For your reading pleasure, we made a transcript of Steven’s last week’s AMA! Translations will follow in the next coming weeks, so please bear with us.
If you’re trying to promote your project today, there’s a good chance that you’re wasting 99% of your spending, while getting a minimal amount of impact on social media. The reason why that happens is that you can’t differentiate in real-time things like spam and relevancy. It’s a recurring thing that happens in lots of cripto ecosystems where you pay people to do certain things, but it all gets consumed by people like bounty hunters, whose job is literally to go out and consume social bounties — they don’t really care about your project. The exact same thing happened with Axie Infinity, where most players are people from the Philippines who do this for a living, not really caring about the game being fun: so when the incentives stop, they stop playing the game. So, when you start doing these marketing campaigns, they all get consumed by people who are probably not going to be future community members, and they’re not going to influence or impact anybody who potentially could be a future community member. All your campaign budget is going down the drain, and you’re not really getting anything out of it.
Types of quantifiable metrics Hype is looking at:
There are three different types of quantifiable metrics, and then there we have lots of sub-metrics that we’re looking at relevance, quality, and impact. Relevance means looking at a specific message and trying to figure out if it is valid uh for payment, or to reward this type of behavior, — sort of a filtering category that answers ‘are they even talking about the project at all?’ Quality is the second category: quality answers ‘Are the discussions meaningful or is it just spam?’ A little bit of spam can be good, but if that’s too much, people be attaching a negative sentiment to your project — definitely not the way to build a sustainable community.
Using Echo Analytics layer for Hype app.
The third, and most important one is impact: do you know how you actually trigger any kind of response or discussion inside the social media platforms. This one is really important, and this is really the final goal. So, the quality factor is sort of an intermediary goal, but the impact is really what you want eventually — generating discussion inside the right groups on the right social platform, ultimately bringing new members into your community.
Let’s dig a little bit deeper into these different categories. In the relevance category, we have baseline admittance which answers ‘does this actually make it right for someone like you to be talking about my project?’ This basic relevance is actually interesting if we consider this across different dimensions: has the person who’s posting it, ever posted cripto-related content in the past? If someone who’s been posting about cats for a while is now posting about cripto on your behalf, those posts are not going to be very relevant as that’s obviously not a cripto influencer. The same goes for the group that this person is posting in: if it’s a group where the subject matter is not relevant to your project or your project’s industry vertical, that’s also not so relevant. The third one is what the content of the message is, i.e. the explicitly stated content of the message: if the message says something about Taraxa, is there something to attract attention that is related to your project. And the fourth one is contextual intent: is it contextually related to your message or not, because in platforms like Telegram and Discord, you might be talking about something but not mention the project, so if someone says ‘Taraxa has just released the testnet’ and ‘Oh yeah, I heard about that’, that second sentence doesn’t really have the word ‘Taraxa’ inside. So, contextually you need to figure out if this is also talking about Taraxa or not.
So, baseline admittance basically answers if the message fits into our consideration for reward: is it at all related to your project your ad campaign, or even your industry vertical. This is very important because the vast majority of messages on social media platforms are not related to what you’re trying to promote, so that needs to be filtered.
The second category is campaign differentiation. At different stages of the project you might want to market different things, so maybe this month you’re talking about your testnet, the next month you’re talking about alpha mainnet, the third month maybe you’re talking about a Dapp partnership. Okay, we have all these messages that are now related to my project and being talked about in the right context, in the right groups, and posted by the right people. So what you’re really trying to do here is to figure out which of your campaigns are they most closely related to, because you might have different rewards for different campaigns, or recency requirements, where you only want to reward the newest campaign. You can now have all these variables so you want to know which campaign it’s related to.
This also goes to another core philosophical concept that we have for the Hype app, and for marketing in general. We believe that marketing shouldn’t happen in fits and starts. So marketing and community building (or hyping in general) should be consistent: it should just happen all the time in a continuous stream that rewards positive behavior. Once you have that continuous stream, another problem is to differentiate between various types of emphasis, because having a continuous stream of hype doesn’t mean you have different emphasis across time. So, campaign differentiation actually helps you to figure out which campaign specifically is most closely related to.
The next one is quality: is it spam, is it informative, and of higher quality? The first sub-category here is crowdedness: are these messages being posted at a very frequency or not. Frequency is very relative, can be inside one group, or across different groups. It’s also very relative because certain groups are very talkative, and if you have a group of 100,000 people with 10,000 people online and they’re all talking, then the feed scrolls up very quickly on your phone or your computer. So if you’re posting at a relatively higher frequency in those groups it might be okay because you know as soon as you post something it gets scrolled up within 10 seconds, so you might need to post it a few times in order for that to work. But if you’re in a smaller group of 20 people online, and no one’s really talking, then you just post the same thing five times, then that’s spam, which only hurts your project.
The next thing that we want to look at is sameness: are the posts highly similar or not? If people are just copy-pasting the same content, there’s definitely going to be a very steep drop-off or reward decay, when it comes to things that happen very frequently and are exactly the same. That’s basically a definition of spam, which you don’t want to reward.
The third one is impact. You have visibility and interactivity, so this is really an end goal: to help your project gain more followers, and more community members by instigating more discussions about your project. So, visibility is about how many people saw your campaigns: in traditional SEO there are things like impressions and engagement, and you can gauge that just by seeing how many people are online, or in Telegram you can actually see how many people saw this message. The more visible, the better. We can actually get those signals and figure out how visible are these messages.
The next category is interactivity. This one is really important, as it instigates further on, follow-up discussions, so you can imagine someone talking about Taraxa launching a testnet inside a group, and then other people start talking about this topic with you, explicitly replying ‘hey I’m interested in this’ or ‘I heard about that’. Or, they have contextual discussions where they don’t specifically reply to but talk about something in close proximity to what you’re saying. So, these are the things you want to see: your ad campaigns to generate discussions on social networks. This is the holy grail: the more of this, the more interested the community is in what you’re doing, potentially bringing more community members.
Another thing that’s missing here is sentiment: is the person talking about you saying positive or negative things about you. The sentiment is very easy to detect from a natural language processing perspective, and we don’t necessarily take a view to only reward positive sentiment — sometimes talk is talk, and any talk is good, so if you’re famous you’re famous even if you’re a little bit infamous. That depends on what result a project really wants to get, so we’re leaving it up to them to reward only positive sentiment messages or both.
All of this is done through a combination of basic search and natural language processing technologies that we’re using. NLP is really a type of AI algorithm that has been to have some basic understanding of what humans are saying. That’s very exciting and a very interesting field of technology that we’re leveraging here.
So, these are the things we’re working on. Right now we’re mostly focused on the relevance section: is this message even related to your project or it’s a post, or a group is even related to your project right, and also ad campaign differentiation.
