#WhatIsSoma crowdsourced content competition
September 27, 2018 update: participants in the competition will want to note our recent rebrand and incorporate the new aesthetic into submissions. You can access the brand guidelines here.
SOMA is giving our supporters a chance to help us in our marketing and visibility efforts (and win lots of SCT in so doing).
Below are the categories in which you can compete. All three categories require you to follow us on Twitter, be part of our Telegram group, post your entry to twitter with the #WhatIsSoma hashtag, and fill out a form. Easy peasy. Read on for the full story.
Original content, and rights to content
SOMA will have rights to use submitted content in whatever way we see fit. Contest participants guarantee that submitted works are their original creations and are not derived from the protected works of others.
The content competition is broken into 3 contests:
Video Creation
Article Creation
Infographic Design
Registration & Submission
Registration form HERE: https://goo.gl/forms/FNcIMYqFSfzg8tga2
ALL submissions must be made via twitter by hash-tagging #WhatIsSoma and tagging @SomaEcomm (https://twitter.com/SomaEcomm) with your video, article, or infographic link in your tweet.
Winners will be announced following the end of the campaign on November 4, 2018. SCT will be distributed by January 5, 2018.
YOU MUST BE FOLLOWING THE OFFICIAL TWITTER ACCOUNT AND BE A MEMBER OF THE OFFICIAL TELEGRAM CHANNEL.
What is SOMA?
#WhatIsSoma
SOMA is two things, really. And those two things — the two problems we’re addressing — dovetail perfectly. One could almost say they’re the same issue looked at from two angles.
- A disintermediated social marketplace. People don’t trust one another, so they rely on mammoth corporations to make transactions go smoothly and guarantee people don’t scam one another. SOMA takes the giant corporation out and uses distributed ledger technology (DLT, also known as blockchain) to provide security and transparency. Additionally, we bring a social element that allows community members to build a following and a ‘lifestyle image,’ and monetize their social influence.
- A protocol for fraud prevention, tracking of provenance, and validation of ownership. We use a patent-pending structure to create a digital representation of an item; that digital representation can then contain a detailed history and all necessary identifying information.
Read the following resources to get the full picture!
Read about SOMA’s upcoming pilot program.
Read our use case study for a hypothetical manufacturer of luxury watches.
A few ideas to get you started
Here are some things that make SOMA stand out. Again, if you read the above resources, you’ll absorb these — but it’s still worth calling them out.
- SOMA integrates social media functionality into an ecommerce site.
- Users can create a personal brand around ‘lifestyle’ products and monetize their influence.
- Our Heimdall Protocol allows a physical object to be tokenized in a digital representation. That digital representation can contain all relevant info about the item.
- The Heimdall Protocol can also tokenize non-physical ‘objects’ such as intellectual property.
- The Heimdall Protocol has enterprise applications far beyond the SOMA marketplace.
- In the SOMA marketplace, the Heimdall Protocol takes the form of the Interactive Item Card, or IIC.
- The Heimdall Protocol/IIC protects against forgery by encoding key information that verifies provenance.
- The Heimdall Protocol/IIC collects a wealth of data, especially in the secondary markets, that companies don’t currently have access to.
- Chain-of-ownership information helps brands tell a story about their product. For example, a luxury watch brand could track successive owners over time and use their ‘stories’ to build a more vibrant brand image and enhance their marketing.
- Blockchain allows SOMA to have immutable records of transactions.
- Blockchain-based ‘smart contracts’ allow transactions to execute without human intervention.
- SOMA’s ‘reselling’ feature allows corporate sellers to build a new model of sales force: fans of their products that use their own social influence to resell to others.
- In reselling, smart contracts execute the reselling contract, paying the reseller his/her fee. This allows the corporate seller to have little to no HR, payroll, or other administrative burden for their ‘sales force.’
- SOMA’s reselling feature has the potential to replace both traditional in-house sales teams as well as affiliate marketing functions.
- SOMA has a working product (our demo MVP, now available on Android).
- SOMA begins our pilot program in Q1 2019, wherein actual buying and selling will take place.
- SOMA has funding from the government of Finland.
- SOMA has great partnerships with the likes of DWISS, Diefendorff, Sipilan Kello, and more (keep up on our blog and on our Medium channel devoted to business development).
Suggestions for winning (this is where you’ll want to pay attention)
Don’t just copy/paste/read/quote from the SOMA website or other SOMA materials. Use the 18 points above (plus whatever others you want to throw in) to develop your own take.
Check punctuation and grammar (if infographic or article).
Dare to think outside the box.
Show us that you actually understand SOMA and the value of our vision.
The three categories of competition
Now that you've gotten acquainted with SOMA via the whitepaper, pilot program description, and use case study, you’re ready to dive in and make some content! But which type? What is SOMA looking for? Read on and learn.
Video creation
This is you, making a video about SOMA. It can be highly-produced, with fancy animations and voice-over, or you can sit in the car and talk to your phone. It’s not about how ‘nice’ the finish is; the winner will win on the following:
- How informative is the video? Imagine someone who has never heard of SOMA: will that person ‘get’ what SOMA is from the video? Or why the world needs SOMA? Or what pain points SOMA is attempting to solve? Or how it plans on solving them? Or what are some of the major milestones ahead? Or what are some of the major milestones already behind us? You don’t have to address every point here, but you should definitely address one or two.
- How compelling is the message? Will it keep a viewer’s interest?
- How personable are you? Do you seem like someone I (or anyone) would want to sit down and have a conversation with?
You will post the video to YouTube and then share on Twitter, with the above tagging and hashtagging.
Don’t worry — you’ll do great!
Article creation
Pretty much the same as the video for points 1 and 2 above. For point 3, swap out ‘how personable are you’ for ‘How is your command of the English language?’ Not only should your writing be free from egregious grammatical and spelling errors, but you should be able to present your ideas in a logical flow. If your article has a lot going for it, we’ll overlook a few errors though.
You will post your article to Medium or Steemit and then share on Twitter, with the above tagging and hashtagging.
Infographic creation
For this category, you’re presenting info about SOMA, in a graphic. So, you need to think about what info you’re presenting, and what the graphic presentation looks like. Infographics will be judged on both the ‘info’ element and the ‘graphic’ element.
Info: anything that you find compelling about the project. Or anything you can dig up from your own research. Let’s say you find statistics about how many counterfeit watches are uncovered every year. Brilliant! Use that — and remember to put a footnote crediting your source!
Pull out any facts, figures, selling points, or tidbits from the whitepaper, pilot description, or use case study. Add to it anything you find on your own. Think about the significance of the information you decide to present. Then think about how you want to present it.
Graphic: Feel free to Google ‘infographics’ and look at examples. Infographics come in a lot of great styles. As long as you keep to basic rules, there’s no right or wrong way to create an infographic. The best ones tend to run vertically, allowing one to scroll down.
We’re not going to steer you stylistically, but hopefully you have some idea of layout and graphic design. And, always include the SOMA logo (ask for it in our Telegram group if you need to).
Take the info, put it into the graphic, and voila! infographic!
The awards
We’ve allocated the equivalent of $10,000 in SCT to this competition. Each category will have a first, second, and third-place winner. The three first-place winners will be judged for an overall prize.
SOMA reserves the right to withhold an award if no entries meet the standards for that award (for example, if one stunning infographic is turned in and the rest are at a third-grade level, we would award 1st place to the eligible infographic and not award a 2nd and 3rd place).
Video awards: $5,000-equivalent SCT pool
1st place will receive the equivalent of $3,000 in SCT.
2nd place will receive the equivalent of $1,400 in SCT
3rd place will receive the equivalent of $600 in SCT
Article awards: $1,500-equivalent SCT pool
1st place will receive the equivalent of $900 in SCT.
2nd place will receive the equivalent of $400 in SCT
3rd place will receive the equivalent of $200 in SCT
Infographic awards: $2,500-equivalent SCT pool
1st place will receive the equivalent of $1,500 in SCT.
2nd place will receive the equivalent of $700 in SCT
3rd place will receive the equivalent of $300 in SCT
Grand prize: $1,000 of SCT
The grand prize winner will receive 1st place in its respective category PLUS the additional $1000 equivalent value of SCT.
Terms and conditions
By submitting your content per the instructions above you grant all rights to SOMA for use of your creation in whole or in part. You also affirm that your creation is not derived from the creations of others and has no claims on the content. SOMA reserves the right to withhold any or all awards based on quality and quantity of submissions.
About SOMA
On legacy ecommerce platforms, anonymous usernames and depersonalized storefronts strip trade interactions of an important social element. Additionally, buyers lack a definitive way to ensure the authenticity of items. Enter SOMA. Our Heimdall Protocol stops forgeries and counterfeiting by validating ownership and provenance history on the blockchain. Social media elements bring personalization and interaction to trade, and allow users to monetize social influence, while a rewards system incentivizes beneficial collaboration and ensures that value-adding services are compensated. Soma is a free-market ecosystem — free of market manipulation, price-fixing, gouging, and bloat.
SOMA links
Website
Telegram
Discord
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Medium
BitcoinTalk
GitHub
Reddit
