They say, "good things come in small packages".
This is what I tell my wife at least.
However, last night I was out at a work dinner with some of the sales organization and sales support leads, talking about social media activities and the like. Unsurprisingly for many here, I am not a big fan of centralized social media, but a lot of people are conditioned to believe that it has value. Which it does, but not in the way that they might think.
For example, sales requires building pipeline, which is simply the potential customers that could be converted into actual customers. Generally, not all convert, which means that the pipeline value is greater than the actual value. However, does it mean,
bigger the better?
In my opinion no.
Quality of lead matters, meaning that a pipeline filled with quality leads will convert at a higher rate than a pipeline filled with shite. Having a healthy pipeline shouldn't be evaluated on the potential value, but the potential for conversion, but that is harder to estimate, because it is more difficult to enumerate the quality of the lead, as there are people involved too, not just numbers.
What has this got to do with social media??
We are conditioned to believe that likes matter, that the number of followers matter, and they do - for the platform - as it is these that are converted into the data that feed their ad revenue model. So, they have convinced us that it matters to us too, by incentivizing us through monetization based on their rules. What this means is that they can generate a massive amount of transactions, that generate an enormous amount of data that they can sell on, to target those same accounts.
Because they have convinced us that volume matters, the metrics that drive user behavior are the numbers of likes, stars and impressions. This is like the pipeline, but it is not a very good metric, because it doesn't speak of the quality of the pipeline. What it does is makes an assumption that out of all of those transactions, some amount of them will be converted. However, this is not actually the case, because all of them are converted by the platform - not just some. The platform leverages the entire pipeline regardless of the quality, but the creator doesn't get this benefit.
This is only possible when the monetary incentive is centralized, but when it is coming from a the audience itself, quality matters. For instance, in sales, generating pipeline is called "prospecting", which is essentially searching for resources. In the terms of sales it is for potential customers. But it is the term when searching for gold or precious minerals too. However, if searching for gold, where do you look? Does every location carry the same likelihood? Are you flying through the clouds with a pan, searching for gold flakes?
Usual suspects.
What prospectors do is look for likely candidates for their product, so they can use their resources more effectively by targeting on what is likely to be interested and has the potential to buy. They don't want to spend or waste their time chasing rubbish leads. However, the fact is that on social media, the vast majority of the likes are rubbish likes, in terms of value. This is the same on the centralized sites too, because take away the centralized distribution, and it is likely that only a small fraction of those likes would actually pay the creator anything at all. There is a massive difference between tapping a screen for money and transferring money.
What this means from a prospecting perspective, is that a content creator wouldn't be incentivized to chase likes, because that doesn't monetize them. Instead, they would act more like sales people building pipeline, where they are chasing quality leads - with "quality" in this case being those with the means and willingness to pay for the content.
As Hive has decentralized distribution through stake and a very direct relationship between creator and curator, the numbers of followers and likes don't actually matter for the monetary value of the post. In general, the consistently well paid authors are getting their income from either a wide range of accounts, or a couple very large accounts.
For example, while I have a few larger accounts that follow and vote occasionally, looking at the majority of my posts, the top 75 accounts add at least 10 cents. At the current price, that means that those accounts are at least dolphin size and have more than 5000 HP. This makes them pretty influential. This is like pipeline in terms of sales, because those accounts might not bite every time, but I am on their radar for one reason or another and their is potential. This potential in the follower list is where the value is, not in the numbers list.
Numbers of followers (or users for that matter) doesn't make an impact unless those users have the "means and willingness" to buy. Playing the numbers game based on volume is not going to work unless those numbers are backed by stake. Otherwise, it is like having a high-end jewelry store in an overpopulated ghetto - there is a massive market there, but they don't have the potential to buy. This doesn't mean that they are better or worse people, but there isn't market alignment - it is the wrong product. No matter how much is put into marketing, no matter how much foot traffic comes through the door, it is unlikely anything is going to sell.
This is something that I have been trying to get people to understand in regards to Hive, where so many think that in order to create a lot of value here, it has to have hundreds of millions of users. That is not the case and in some ways, I believe that will actually be more of a detriment to Hive. What it needs is enough users with the means and willingness to invest themselves into it, not only with time and effort, but also with money. This can be directly themselves or through the building of environments that attract people willing to spend.
It is not a numbers game.
We are conditioned to believe it is, but it really isn't. I don't think the goal should be to make a massive ghetto with not enough resources to build a vibrant community, but rather, to grow sustainably so that there are enough contributors to support growth and help others build. No community is sustainable on handouts, so there has to be the incentive to be a value-adding participant. And yes, while there are many ways to add value, there has to be more value growing on Hive, than being extracted from Hive. And, to make it a robust community, there has to be a wide distribution of value-adding participants that are helping ensure growth of the community, not retraction.
Onboarding activities shouldn't focus on number of accounts, it should focus on quality of account relevant to their user group activities. For example, in terms of content creation, application development, or curator investment. Where the numbers do matter however, is in the consumer audience, but that is driven be the content and potential, not the number of users. What I mean is, onboarding a million accounts hoping to earn from content creation is useless, if they are producing stuff that people are not willing to consume or pay for. On a centralized platform, these users are fine, because they can still be monetized through data tracing and product targeting, but on Hive, that isn't relevant - at least for now.
This isn't about exclusion either, because no one can be excluded from Hive as long as they have an account and a little RC to transact with, but that doesn't automatically make them valuable to the blockchain. What people on Hive should consider, is how they want to bring value to the blockchain and what effects they have in the community. To they want to be a positive force that grows and strengthens the community, or a negative one that lessens and weakens it?
No matter what stake a person has, they should reflect on the quality and type of the pipeline they generate and what their actions convert into for Hive. This can take on many forms, yet the end goal is the same.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
