Forget your good old PR, digital community is the king.

I’ve been involved in content and PR in the Wild Wild West of ICOs for quite a while now, and I just gotta let it out. Call it bragging or whatnot, there is this one confession to be made: most of marketing people in crypto still got no clue about how crypto industry really works.

Respect the crypto mecca

Community is the king in crypto, and Telegram rules it. The mecca of chat rooms for ICOs is the first channel you wanna be on. But don’t rush, dummy. Before launching a Telegram chat, make sure ‘the final final’ version of your website is up and running smoothly. Otherwise, it either gets overloaded by traffic, or raises a great amount of ambiguity that your community managers who are the first at the fire line probably won’t handle. Have mercy for them: never release a WP, until you’re all set with ‘Tokensale’ chapter. Otherwise, you’ll get caught in your own trap of never-ending dealing with the questions you don’t have answers to yet. Reputation is not something that can be built over night, and that ‘damn WP chapter’ could have been finished sooner, if you bothered to hire a decent token economy expert to come up with a business model. At least, that would help you avoiding one of the haters’ favorite question: ‘And why do you guys need to run this on blockchain?’

Get those damn organic followers

Still can’t figure out how to get that organic social media following? Pour in some traffic to the page with zero content. Hello, it’s me captain obvious speaking: make some effort to repost some of those McAffee’s tweets at least. Alternatively, I got one cheat code for you here called ‘delete everything’: this is where you’re basically saying ‘oops, we never started this page’. This is how you end up with never getting another chance to draw the audience, which is probably for the better. No one was ever going to buy your tokens, anyways.

Everyone wants to be exclusive and first-blockchain-platform-leveraging-the-coolest-technology. However, you could probably get more creative than asking prospective investors to join the Whitelist hoping that they immediately feel privileged to get a dubious chance to apply to invest into something no one has ever heard about. How about making a slight effort to engage the audience just for a change? ‘I want Cointelegraph!’, is probably the most frequent request that I’m getting from nitty-witty CEOs. They all lusting it like crazy. But wait a minute, have you guys heard of Alexa rank? Not trying to demolish ‘the most read crypto media in the world’, but really there are tech media with higher rankings! I’m not even talking Techcrunch here. Turn to major Medium publications focused on tech that has been out there for much longer drawing in the enthusiast audience engaged in lively quality discussions. Now we’re talking audience engagement. Tokeneconomy, Consensys and a number of personal blogs are some of my top-favorites here. Trust me, your potential investors, enthusiasts and — most importantly — investment funds and other big players are all hanging out there.

Any brand director in ‘so last season fiat industry’ would cry out loud, if he saw you trying to cut the costs on hiring a designer and instead using ‘some basic images just to fill up the space’. Remember, dummy, visuals aligned with your brand strategy are essential. ‘Okay, we’ll make stickers then!’ Now you’re getting there. Remember I grumbled about user engagement? How about launching a design contest — let people get creative, believe me the results will outperform your KPIs big time. I came across this one community quest run by this emerging platform Akropolis, with all sorts of quizzes and riddles, and the community engagement in their Telegram is really massive.

Mind the code

Here is one of my favorites: ‘‘We’ll fill out the GitHub page later, no one can read that damn code anyway!’ Well, you’re wrong, dummy. Get that code straight and make it pop out. And probably consider hiring CTO who won’t be telling you that the code is ‘private’: he probably doesn’t have it or your ICO is scam — unless that was your initial plan. Gone are the times when one could get away with copy pasting the lines of code or stealing from the rival’s page. And please, please do not announce the ICO start date, until you’re got that ERC-20 up and running. Cause there actually might be some people who would really want to transfer their precious bitcoins to buy your token.

Anything goes in PR hustle

One thing that everyone chose not to notice, yet it is running under the counter, is bribing. That might sound a bit of a strong word, but that’s what it really is. Media outlets supply the readers with paid PRs here and there, exchanges are allegedly (or in fact) manipulating the asset prices, while expert rating opinions are bought for a certain amount of BTC.

‘I get approached by blockchain entrepreneur wannabes with innocent requests to review their project on ICO Bench or mention on Cointelegraph. Some of them are rather straight-forward paid offers. What strikes me is that those shady ICOs are not even trying to get the essence of tokenization. Have you guys ever asked yourself why you need to run the business on blockchain? Meanwhile, in ICO projects architecture is essential to design business processes so that the token was attractive for investment and had both potential of its value growth at the external market and potential for its inner value growth when scaling the project. Not so many startups are capable of handling it: more often than not the business itself and the token are on the opposite ends. And honestly, there are cases when in fact the business would be operating so much better without introducing a token at all. I’d say that a successful ICO is essentially a combination of good product, effective marketing strategy and proper market placement,’

says Vasily Sumanov who is also getting his share of annoying LinkedIn message buzz.

On a larger scale, the implications of this are rather alarming for blockchain industry as a whole. Not only the reputation is at stake. By launching a token for the sake of pushing it to the exchange and pumping up the price, those ‘artful entrepreneurs’ are merely demolishing our good faith in new technologies.

‘Are we done yet? I just wanna sell those tokens, man’. Hey, I’m trying to help you here. One last thing: ICO listings. Very important: ‘The more listings we cover, the more people buy the token’. Well, sometimes — or more so, almost every time — quality wins over quantity. Check out a good old Alexa rank for the most visited sites out of that huge list — no one ever gets down further than the first 10 anyways.

Dig deeper, think harder

One major take away for a crypto dummy CMO scratching their head over ‘that damn ICO’ is this: do not try to seem am expert, just be it! Meaning that the best idea before actually getting involved into the token sale, get yourself acquainted with the industry, go the conference, read that damn Cointelegraph, and — most importantly — talk to a guru: if you’re lucky he or she will probably tell you that social media and Telegram updates are not really selling your tokens — the business is done elsewhere.

PS: I could dwell on the subject infinitely, yet I’m pressed in time - got a number of ICOs to attend to. Hit me up, if you guys wanna get into more of this. Do not hit me up, if you’re running an ICO. No, I’m kidding :)