How Businesses Can Benefit From Cryptosocial Media
Freedom for individual users also means freedom for businesses. However, there is a thin line between business and economic freedom and consumer exploitation. In fact, one of the ways that Facebook and Twitter have been used by businesses to exploit consumers is in the area of advertising. The platforms themselves have been used as data collectors on behalf of businesses allowing both the platforms and the businesses to profit with little power in the hands of consumers to curtail the abuse of this practice.
Consumers have a reasonable expectation to control their own data and identities. Businesses also have a reasonable expectation to profit by targeting their content toward consumers who might be interested in their products and services. Where do these interests meet?
Does blockchain technology have the answer? Can cryptosocial media be a conduit to help businesses profit without being exploitative?
How Businesses Currently Use Social Media
Social media marketing is a branch of Internet marketing that wasn’t possible until the advent of social media. That may sound obvious, but the marketing aspect of Internet marketing, from content marketing to paid marketing, isn’t all that innovative. The basic principles of marketing haven’t changed in thousands of years. Businesses still use it to reach potential customers, sell their products and services, and generate leads. What has changed is how technology is implemented to aid businesses in executing marketing tactics.
The Internet itself has spawned at least a dozen new ways to reach potential customers. Social media marketing is just one of them. And the Internet is so ubiquitous that it’s got its own cliches. One of those is this oft-repeated mantra of Internet marketers everywhere: “Businesses today must have an online presence if they wish to survive.”
An “online presence” usually means a website, a blog, and multiple social media accounts. But businesses use these tools in a variety of different ways.
The mix of social media accounts, for instance, varies from the expected “Facebook presence” to the broader reach of “spread wide and thin.” Another way businesses differ in their use of social media is in the nature of the content they publish. The biggest and most important difference, however, is in what each business expects to receive from their social media presence. That can range from brand recognition to nurturing online sales channels.
In general, businesses don’t show up until the customers do. That’s true of any platform or medium, from radio to blockchains. As prominent as display advertising was on the early Web, businesses didn’t buy advertising until there was someone to advertise to.
When the first social media platforms launched, most businesses had no interest in them. The ones that did were pioneers. When Six Degrees launched in 1997, the concept of Internet marketing wasn’t very well developed. Google hadn’t launched yet. Pay-per-click advertising was in its infancy. Search engine optimization was mostly about keyword management. And there was no video marketing. Most businesses with an Internet presence built a website, employed a primitive content marketing strategy, and threw money at online display ads. That was it. In fact, the first clickable display banner ad hit the Web in 1994.1
There were only 25 million Internet users2 in 1994 when Netscape launched its popular Web browser Navigator, and there were less than 3,000 websites. That could be the pivot point that led to the Internet’s massive growth. And it wasn’t long after that before “content is king” became the cult-like incantation among Internet content marketers.
As popular as it has become, content marketing isn’t new. Experts disagree on who the first content marketers were, but one source pins it on John Deere.3 The Content Marketing Institute traces it back to Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack.4 It’s likely older than that. Maybe as old as hieroglyphs.
What’s clear is that content marketing saw a resurgence of interest when the World Wide Web went commercial, after a long duration of radio and television advertising dominance.5 In its earliest forms, it appeared mostly as email messages and within the html brackets on ordinary Web pages. Since then, its trajectory has followed the path of Internet technology development.
In 1997, when Netflix launched as a digital video disc (DVD) rental service, there were more than 1 million websites and 120 million Internet users.6 A year later, the same year Google launched, the number of websites more than doubled.
The significance of Google’s launch, and PayPal’s a year later, can’t be overstated. In the first case, search engine optimization changed and, in the latter’s case, businesses with an online presence had a way to collect payments online. E-commerce was in full swing.
By 1997, Amazon and eBay were raking in huge dollars selling to consumers, but most business online at that point was business-to-business (B2B).7 Cisco was the leader in online commerce with $3 billion in networking equipment sales from its website. Dell racked up $3 million a day in personal computer sales. Businesses spent a total of $1 billion on online display advertising that year.
Web portals that served as ways for consumers to find businesses with an online presence were popular, as well.
Yahoo! was the most popular Web directory. Meanwhile, a slew of search engines competed for traffic and search volume. These included Excite, WebCrawler, Lycos, Infoseek, AltaVista, and Inktomi.8 Ask Jeeves gained a name for itself through its unique method of delivering search query results by encouraging searchers to simply ask a question rather than posting one-or two-word search queries. It launched in 1997.
What made Yahoo! different than the search engines is that website owners had to submit their websites whereas search engines crawled the Web in search of Web pages to list. Despite the Web crawlers, Yahoo! was still the most popular website online.9
Before Google, search engine optimization consisted primarily of packing website content with keywords and hoping the competition didn’t do it better. The use of metadata was also prominent. Google introduced backlink counting and, over time, honed the process of evaluating back link quality while introducing hundreds of other ranking factors to determine where Web pages should fall in the search results. Almost overnight, the practice of link building became a race to the top of Google’s search results for thousands of search engine optimizers around the world.10 It got so bad, it didn’t matter what a Web searcher was looking for, on any given day of the week the search results would be riddled with spam based on optimizers’ ability to build back links to Web pages.
Eventually, Google made several improvements to its algorithms so that back links, while still important, weren’t the only driver of information quality in search results.
The cat-and-mouse game between Google and search engine optimizers continues to this day, but Google has become so sophisticated in its information retrieval practices that it’s much harder to game search results. This improves the quality of search results for all searchers and evens out the playing field for businesses. However, large businesses still have an advantage over smaller businesses due to budget constraints. It can cost a business thousands of dollars to maintain top search results for any given keyword.
These facts are a testimony to both the benefits and drawbacks of centralization. On the one hand, centralization ensures that the central authority is effective in weeding out the undesirables. On the other hand, centralization places one individual or entity above everyone else and inequitable results are inevitable. Someone always benefits at the expense of someone else.
As the Internet grew, more businesses saw the necessity of an online presence, but the dot-com bubble would pop at the turn of the millennium, and everyone realized that simply throwing money at new technology wasn’t going to grow businesses or solve problems. It became important to build a strategy around one’s online marketing efforts.
By 2004, the Internet had almost 1 billion users and more than 51 million websites.11 Eighty-eight percent of Americans online said the Internet played a role in their daily routines and 33 percent of them bought everyday items online.12 But the most popular online activity at that time was communicating with friends and family—in the year that Facebook launched.
Of course, most of those Internet users hadn’t discovered Facebook yet. But they will eventually. And social media will become a major part of most people’s lives.
Businesses go where the crowds go. Whether advertising, using content marketing strategies, or simply showing up to take a survey, businesses always want to go where their potential customers are. In 2013, 86 percent of business-to-consumer companies and 92 percent of B2B firms used content marketing strategies.13 Fast forward to 2021 and Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are major channels of online marketing for businesses all over the world. But what do these businesses do on social media?
The popular social media management solution HootSuite has identified 25 benefits of social media for businesses.14 Among the benefits listed include brand awareness, thought leadership, website traffic, lead generation, sales, content promotion, reputation management, crisis communication, audience engagement, conversation monitoring, brand sentiment gauging, targeted advertising, and more.
Businesses achieve these benefits in a number of ways. Some of the most popular include:
• Content Promotion—One obvious way to increase a business’s brand awareness, generate more leads, and increase website traffic is to promote the business’s brand content through social media. This typically includes blog content, but it can also include other content assets such as whitepapers, case studies, special reports, survey results, and website content. Social media promotion allows businesses to promote the content they produce in order to increase the benefits of publishing that content for the business and its clientele.
• Original Content—Many businesses produce original content for the social media channels they navigate.
• Advertising—Several popular social media platforms allow businesses to advertise. Facebook offers advertising and claims that 1.6 billion of its users are connected to a business through Facebook.15 Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Snapchat all offer business advertising on their platforms.
• Groups—Several social media platforms have groups that users can join or start. Groups are generally centered on a particular topic. For instance, a LinkedIn group might be about local business marketing. A business might join such a group to network with other local small businesses in other parts of the country, or world, to share local marketing tactics. If a business specializes in local business marketing, they could join such a group to network with business owners who are potential customers and demonstrate their expertise by interacting with those potential customers. In that way, the business is networking but also engaging potential customers in conversation. This type of social media marketing leverages audience engagement.
• Conversation Monitoring—Another way businesses use social media is to monitor a conversation on a particular topic. They might subscribe to key influencers or follow specific hashtags to keep up with what people are saying on those topics. It’s a good way to generate ideas for content based on what people are talking about on social media. Conversation monitoring may also be used to generate ideas for new products and services.
• Customer Service—Some brands use opportunities on social media to handle customer service issues. For instance, if a customer on Twitter criticizes a brand, the company behind it can respond. By monitoring brand mentions, businesses can be notified of these instances and respond to criticisms openly on the social media channel where they take place. If necessary, a business might offer a way to rectify the situation—a discount coupon for the disgruntled customer, for example—or talk through the issue and use the information for improving future customer interactions, product enhancements, or services.
• Close sales—Some businesses offer discounts or incentives for potential customers who buy a product through a particular social media channel. For instance, if a business sells digital products, they might offer a 10 percent discount on certain items to anyone who buys them through the business’s Facebook page.
These are just a few ideas. Almost any legitimate business practice in the real world can be conducted online in 2021. Social media has become a regular part of many businesses’ overall marketing efforts. It’s so prevalent, in fact, that social media marketing experts discuss ways to improve social media marketing strategies by publishing guides16 and how-tos on their own blogs.
How Decentralization Changes Social Media for Businesses
The benefits of decentralization for business operations have been overblown in some quarters. Decentralization itself has become such a buzzword that some people seem to want to decentralize everything on the planet, but that would impractical. Despite its clear benefits, there are some downsides to decentralization.17
While I’m a proponent of decentralization, I believe it is imperative for businesses to properly analyze decentralization before leaping in. There are several reasons for this.
First, decentralization is expensive. Because of the high cost of implementation, it’s impractical to reorganize a small business with thin profits just to follow a new trend. On top of that, in a decentralized organization, you may find that various departments end up competing against each other rather than working toward the same goal. That could lead to inefficiencies, redundancies, and cannibalization of efforts. Such workflow challenges would undoubtedly affect the bottom line and eat away at profits. For these reasons, I would not encourage most small businesses to reorganize themselves around the principles of decentralization unless it makes sense for the business.
That does not mean, however, that your business couldn’t benefit from decentralization. Many businesses that are not decentralized, and may never be decentralized, could benefit from using decentralized tools for business-related processes.
One of those business tools is decentralized social media.
Before plunging headlong into decentralization, first ask yourself what you hope to gain by using decentralized social media. Consider the benefits and the drawbacks for your own business and make a rational decision based on the direction your industry is going, the potential your business has within that industry, and your own customers and employees. What works for one business may not work for every business.
That said, decentralized social media can benefit noncrypto businesses just as well as businesses operating within the cryptocurrency space. It’s easy to see how Splinterlands is profitable when you understand that its business model is inherently decentralized. It’s also easy to see how centralized crypto-related businesses such as Kraken and Gemini can easily reach new customers and take advantage of social media marketing strategies by using cryptosocial media platforms the same way many non crypto-related businesses use Facebook and Twitter to reach their audiences. These businesses are showing up where their customers are.
Another thing to consider is the nature of the platform or protocol that you’re considering. There is a huge difference between Hive and Coil. Whether you use one or the other, or both, depends on your business goals and what you hope to gain by using the tool.
At the end of the day, it’s about freedom and how you manage your business. Are your business’s customers or potential clients into crypto even if you’re not? Then it might not be a bad idea to position yourself where you’ll find those customers. If you’re a certified public accountant (CPA) and you’ve been getting more crypto-related tax questions from your clients, you might consider joining one or two cryptosocial media platforms and posting answers to those questions.
Decentralization also doesn’t mean that your business must utilize the platforms and protocols listed in Chapter 7. Many businesses today allow their employees to set up Twitter and other social media accounts and interact with customers and potential customers as representatives of the company. If you’ve already implemented that decentralized social media strategy for your company, it’s not too much of a stretch to allow your employees to set up accounts at Hive, Publish0x, and Minds and represent your brand on those platforms. But, again, that only makes sense if your customers are on those platforms.
One more question to ask yourself, should you decide to explore decentralized social media channels, is, to what extent should you participate? Do you dive all the way in, dabble a little here and there, or develop a strategy somewhere in between?
Decentralization is not an all-or-nothing proposition. You may find it beneficial to incorporate it into your social media marketing in certain instances or in very specific ways that make sense for your business. The important thing to consider is that it is an option. Just as businesses once had to consider whether to incorporate Facebook, Twitter, and/or Instagram into their marketing strategies, the day is coming soon when every business will have to decide if they want to incorporate cryptosocial media into their social media strategies. That time could be now for your business.
If it is, then you’ll have to decide which platforms and protocols you want to play with. Considering the diversity within the space, you’ll have to clearly define what benefits you want from your cryptosocial strategy. Decentralization allows businesses of all types the ability to choose from a broader range of social media marketing benefits. These include:
• Developing a long-term cryptocurrency strategy—earning and investing
• Taking advantage of anonymous accounts, which can be used to ethically spy on the competition or survey the market
• Nurturing faster payment channels
• Establishing seamless cross-border payments for international transactions
• Conducting microtransactions for your business in ways that are not possible with government-sponsored currencies
• Protecting your content and branded assets with enhanced security protocols
• Communicating with customers and potential customers without fear of censorship or backlash from the platforms on which you publish
• Leverage current and future relationships for greater financial, marketing, and computing power
• And more
This list of cryptosocial benefits for businesses is just the beginning. A business can take advantage of all of these benefits or just a few.
The bottom line is, if it makes sense for your business, cryptosocial media marketing can be an add-on to your current social media marketing strategy allowing you to reach new customers, engage with current customers in new ways, and profit financially from your social media strategy in ways that are not now possible. And, it would be irresponsible not to mention, many ways businesses could use decentralization have not been thought of yet.
How Businesses Can Use Cryptosocial Media Without Exploiting Customer Data
People are waking up to the fact that social media platforms, and brands that use them for marketing, are exploiting platform user data and profiting from that data without express permission from the users. It is no longer acceptable that a default user agreement written by corporate lawyers will cover every instance of data usage. Customer data is not secure and everyone knows it.
That spells an opportunity for brands that really care about their customers’ personal information. It isn’t enough to promise not to sell user data or share it with third parties. Brands must put their money where their mouths are. On a practical level, that means using tools that make it impossible for you to exploit user data, because we all know what happens when you hand a blank check to a kid in a candy shop. Good intentions will not keep you off the fiery path!
On the other hand, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. Building your own blockchain-based social media platform will be expensive. Unless there’s a real good reason to do so, you’ll be much better off using the platforms that your customers are using. For several reasons.
For starters, it will be easier and less expensive. Unless you’re already involved in cryptocurrencies, start at the entry level. If it later becomes necessary to own your own platform, you can migrate to that much easier from a presence on a platform that has already been established.
Second, transparency is very important on social media.18 It’s important on any social media platform, but it’s even more important on cryptosocial media because customers on those platforms expect it and won’t tolerate anything less.
If you can’t be transparent, you won’t succeed no matter how awesome your content is. There’s no free pass for brands that fail to understand the importance of transparency. Practically, that means you can’t get caught pretending to be bigger than you are, wealthier than you are, or more knowledgeable than you are. If you can’t be honest with yourself, you won’t be honest with anyone else.
When it comes to cryptosocial media, there are many valid strategies, just as there are many valid social media strategies with legacy social media. You must figure out what works for your brand.
If you believe you’d like to delve deeper, here are a few ways that businesses currently use cryptosocial media:
Original Content Production
Social blogging is popular on cryptosocial platforms. Brands are using cryptosocial media to publish original content in several different formats. Hive and Steemit are akin to traditional blogging platforms such as Blogger and Medium while 3Speak and YouNow are video blogging platforms. All.me is a Pinterest-like photo sharing site.
The key is to find the platform that allows you to create the type of branded content you want to be known for and to drive traffic back to your website or specific landing pages. Like any social media strategy based on original content production, you want your content to be unique, extraordinary, and targeted to your audience. Once you build a presence on a cryptosocial media platform, you can translate that presence into a branded asset.
The added benefit to original content production on cryptosocial media is that your audience may interact with your content and you’ll earn monetary rewards.
In the case of Coil, you can monetize your branded company assets so that your brand can earn cryptocurrencies based on how much time your audience spends reading and engaging with your content on your own Web properties. If you have a YouTube or Twitch channel, you can monetize them too. If you are used to seeing high traffic counts, this one move alone could be lucrative.
Content Promotion
In some cases, you may want to promote your branded content on other platforms. That’s okay too.
Some cryptosocial media users post a teaser on Minds, or other platforms, and link back to the original article on their blog. While I believe this strategy is less effective than posting original content on all of your channels, it is an option if you simply want to establish a cryptosocial presence but don’t want to spend a lot of time nurturing relationships or creating new content on the platforms.
Content Curation
Some users on the cryptosocial platforms don’t post original content at all. They like, share, and comment on others’ content and earn cryptocurrencies for doing so.
For a business, the benefit to being a content curator is that you could use this strategy as a branding strategy. If you’re a travel agent, for instance, you may simply curate all the best travel articles under your branded cryptosocial account on Steemit and Hive without posting any content of your own. It’s a perfectly valid approach that allows you to brand yourself while earning cryptocurrencies and promoting your business to potential clients.
One of the biggest selling points for cryptosocial media users is the ability to earn cryptocurrencies for one’s content. However, every site is different and the manner in which cryptocurrencies are earned is different. How much one can earn in a given period of time is determined by several factors, some of which are out of the publisher’s control. These include:
• Publishing frequency
• Depth and value of content
• The audience
• Whether there is any audience engagement, and how much engagement each piece of content receives
• Whether the business stakes earnings
• Whether the business invests in the platform by purchasing tokens prior to publishing any content
There’s nothing that says a business can’t have an account on a blockchain. Whether that is feasible or not depends on the blockchain and the cryptosocial platform. On the Hive and Steem blockchains, users can have multiple accounts. Those accounts can be personal or business, and they can be anonymous. There’s no protocol for proving your identity like there is on some of the other platforms. Even then, if you’re a small business owner, you can always set up an account in your personal name and use it to publish branded content for your business.
Each platform pays in different ways. With Hive and Steemit, there is a seven-day payout period and you’ll be earning the respective blockchain’s native currency. With Publish0x, you can request payout at any time and you’ll receive your earnings at the appointed time in your connected wallet. Right now, you can have your AMPL rewards sent to your KuCoin wallet. With FARM, you can only request payouts to an Ethereum on-chain wallet that supports FARM.
It’s best to research each platform’s policies, read their whitepapers, and become familiar with their unique cultures before diving in. You should also decide whether earning cryptocurrencies is your primary goal or if you want other benefits for your business. If you intend to earn cryptocurrencies, take the time to learn how they work and, specifically, the cryptocurrencies you expect to earn.
You’ve likely been taught, if you’ve been publishing content on the Internet for a while, that Google penalizes “duplicate content.” On cryptosocial media, cross-posting is allowed.
Never mind that Google’s famous duplicate content penalty doesn’t exist. Google does not and never has penalized duplicate content. They simply do not index multiple pages of the same content. When Google finds duplicate content on the Web, the search engine must determine which piece to index and that is determined by a number of factors. One factor is the content publisher can designate a canonical URL, which is like asking Google to bypass all the duplicates. Some cryptosocial platforms make this easy by allowing you to designate a canonical URL for each piece of content you publish.
Like many content publishers, blockchains have been plagued with content spam, plagiarism, content theft, and other World Wide Web nasties. Attacking these evils have met with various results from disastrous to successful. However, the bottom line is this: It’s your content. You own it and no one should be able to tell you what you can and can’t do with it.
The truth about blockchains is that each one has its advocates and critics. Some people like Ethereum while some don’t. The Steem/Hive hard fork in 2020 caused a huge rift in those communities so you’ll find the die-hard Hive advocates and those who prefer Steem. What that means for content publishers is that you can cross-post your content and reach different audiences while maintaining all of the benefits of using blockchains for content publishing. If one of your goals is to earn cryptocurrencies for your business, you can earn multiple cryptocurrencies from the same content by cross-posting from one platform to another. This is one of the benefits of decentralization.
Monitor Conversations
Not all blockchain activity must be about publishing. Just as you monitor conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, if your audience is on Hive, Torum, and Mastodon, then you can monitor the conversations they’re having about your brand, your products, and the market that you serve.
Along with monitoring conversations, you can use cryptosocial media to measure brand sentiment. If your brand is a cryptocurrency or blockchain-based business, it’s likely that people on cryptosocial media platforms are talking about your business. There is a lot of that going on.
While it’s still too early for most brands to worry about being talked about on cryptosocial media, it’s not too early to start thinking about it. If you wait until the platforms are as popular as Facebook and Twitter, it may be too late. The decentralized Web is here, and it’s likely to grow more decentralized. It’s time to start measuring brand sentiment now.
If no one is talking about you on cryptosocial media, it’s entirely practical and fair to kick off the conversation yourself. Get them talking about you, then measure the sentiment.
Build a Community
Now is the time to build cryptosocial communities. Several blockchains already have the means for platform users to start their own communities. Both Hive and Steemit offer that capability. Minds has groups users can join or start. And not all of the groups are cryptocurrency-related. Torum has clans, and a space for companies.
Some of the topics around which Minds groups are formed include exercise and fitness, philosophy, a group for men “going their own way,” biohacking, prepping and survivalism, people banned from Facebook, and, of course, several cryptocurrency projects. If you have a business centered on some of these topics, you can join a group and use it to soft promote your business the same way you would in Facebook or LinkedIn groups. If there’s no group that matches your interests, you can start one.
On Hive, communities exist for travel, finance, make up and beautification, food, photography, art and music, fitness, natural medicine, video production, pets, movies, motherhood, nature, and more. If you have a business related to any of those topics, you can join a community and publish content about those topics in those communities, giving you a built-in audience. Again, if a community doesn’t exist for your interests, you can start one.
One of the great benefits of social media is the ability to build a community around a common interest. Individuals and businesses do it. Just because you can earn cryptocurrencies or gain other benefits, that doesn’t mean you can’t also build a community. Cryptosocial is still social.
Nurture a Customer Rewards Program
One cool benefit to using cryptosocial media is that you can nurture a unique customer rewards program by offering a platform’s native cryptocurrency to your customers for interacting with you on the platform. You can offer contests with prizes, play games with other users, or host a give-away.
At one point, on Steemit, I promoted my fiction publishing company by sponsoring fiction contests. I invited users to write stories on a specific theme and chose the best story as the winner. The winner would receive a prize, usually some amount of STEEM or Steem Dollars. The contests were quite popular.
Other Steemit users did something similar. There were humor contests, contests for the best travel-related content, and contests for the best progress made toward a fitness goal.
There’s no limit to how far you can take a rewards program. On Publish0x, many cryptocurrency brands offer prizes for the best content written by Publish0x users that discuss the benefits of their projects. These are very popular, and they get people talking about your brand.
Brand Promotion Strategies
There are other brand promotion strategies that businesses can use to get people to talking about and noticing their brands. Again, while publishing to Steemit, I joined several promotional efforts that allowed me to discuss certain brands even if I was critical of them. And, believe me, I was critical of some of them. But they upvoted my content anyway. Some of these posts were among my most popular and highest paying.
On Steemit, an upvote is weighted based on an account’s Steem Power. The brand, and the on-chain promoter that consulted with the brand, would drop thousands of dollars into their accounts just so they could upvote content that mentions the sponsoring brand. This allowed Steemit users to write content they would not otherwise write and earn more rewards than they were accustomed to earning just for mentioning a brand, whether they liked the brand or not. The facilitator for these promotions was a decentralized company called Oracle-D. It has since changed its name to YooDoo.
These kinds of promotional efforts are great ways to get people to talk about your brand and get it some much-needed press at no cost. Since the brand buys cryptocurrency and adds it to their own wallet, they can retrieve that money any time they want. It’s just there to upvote other users’ content for the purpose of rewards distribution, because on Steemit a person’s upvote is worth more if they have more Steem Power in their account. This same strategy can be used on Hive.
If you set up a community around your brand, you can have Hive or Steemit users post content to that community and encourage all community members to upvote the content.
On Publish0x, you can partner with the platform to offer content posters your project’s native cryptocurrency (or another cryptocurrency) for writing and publishing the best content about your brand. You can also set up a blog for your brand, like cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin, and publish to your blog. Use it to offer incentives for writing about your brand.
For instance, you could offer a 100 percent tip to the user who writes the best content about your brand.
Virtually any cryptosocial media platform can be used this way to promote a brand or a business. All it takes is some creativity and the ability to orchestrate an attention-getting marketing campaign. In many cases, brands are getting more exposure for less investment.
Nonfungible Tokens
Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) are creating a unique opportunity for brands and individuals to earn from content published once and sold multiple times.
Artists can create a piece of artwork, sell it in limited quantities, and each time that artwork exchanges hands it pays a royalty to the artist. If the first buyer gets the piece for $100 and resells it one year later for $1,000, the artist will receive a royalty—a predetermined percentage of the sales price—when that transaction takes place. If it is sold again five years later for $5,000, the artist will receive another royalty.
This is a unique opportunity for businesses. Why not sponsor an artist in exchange for a percentage of future royalties? Or hire an artist to produce something that represents your brand and pay that artist with a royalty split on all future sales of the artwork. Some brands are beginning to turn their product lines into NFTs.
The way that works is you create a product. Then you create an NFT of that product. In this case, the NFT is a derivative of the actual product. If someone owns the NFT of an automobile, for instance, they don’t own the actual automobile. They own a token that represents the automobile. In the case of an NFT, it’s a unique token and can’t be exchanged for another just like it. This increases the value of the token and allows the automobile manufacturer to earn from the sale of the NFT each time it exchanges hands.
The potential for businesses to earn and continue promoting their businesses in perpetuity with the creation of one marketing piece is astounding. In the past, if a business purchased a radio advertising spot, that was an expense and it cost the business every time the ad ran. The same with television. Print advertising was an expense. With NFTs, an expense can be turned into a profit center.
“Advertising opportunities:”
There are also creative advertising opportunities brands can take advantage of. Brave Browser, for instance, sells advertising and shares the revenue with its users who are paid a small amount for each ad they view through the browser. Presearch is a decentralized search engine. Brands can bid on keywords and the highest bidder’s ad is shown at the top of the search results when users search for that term.
These represent unique opportunities for brands. In the case of Brave, the ERC-20 token paid out to Brave users is Basic Attention Token (BAT). On Presearch, users earn a small amount of PRE, the native cryptocurrency, for each search query they make. These opportunities are only possible through blockchain technology.
Some cryptosocial media platforms are beginning to offer their own advertising opportunities in a similar manner.
Summary
Creative businesses are going to rule the day when cryptosocial media goes mainstream. The businesses that already have a cryptosocial presence have a head start. It need not be about earning cryptocurrencies. For businesses, the potential to build a community around the brand or reach a new audience through decentralized publishing is itself a benefit.
Social Media Examiner lists eight essential elements to a social media marketing strategy.19 Those won’t change with cryptosocial communities. What will change, slightly, are the benefits the business gains from their efforts. And cryptosocial communities will likely offer a few more ways to reach audiences that legacy social media can’t touch.
The future of social media marketing for businesses is cryptosocial. It may not be the sole channel for many businesses, but it will be another option for most.
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