This post is mostly in response to @pennsif's posts brainstorming Steem marketing ideas and I just wanted to weigh in with some thoughts.

There's a lot in my head about this, so I'll try my best to get it out in a way that's digestible. Here are a few bullet points.

• Before you can do marketing, you need to do branding. The brand is what you market.

• It's really hard to brand and market a platform. Think about it like this, when was the last time you saw an ad for iOS? You've probably never seen one. You've seen ads for iPhones, iPads, iPods, or applications built on iOS. You see ads for the PRODUCTS built on the platform. The platform itself is so generic and general purpose that it's hard to create a compelling "story" around it. Although not impossible.

• If Steem wants to "Onboard the Masses", then that's who we need to market to. That means ditch talking points about transaction times, or anything related to blockchain. Nobody cares, actually it's worse than that, nobody KNOWS what the hell you're even talking about. We have to think of real world solutions we can offer to regular people. Luckily, we have those.(sort of)

Real World Problem #1: Deplatforming, Algorithm Bias, Soft Banning, all that jazz.

Solution: The Universal Decentralized Account

(mock marketing message)

Steem is a network of applications spanning social media, gaming, finance, content management and more.

When you create an account on Steem, you immediately have access to every application on the network and new applications are being created everyday. Not only that, but Steem is a decentralized network, meaning no central authority controls your account. You are the true owner of your account and no company, government, user, or anyone else can take your account from you or remove you from the network.

Create your Universal Decentralized Account on Steem today and stake your claim on the future of the web.

Real World Problem #2: Content Monetization

Solution: The World's Easiest to Use Digital Currency: STEEM

*note: I didn't say it was easy, I said it was the "easiest", which is arguable ;)
*note2: Yes I said digital currency, and yes I know there's a difference, and that that's not accurate. I don't care, what's more important is not using words outside their vocabulary in a marketing pitch. A big mistake I see Steemians make often.
(mock marketing message)

More and more it's becoming clear that there is a new oil in this digital age...

Attention

Social media giants and content sharing platforms have so far been the sole beneficiaries of this new economy, but on the Steem network that's all changing.

On these platforms YOU are the product and the advertisers are the customers, the problem is, it's YOU that's creating most of the value while THEY rake in all the profits.

That's the past. The future is you benefitting from the value that you create. The future is a level playing field where algorithms don't get to play favorites. The future is global, censorship resistant, and permissionless.

The future...is STEEM.

So these are a couple examples of how I think you could market Steem. Some key ideas here are that I prioritize clear communication and legibility over accuracy. This isn't a contract, it's a carrot. They can get the details wherever we'd send them to. TBH, I don't think these are THAT strong for the reasons I said above. It's still trying to market a platform and I think it's better to market PRODUCTS.

If we did still want to market Steem, we would have to come up with some sort of brand to move forward with. We can't define Steem in any meaningful way and that's fine, but we'd need to pick a direction for a marketing campaign. A story we plan to tell. Problems we plan to address, a demographic we plan to reach, and some specific goals we plan to accomplish.

"Getting the word out" is not a tangible goal worth spending money on. An example of a tangible goal is

• Increase user signups by x percent.
• Increase traffic to x product by x percent.

The better we can track the goal the better, and it's not worth it to aim for things we can't track because we can't tell if what we're doing is working or not.

NOW, seeing that I think we should market products and not Steem, the next question is which product is ready to be marketed?

In my opinion, unfortunately, none of them. Some are really close, but here is the reality. There are no training wheels. Nobody is going to "do us a solid" and use Steem apps. We are now, and will forever in the future, be competing with the big dogs. That's it, period. If we can't offer similarly useful applications people won't use them. It has nothing to do with fairness, or difficulty, that is the path. We deliver or we don't. We have to be thinking big, about how we're going to become significant in a large part of the populations life. That sounds like a lofty goal, but that's what "Onboarding the Masses" really comes down to.

So when we look at our applications, we can't look at them with Steem goggles on, or even blockchain goggles. What I mean is thinking, "This is really good!(for Steem)" or "This is really good!(for a blockchain app)" I know we already have a lot of stuff that's great compared to other blockchains, but seriously, who cares. It only matters if it's good, compared to EVERYTHING.

As I've said before in previous posts, I think we have the functionality to do just this, but we're lacking the features.

I think the sort of cheap/practically free marketing that we do now is appropriate. Twitter campaigns, individuals making promotional videos, word of mouth, etc. because it's been a long time, I know people are tired of waiting, and frustrated, but we are still not there yet. Progress is being made, but I can't say confidently that I believe in any of these apps in their current state. Like most of you here, I'm excited about the future. About fully launched and ready Communities with all the community types, and a working example of an SMT connected to a Community, and the first Community breaking off and creating its own frontend, SMT's out, in the wild, doing exciting things.

Right now, we can hope to get a few more early adopters, people that want to be in on the ground floor, people that don't mind getting to the party early before the music starts or anyone is actually partying, but we're not ready for the masses.

All that is obviously just my opinion, by all means, feel free to organize marketing campaigns to your heart's content, because I'm just one guy and I'm not any smarter than you, but those are my garbled up thoughts. I hope it makes sense. Let me know what you think in the comments! If you think I'm wrong, tell me why, if you think I'm right, let me know. Let's get the discussion going.

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