There are certain strategies which you can employ to help you create effective and long lasting positive blockchain PR. The most important thing to remember about these strategies is that you need to start early and you need to start small. You will need to build the narrative over time by planting the seeds in people’s minds that, with continued nurturing, will flourish into full blown associations with your project. This blog post will outline three key characteristics behind a long lasting and positive blockchain PR strategy.
Engagement
How can you expect to have any success without the correct level of engagement? Indeed, engaging with the wider community is needed on a regular and planned basis. Keeping the tone and messaging the same over all your project’s comms will give it an authoritative and recognisable voice. It is important here that you are able to strike the balance between a tone which creates a sense of authority, but also approachability. You don’t want the project’s tone of voice to come off as sounding imperious – this would negatively influence the wider community – and you also don’t want to come off as being considered too playful. The best way to imagine this is to sound like you are a having an honest and frank discussion with the audience, which is made up of equal and valued participants.
The communication strategy is best when all the lines of communication are in synchronisation and building the same narrative. This means that the communication should be planned and should not be conducted whimsically. As such, it would be wise to delegate the strategy to one team that has ownership of the whole process, allowing for greater coherency and the chance to foster the ability to create a unified position.
It also needs to be stressed that the planned strategy for engagement needs to be flexible. Although we have mentioned that there needs to be an element of planning involved, there also needs to be a degree to which the plan can be proactively changed in order to fit the changes that will undoubtedly occur in other aspects of the project. This is not to say that we encourage your engagement strategy to be reactive – on the contrary, we feel that maintaining an overarching plan whilst also having the flexibility to engage with things as and when they occur is the best way to approach the topic of engagement.
It is without a shadow of a doubt that transparency will always play a leading role in any successful blockchain PR strategy. This comes down to a variety of reasons, most prominent of which is the nature of the blockchain space. Indeed, the fact that people are able to invest into a project they have heard about or read about over the internet, often without ever having spoken to anyone related to the project in person, and without physical contact with any members of the project, means that transparency is such a key issue.
When we think about bringing attention to your project, we mean for the right reasons. The level of transparency is entirely up to you to decide for yourself, and this should be considered and discussed at length. However, we want to encourage you to try and be as open with the community as possible and allow them some insight into the project. These can take a variety of forms: insight into what the project is doing, whether or not it is hitting its goal, interesting in-depth pieces about members of the team’s journey and how they became involved with the project, the prime motivations for creating the project in the first place, detailed reporting about where the ICO funding has gone – these are just a few possible examples.
A demonstration that the teams’ tokens are locked-up and will only be released against certain established vesting milestones will show the wider community the successful development of the project is the key motivation of the project’s team. This tends to lessen fears that the team will dump the tokens on the market for personal financial gain. We encourage projects to take note of the importance of transparency as one of the key factors in building a successful and long lasting healthy public image. The most essential point of all is to build the narrative from the off and remember that a healthy project has transparency at its core.
Change
In order to successfully tell the story behind why your project exists it may be helpful to ask yourself this question: how does my project promote change in society? Answering this question will give you the best way to frame the construction of your narrative in the most appealing way. It will give you a greater understanding of how best to talk to the wider community about the project. It needs to be targeted to the area in which your project will affect the most change and will thus be the most receptive to it.
However, we feel it is important to stress that the change your project wishes to create should also be relative and focus on tangible and realistic change and not an abstract and overblown sentiment. One of the surest ways to put people off a project is to make grandiose claims which are – quite frankly – entirely unrealistic.
Furthermore, change should be displayed as something that will be able to help people. Disintermediation – although sought after in many cases – can also negatively affect certain people’s lives. We have to imagine that although disintermediation can encourage the development of new business models which have the potential to radically alter society, we must also remember that there are numerous constituencies which are set to ‘lose out’ due to disintermediation. We are not advocating that you do not go ahead with your planned project because it might cost people their livelihood. However, we feel that this needs to be taken into account when discussing the issues in the public.
Indeed, by suggesting this fact, we do not want to come across as some form of neo-luddites wishing to hold back the inevitable development of technology. We solely want to raise the issue that with change there also comes an element of pain and that this acknowledgement should not be left out of the picture.
Overall then, the three areas which we have touched upon – engagement, transparency and change – are all vital to building a coherent narrative and creating a vital and successful story which you are able to tell the world. As technological developments occur throughout the following few years, we hope that your project remains at the forefront of those developments. There is so much to be done and there are so many opportunities to build the future of the internet and create a much more inclusive and accessible world economy. It is of course yet to be seen how blockchain will enable a brighter and better tomorrow but it is hoped that by following some of the strategies mentioned above that the message about the nature of your project can be displayed in a coherent and correct manner.
Get in touch if you want to book a consultation to learn how we are able to help you. We love hearing from all types of projects are excited to playing such a crucial role in the development of the blockchain space as a whole.
