How should marketing be done for Hive has been a recurring theme of discussion for a long time.
A few posts I've seen recently reminded me of that.
Hive Blockchain Features in the Back-End
It looks like many of us converge on the idea that Hive as a whole doesn't need marketing. On each particular niche, applications should promote themselves, and by doing that, Hive would come up as their choice to build their app on for:
- its quasi-feeless and fast transactions, now with one-block irreversibility too
- its already-established community
- being the "source of truth" for the digital assets and transactions of its users (immutability has the invaluable benefit of providing incontestable proof-of-ownership and transaction history on a decentralized blockchain)
- its account management system
- a significant degree of decentralization of the first layer
- its dual-token tokenomics at the first layer, one token volatile (HIVE), the other bouncing around the 1 USD level (HBD), with good failsafe mechanisms that have been tested over time
- its in-built system to recover accounts (which were hacked or the last owner private key was lost)
- etc.
But none of these features needs to be mentioned directly unless the discussion is about blockchains and their capabilities or one of their features.
Censorship Resistance
For example, censorship resistance is something Hive is good at. But that's mostly useful if people understand how to use it if it comes down to it.
Regular people, if you start explaining to them what that really means, that's not convincing. Because to them, once their regular front-end bans them, it seems like the end of the world. And that is still possible on Hive. The resistance is only at the blockchain level and can be taken advantage of by using other front-ends, from different jurisdictions, that didn't ban you. Or building your own front-end, which 99.9% of users wouldn't.
But, in my opinion, most discussions that would attract users are not at the technical level or even for principles. They are based on specific use cases. And for that there are apps.
Everything App
I know there is talk in the ecosystem about the "Everything App". I wonder if this is a direction Hive applications will excel at.
Twitter, yes, because they already have 400m users or whatever they have. They have a massive user base which they want to keep captive for almost everything they do online. That could work. And they have a huge development team, I imagine...
On Hive, the challenges are different, because we still need to grow a lot more from here before worrying about keeping everyone on the same app. Maybe it would work. I don't know. But it would require a massive push in development resources starting from a much lower user base. And an "Everything App" would probably be something more difficult to update, steer, and adapt. More massive and less agile.
Apps Doing the Marketing
Moving forward, I believe that the main marketing effort on Hive should come from the apps.
Again, they don't need to promote Hive, they should focus on promoting themselves. That's what Splinterlands has done. That's what Leofinance is doing, as far as I know.
Indirectly, Splinterlands promotes Hive where it matters. In their whitepapers, Hive is mentioned (here's a sample). Whitepapers are often read by investors (and sometimes, developers). Then, through their weekly challenges, they encourage people to become content creators on Hive. I know for sure some players onboarded by Splinterlands expanded to other areas of Hive via SplinterTalk or PeakD.
That's why I believe that instead of inviting someone to Hive, one should invite him or her to Leofinance, PeakD, Ecency, 3Speak, LikeTu, Splinterlands, Actifit, or any other app that suites the user's needs. Specific use cases, not something general and hard to explain!
One thing I also wanted to mention. In my opinion, marketing an app that is not ready for a wider audience is detrimental. The first impression will be bad, and that will be hard to change. Building up hype is ok, as long as hype will be justified when the launch date comes (or very soon after).