The Question Of Human Capital & Growth

Greetings,

On 4/21/2021 there began a discussion on what specific positions are missing in our ecosystem right now. There were many excellent ideas, and as such I wanted to make sure that a thread was created to generate a discussion on the matter.

Here are the key questions:

  1. What Human Capital is needed specifically?
  2. What are the goals / roles of these individuals?

Here was a list of some initial ideas, of which more detail and justification should be added to.

  • Creative Director
  • UI/UX Dev
  • Brand Manager
  • Project Manager
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I think Brendan and I meant the same thing when we said Creative Director/Brand Manager. I look at a lot of normal brands on twitter they post daily, reply to viral tweets/big threads, engagement with users and do promos. A good example is: https://twitter.com/DennysDiner.

Now weā€™re obviously not selling food but I think we could repurpose this model into crypto twitter. We all know the big influencer accounts, what points we need to push, it can source the best memes from the community, and interact with other chains brand accounts directly. I think something like this is really worth experimenting with and could be part of this person role. This person could lead or co-lead the awareness committee and be responsible to talk about what themes are getting the most interaction so the community can help push the message. I donā€™t know if it needs to be a full time job, but this could fill at least half a job description.

If we donā€™t come up with a better idea for the other half or theres too much downtime in this role I propose they spend spare time helping users with simple questions in telegram or discord. ā€œHow do I make a viewing key?ā€ etc

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Troll controlā€¦ There is such thing as active AI fudpupetry

We can see Crypto is currently tribal . Dialogue disruption is a tactic. It is very covert . Question and or comments are written in a way were a new person entering the community would seem to see credibility issues . We have left wild west era and now operate within the den of thieves. It is naĆÆve to believe outside actors would not actively try to cause chaosā€™s within a competing community social media . As the community grows in an ethical organic honest fashion , this issue of distraction campaigns wll not be possible.

This takes a specialized eye . Any direct fud must be questioned and discusses immediately to squash any fud fire befoe they start.

Fud Hunterā€¦ turn the help wanted campaign into an awareness opportunity .

It is a contest for a crypto job,ā€¦ lets go salary , 3 years contractā€¦ 35k ā€¦

How to apply and receive the job offer? Well do a write up on the history of SCRT fud and whomever most eloquently explains why it is not fud , gets the job.

Then they activaly hunt fud and shut it downā€¦ they should have the easy job . They should literally have to nothing if the community continually improves each year creating a strong inclusive atomsphere

This is a pretty junior level position as described all in all. Is this the highest leverage position we can staff for when it can be pretty easily filled by any motivated community member whoā€™s an active member of the awareness committee? And isnā€™t it best done by a long tail of users and community members, not a single shill?

I donā€™t necessarily agree with turning the Secret Network Twitter (our highest value and highest reach brand property) into a meme account. Anything we do to expand its activity has to be done extremely delicately.

To expand this idea of ā€œproject manager,ā€ Iā€™d like to get a sense from the community at large: do you believe it is a net good for the ecosystem if the Foundation employs a full-time professional who will work with the committee leads to install best practices across all committees for project management, recruitment, and execution?

This project manager could work to ensure all projects and leads have clear goals and necessary resources, as well as help hold projects and their owners accountable for their stated KPIs. This can include direct support for SNACs.

Weā€™ve absolutely considered hiring a full-time person for this position, but it would be a wasted effort if there is not buy-in from existing committee leads and committee participants. Are there strong arguments in favor or against?

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Yes I definitely think there needs to be a project manager role that oversees all committees plans, budgets and deliverables. This person would not necessarily have control over the committee lead but keep committee leads accountable on things they are funded to do (not saying any lead is not doing their work but thereā€™s also not a system to keep track of processes and share progress).

This person would also own and execute on cross-committee initiatives. For example weā€™ve been talking about the need to grow the dev community and bring talent to the ecosystem or build branding / landing page for secretNFTs. These tasks donā€™t have owners and as result donā€™t move.

I donā€™t see any argument against it, including foundation being a central point of failure because certain things donā€™t get done unless thereā€™s someone responsible to do it

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Fud hunter would shut down the Seinna airdrop trolls hitting the TG channelsā€¦ it is a set up too cause community pollution when plebs get fooled into thinking there is an airdropā€¦ ā€¦ If there is no Seinna airdrop put out an official announcement now or else plebs fudpets will come hit all social media calling SN team liars.

Not shutting down these rumorā€™s is feeding a fake pump and looks not to genuine.

Are you, or anyone else here, aware of people in similar positions in other crypto projects? Are such crypto project managers successful in delivering and moving the projects forward?

What gets checked regularly gets done, a project/programme manager would be good way to consolidate/manage and report on all the projects on SN. Checking to see if timelines/kpiā€™s are met and also help move projects along. Currently there are many projects ongoing and likely much more as time goes on, however the status/timelines of these ongoing projects is not know to the wider community at least.

100% would like to see a project manager or some other ā€˜spider in the webā€™. Iā€™d like to see the ecosystem as:

  • Enigma working on foundational elements and toolkits
  • Community members working on their expertise (dev, design, nodes, etc.)
  • Foundation managing the ā€˜brandā€™ and work on bringing in new large entities (external affairs so to speak)

Missing link, would be a dedicated person to handle internal affairs;

  • attend all committee meeting,
  • connect people and initiatives,
  • troubleshooting assistance for newbies (discord + telegram),
  • bug collection and reporting to the devs,
  • work out (and manage) a roadmap (or a whiteboard for running projects)

I think the foundation is THE appropiate party to fund this.

Problem 1 ā€“ Design, Brand, UX/UI
Did the community build a basic site that has good speed? Yes.
Does it follow best practices around asset size, cache policy, DOM size, Javascript, CSS, and more? Yes.
Does it have a clear brand image that is consistent around all channels? No.
Does it have professional design with clear/easy to ready font pairings, attractive color pallets, innovative and easy to use UX/UI? No.
Is there constant collateral creation that follows brand guidelines? No.
How do we fix all this? Hire a full time Creative Director. Doesnā€™t need to be from crypto but having experience or an understanding would be great. Tons of these out there. We canā€™t keep outsourcing brand image, site creation, etc. to part-time hobbyists and expect professional, multibillion dollar results. Crowdsourcing this is not efficient. Hire a single professional who is great at what they do and let them execute on their vision and experience.
Action Item: Create a listing for a Creative Director. Post it on all traditional job boards, share within crypto network, cross-post on Twitter. Interview & hire.

Problem 2 ā€“ Growth (Retail interest, Corporate interest, Developer interest)
Tor even says so himself; SN is the most underrated and undervalued project in the space. Why is this? Because to date we have relied on Secret Agents to grow interest around the project. Weā€™re relying on tweets and infographics made in Microsoft Paint to drive adoption. This isnā€™t going to work. Secret Agents are great and a large community in necessary, but again we shouldnā€™t be relying on part-time hobbyists to form our marketing strategy. We need true professionals who know what they are doing to work quickly and efficiently to spread the word and grow SN interest in multiple areas. Secret Agents are perfect for small side projects, helping when more hands are needed, and for amplifying messages.

How do we fix this? Hire a Director of Marketing. Doesnā€™t need to be from crypto. This person will be responsible for structuring the strategies and actionable items for reaching critical mass. There is a ton of work that needs to be done here. This work could be boiled down into two categories: long-term growth & short-term growth.

Action Item: Create a listing for a Director of Marketing. Post it on all traditional job boards, share within crypto network, cross-post on Twitter. Interview & hire.

Long-term: SEO
So much work needs to be done to position SN as a leader in privacy, DeFi, NFTs, etc. We have no SEO strategy and the longer we wait, the harder it will be. Current issues:
Awful keyword rankings. Only ranking for 13 words which are all basic misspellings of ā€œsecretā€.
image

Definitely not what we want. Page authority and domain authority both are way below average because like Iā€™ve said so many times, we donā€™t have professionals working on this! Hereā€™s a comparison between SN and Uniswap / Terra:

See the difference? And I donā€™t even think Uniswap or Terra are heavily focused on SEO at the moment. We could get a big jumpstart here.
Site issues:
A quick analysis shows we have over 1.4k issue on the site that need to be addressed.

Issues with:

And much moreā€¦
Content is NOT being created in a fast, professional, and strategic manner. We simply have blog posts written (which are great) but they donā€™t focus on any keywords or any ranking factors. They arenā€™t looking at search terms that relate to SN and how we can attract eyeballs. Example:

  • NFTs are hot right? Theyā€™re huge and have tons of search results. In fact, there are thousands of people searching for NFT terms or derivatives each month.

  • Guess how may users SN captured from this? I mean youā€™d think it would be huge right? Because SN directly relates and brings a ton of advantages to basic NFTs. They open so many use cases. We got 0. Thereā€™s hardly any content on the site that relates to NFTs let alone content or pages that were strategically created to rank for high volume search terms.

Short-term: Social Media Management + Amplification
Action Item: Create a listing for a Marketing Specialist. Post it on all traditional job boards, share within crypto network, cross-post on Twitter. Interview & hire.
This position would work with the Director of Marketing and the Creative Director to help drive results. They would be the one primarily doing the day-to-day actions such as managing social media platforms, creating engagement and amplifying releases. They would run the plans that are created by the Director of Marketing. Theyā€™d be the one updating titles, metas, looking for new ranking opportunities, etc. Basically the workhorse that may not have the experience and skills of the Director of Marketing. Theyā€™d also communicate with Secret Agents to amplify and grow the network.
I could go on all day with ā€œactionableā€ suggestions and develop plans and strategies on how to solve these, but frankly I donā€™t have the time. The main take away: hire three people who are great at what they do and let them run. We need people that know what theyā€™re doing and have the knowledge and background to get it done. We canā€™t have a bunch of part-time people who dabble in things run what we hope to be a billion dollar ecosystem. Supposedly we have the money. Hire the right people to grow this thing.

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None of my other images (lots of them) arenā€™t allowed to be posted. Iā€™ve spent too much time on this already so Iā€™m not even going to bother.

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YAM Finance are currently onboarding Brand and Product Marketing person. Iā€™m sharing it here as a point of reference what other DeFi projects are doing in terms of human capital and growth.

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Great discussion, thanks @Brian! we also had a fruitful conversation this morning. @Carter-Woetzel will share improvement areas weā€™ve identified shortly

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I recall Brian being banned in a TG group for a being hostile regarding SN development. I donā€™t think Brian is emotionally balanced to be a candidate for any SN official position.

Iā€™m sure Brian is genuine about his distaste for the protocol mainstream trajectory but openly in public settings attacking current leadership is very counter productive and possible bad actor motivated.

I recommend Brian continue to focus on his personal business . Brian I feel does not have an clear understanding in what is involved oin this new blockchain space. Traditional ā€œmarketingā€ to introduce SN to new users will not work as some think .

The initial user base will those that choose to not participate with the current finance disorder.

After discussion with committee leads, the foundation, the community, and Enigma, these are some followings improvement areas (of which human capital allocation and re-allocation can help alleviate)

Improvement areas that were brought up:

  • Ecosystem projects should be summarized in a single place (github repo - ecosystem profiles is a project in motion, needs more attention)
  • How to get projects like auctions to scale?
  • How to set better processes for SNACs? Process is not clear, applicants donā€™t get responses
  • Forum ownership: Committees can have sections to summarize the efforts + committee lead + Carter can be responsible. Better organization of points + faster responses
  • Agent on-boarding program (More touchpoints needed after applying to be a Secret Agent)
  • Developer outreach / developer community building
  • Intra-committee communication / coordination
  • Community misalignment: community / telegram have quite a few frustrations. Thereā€™s lack of transparency - no one knows what committees or the foundation has achieved. Remedy by weekly committee updates on the forums, as well as transparency report.
  • Support: Technical support is needed - Need dedicated individuals to handle this
  • Better UI/UX:
  • Better Enigma transparency on development priorities and what has been built
  • Better developer on-boarding // better organizing developer asks and leveraging channels like Gitcoin
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Yea. Its junior level, but we need someone locked in on growing social media across platforms. This person can start the Tik Tok, manage twitter/IG, etc. I understand hesitation to use official brand properties, but itā€™s what actually fun and engaging about it. The messages come from the official account - not a shill. Thereā€™s def levels of memes and ways of being playful while still being professional. Basically we need a younger person who understand this stuff and will engage with people to increase our exposure and connections (podcasters, influencers, other chains, end users, writers for cointelegraph/decrypt/massari, etc).

As far as why not use a community member if someone can prove theyve grow their personal brand (and not follow for follow) then I wouldnā€™t be opposed, but I havent seen that person yet in our ecosystem. Show me a 20 year old with 10k twitter/tiktok/ig followers who makes jokes and teach them a bit crypto and why were different. Community members would be better off training this person on the crypto side than trying to learn how to become a poster.

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Who is the general target market for the marketing campaign?

Is it twtter meme users or a larger broader demographic?

Is there a pathway from savvy crypto users ā†’ DeFI Users ā†’ profitable DeFi Users ā†’ SCRT hodlers?

Whoā€™s the target? Whatā€™s their demographics? Globally? Regional targeting? Is the goal recognition, adoption, usage?

I donā€™t know how memes lay out any of these targets and goals but Iā€™m pretty sure a full time brand manager would be all over it.

Anyway. First post, but very interested to see where the discussion goes.