Thanks for your comments.

This is a pure strategy proposal, not an execution proposal. This should be made clear.

We did try to highlight this in a few places, yes, such as:

"This initial proposal is only for research and strategy, not for implementation of any potentially more costly marketing activities, such as advertising campaigns."

Decentralized social blogging solutions are not our competitors.

I think it's fair to say that Hive fits the description of a decentralized social network, despite the ambitions to be much more. There is certainly sense to expanding the view of Hive to include it within other categories too, but in its current stage of development it is logical to see other decentralised social networks as being among its competitors.

Perhaps the community will disagree, but it seems something of a gamble to try to market Hive as, for example, a competitor to to Ethereum's EVM at this point, given that we do not have the necessary functionality in place. When/if general smart contracts do go live on Hive then the shape of Hive may change drastically and so will the approach to growth and marketing. Some of the building related features have been present all along and as a developer I will say that the lack of quality development documentation is massively limiting Hive's appeal in that arena.

The question of 'why people should come to Hive' should ideally be taking into consideration public opinion, rather than relying so much on the opinion of those already invested in Hive - including my own opinion. We might disagree on the currently best selling points of Hive, but none of that matters if no-one else agrees with either of us!
I feel it is invaluable to understand what the market itself values and wants. In any case, the idea of this project is to include all potentialities in order to get as wide an understanding as possible of the options, strengths and weaknesses that relate to Hive's growth.. So that will absolutely include assessment of the issues relating to developers and entrepreneurs.

SEO:

I am aware that SEO is a contentious subject in general and also that, as you point out, there are some projects who already receive funding in that area. I don't currently have a list of which projects that includes, but I will find out. From what I have seen, there may be some issues that are limiting the performance of Hive sites due to the overall design of Hive as a decentralised eco-system (content duplication, among others). There are also possible strategies that most sites could use, but which they probably don't as yet. There will also be more specific issues that relate to individual domains.

SEO was not intended to be a primary focus of this project, so it will probably be handled near the end. I will ideally set aside time to first identify common weaknesses and opportunities that all sites can benefit from and then dedicate whatever time is available to provide suggestions to sites that are receptive.

Some people are avidly pro SEO and some are avidly anti SEO, for their own reasons. It makes not sense to waste time trying to help a project that doesn't want the help or intend to act on it, so we won't do that. If it turns out that the general consensus is that we should skip SEO then that's totally fine as we have more than enough other goals here that we will be kept busy regardless.

I am currently gradually speaking to the various dApp operators, but it understandably takes some time.

Polling:

As mentioned in our lengthy private discussion earlier, there are a couple of main challenges with the surveys. One is that the surveys need to both be able to support anonymity, while also being tied to Hive accounts to help minimize manipulation via multiple accounts.

We are able to use survey systems that are privacy oriented and then potentially implement a simple system to confirm with the users on-chain that they did indeed complete the survey. We can then transparently publish the account names on-chain, without publicly linking the names to their actual responses. Those accounts can then be scrutinized by vested stakeholders, perhaps including reference to blacklists published on Hive, in order to try to minimize abuse by known 'problem' accounts on Hive.

There is no simple solution to all of this unfortunately, but this is also a common problem with surveys in general, so it's generally accepted that there is always a potential for some inaccuracy and misinformation among the results. The goal is, as you alluded to, to receive a high enough volume of responses that the signal outweighs the noise.

As previously mentioned privately, we will do our best to inform the community both on-chain and off-chain (in chat spaces, for example) that the census is underway and that community members have an opportunity to express their opinions and experiences in order to help improve Hive. One of the main subjects I have seen discussed here over the years is this exact one - how to improve Hive and what the problems are with it... So I don't expect there to be a shortage of respondents!

It is not out of the question to organize incentives for participation too - though that needs to be minimized in order to reduce the incentive to try to game the system, skewing the results in the process.

Listings:

Exchange relations and listings were never intended to be part of this proposal. We may ask general questions about people's views regarding crypto, which may possibly generally relate to the concept of exchanges and also to De-Fi, but are more than happy to check with you and @crimsonclad in advance to ensure that you don't think anything we do will cause you problems.