetup. That's partly because there are more options on how to get involved, but mainly because the focus is on creativity. It's a publishing platform that's open to anyone, and the built-in rewards are just a cool bonus. Plenty of people already do creative stuff like this - blog posts, podcasts, etc. - for nothing.
The Steem blockchain is essentially a public resource that any creative person anywhere can use and build on.
Steem is a decentralized publishing platform that supports audio, video, photo, writing, and coding contributions of a wide, wide variety. Distribution of rewards for content is determined entirely by users.
These features make Steem a pretty powerful tool, completely aside from any income users might earn. I am very curious to see whether the people who do show up for these first few meetups are going to be people who already use Steem, or if they're mostly newcomers just looking to find out about it for the first time.
I'm up for it either way. I hope to see you there :-)
