I have recently put forward three separate ideas for promoting steemit to a wider audience.
Some progress has been made.
I thought it would be useful to summarise where I am on each project now.
SteemTowns
As a long time community activist this is the project that excites me the most.
Getting steemit adopted in a town for widespread community use for news, local information, events, business promotion etc would really boost the large scale adoption of steemit.
You can read the initial posts about the project here :
There have been a number of people who have expressed interest in the idea, but no great upswell of support so far. I know I will need to do more to progress the project myself before it will gain any momentum.
However I have a hit up against a problem - and it's a big problem for this sort of project.
A friend of mine who is something of a leader in our local town community - chair of this, trustee of that etc - happened to pop round the other day. I've worked with him successfully on a number of community development projects in our town so I thought I would show him steemit and run the idea of SteemTowns past him.
He was definitely interested as he is always looking for new ideas to promote our town. I showed him my post about Abersteemit and told him more about how steemit works and how you can earn money with it. I left him and his daughter who was with him looking at the steemit New feed while I went to make a cup of tea.
Bad move, bad move, bad move. I should have warned him...
When I came back with the tea he was not impressed - at all.
He had by chance clicked on a NSFW post. It certainly wasn't suitable for his daughter to see.
He was not impressed, he was very embarrassed and it was all very awkward.
No way is he going to support a SteemTown here now.
Maybe he shouldn't have clicked on the post. But NSFW is not in the mainstream lingo. He had no idea what it meant.
Should NSFW be changed to Adult Content maybe?
This is one big blocker for steemit to go mainstream. Should it be an adult only platform? Should there be age verification on signup? Does there need to be a family-friendly version of steemit that doesn't show NSFW content?
I know the reason this sort of content is on steemit, and that is fine. But it is extremely unlikely that steemit is going to be allowed in any public organisations in Britain unless this is changed. Schools won't touch it, councils won't allow it, libraries won't go near it and I've got a feeling it will get a rough ride with many businesses.
I really would like to go forward with the SteemTowns project but I have no idea how to get round this roadblock.
Suggestions welcome.
Cooking with Steem
This project is much simpler. It has received quite a lot of support and good comment. It went down well with the audience when I talked about it in an interview with @ma1neevent on MSP Waves Radio.
Producing recipe sheets and cookbooks with recipes from steemit to promote the platform is moderately straightforward to produce and to deliver.
It does have a cost though for the physical products. Initial quotes put leaflets at about US $0.03 per leaflet (5000 run), and booklets at about US $ 1.50 each (500 run).
Assuming we can find the budget to cover an initial production run, I will be taking this forward over the coming weeks.
A number of people have already offered recipes but I am thinking a contest would be good to spread the word and get a bigger selection of recipes to choose from.
I am planning to launch that contest along with a new radio show I'll be starting on MSP Waves shortly.
For reference here is the initial post about the project :
Recruitment Referral Reward Scheme
This is the most recent promotional idea posted just three days ago :
The post has created some interesting comment and discussion.
While there is a general interest in some sort of referral reward scheme the mechanics of a manually administered scheme are definitely difficult to work through.
I have not dropped the idea but it would need some very careful planning and execution to avoid it being gamed or exploited.
Otherwise a referral reward scheme will just have to be parked until steemit wants to build a proper system into the core.
If you found this post useful or interesting please do upvote, resteem and follow. Thank you.
You might also be interested in some of my other posts :
Pennsif's Progress - The Days are Numbered // Day 907 : Where should I put my nuts?
Pennsif's Progress - The Days are Numbered // Day 919 : Goodbye young cockerel, hello new friends
Calling Wales, Calling Wales - any steemit citizens from Wales or living in Wales?
[header graphic by @pennsif // other images from pixabay - Creative Commons CC0]