Is there anyway we can use the hefty sum on Peer4commit to hire a dedicated marketing/pr person? The community completely transformed with JBT’s help, and it feels like the lack of one is one of the greatest weaknesses of Peercoin at the moment. Thoughts?
Edit: Changed the title, this is something that can be done outside of Peer4Commit.
Maybe we can make a separate fundraiser for that. The Peercoin video project was just fully funded.
I love the idea. It should NOT be some one that doesn’t always have to board airplanes to attend events. It’s too expensive.
It needs to be some one with a face, that can do Skype interviews, youtube videos, radio talk shows by phone (all free, from an internet connection or telephone)
Television appearances when the studio foots the bill for him to appear, or is geographically local.
Some one who holds a sizeable amount of Peercoin to prove that they are tied to Peercoin’s success as well. No scammers or greedy self-interested people. Some credientials to prove they are reliable and can be trusted.
Once peercoin’s value dramatically increases, then we can fit him with an assistant, hotel stays, limos, and his own private jet.
For now, I think the skype, youtube, phone interviewable person who fully understands Peercoin and has a business saavy way of selling it is plenty.
Not the worst idea it’s just that with Peer4Commit, the money is already there. We just have to use some of it and we could do this right now.
We do need it right now. But we also have to be careful of not re-appropriating funds without the community agreeing to it. It also is generally a poor business practice. To raise funds for one thing, and then try and use the funds for some thing else.
People will be scorn and put off by that…
I think right now we should design the concept of the Peercoin PR person (which will take some time and is free to do)…
By the time the new video gets out there, and this market starts becoming favorable, we can use less coins, to get what we need done, and a PR person is definitely on the list as a next fundraiser or purchase.
I agree, we shouldn’t be taking funds from another project that people donated money to. That’s just inviting trouble.
I feel that a better overall presence would only benefit PPC as a whole, including those projects; though I was never suggesting we do something without community consensus.
Vitalik has given a lot of visibility to Peercoin and Primecoin in his speeches, and he isn’t even in the team. We definitely need a “face” to represent Peercoin on conferences, events, interviews. Litecoin has it’s own structural problems, but Bobby Lee is a semi-decent public speaker and a good manager / leader.
History reminds us that there are many superior technologies that didn’t make it because they lost out in adoption. Think about, mini-disk, betamax, palm pre. What I’m trying to say is that we shouldn’t neglect the network effect from PR, community building and marketing.
Yurizhai, I also initially thought community consensus might be enough, but after re-thinking it, I soon realized:
If you were a donator, and didn’t agree with the community consensus to re-appropriate your funds to a different project, you should be given the opportunity to have your donation refunded.
So in a case like that, the donator donated funds on the premise that it would be used for something specific, irregardless of community consensus or the majority vote at a later date.
The refund process would be impossible to administer, especially from “anonymous” donations. Eventually some one would start complaining and hard feelings would result. Not a good situation. 
The only time this could occur, is if donated funds to a project were unable to be used, because the project became unnecessary for some reason. It hit a dead end. At this point, no one could claim that the funds were used inappropriately, because the only method then was to reach a conclusion by community consensus.
But it would have to be one of those… “we had no other option” cases.
Yurizhai, I also initially thought community consensus might be enough, but after re-thinking it, I soon realized:
If you were a donator, and didn’t agree with the community consensus to re-appropriate your funds to a different project, you should be given the opportunity to have your donation refunded.
So in a case like that, the donator donated funds on the premise that it would be used for something specific, irregardless of community consensus or the majority vote at a later date.
The refund process would be impossible to administer, especially from “anonymous” donations. Eventually some one would start complaining and hard feelings would result. Not a good situation.
The only time this could occur, is if donated funds to a project were unable to be used, because the project became unnecessary for some reason. It hit a dead end. At this point, no one could claim that the funds were used inappropriately, because the only method then was to reach a conclusion by community consensus.
But it would have to be one of those… “we had no other option” cases.[/quote]
Yep, if I donated to the video project and my donation was redirected toward wallet development I might be pretty pissed. The only solution here I think would be to develop a new charter like Cybnate did for the video project and start the process over again.
The problem I’m having here is figuring out how much it would cost to pay someone to fill this role full-time, or would it not be a full-time position? It’s not a simple matter of raising funds once and then you’re done. This would be a continuous thing. We can’t raise 1,000 PPC, have him work for 1-2 months and then run out of funds for him to continue working.
Im willing to donate for this.
On a side note, Jeffrey Tucker could be enlightened. He is smart and vocal. Actually I’ll just email him myself.
Before we could hire someone we need to do some really serious fundraising to built a fund where we can pay someone from for at least 3 months (3-6 months contract). On top of that it needs to be topped up every 2-3 months or so. Not sure if this community is strong enough to bear such a thing, but we can try. Anyway, I don’t think full-time would be feasible at all. Two days a week would already be great.
I’m also not so sure about one face though, especially for meetings and presentations all over the world you need a few people to cover that properly.
Instead of hiring someone we can also take a hybrid model with some marginal pay monthly but with strong incentives. E.g. pay for each interview, each presentation, each mention etc.
With that you would also be able to have two or three people on that schema. I think one in US, one and Europe and one in Asia would be the way to go.
The hardest part would be to find someone who is reliable has a decent Peercoin stake or other strong incentive and is available.
Whatever way we go, just make sure you have a good charter for this fund.
My suggestion to start with:
The target would be 3 * 500 PPC 3 month stick around payment + 10 x 100 PPC incentives (excluding any travel, entrance and accommodation costs where applicable) + one part-time person on a ‘salary’ for 16 hours /week (say 3 hours/day) = ~2500 PPC for 3 months (US$25/hour assuming 1 PPC=$2) = ~5000 PPC
So 5000 PPC to start with for just 3 months and then keeping our fingers crossed we can get some good candidates…
After they started you have to start fundraising again to cover the next 3 months etc. Also the complexities around taxes, managing an ongoing fund and hitting regulations makes this a very challenging one. There are good reasons why we are where we are now. I’m afraid that when you really hire people (beyond free-lance) you quickly have to establish some kind of a foundation to make it all work.
Won’t even want to start talking about stretch targets in this case…
So you already guessed, I’m not a fan of hiring people, but we can provide targeted incentives to a designated/pre-selected pool of free-lancers who can pick up jobs or suggest jobs to market Peercoin. That might work given enough funds.
I see some great ideas in the post…
Some kind of community tipping system instead of a fixed+incentives could work too.
This will be a part-time job, paid on commission. Not commission of sales though.
For instance, they do a TV interview that gets broadcasted, they get XYZ number of peercoin
They answer a newspaper reporter’s questions that makes it into print article and published they get XYZ number of peercoin
They do a video interview that makes it into a youtube video with in excess of 25,000 views, they get XYZ number of peercoin. (i know you can buy views. how about organic views)
What ever they do, has to be compensated, based on their performance.
But they can’t do 200 interviews in one day. We have to limit their interviews to 5 a week or something.
[size=12pt]We definitely need a reachable PR person for the media. When the editor says “We need a comment from your Peercoin guy for the next news piece we’re releasing in an hour”, the reporter or journalist can’t waste time. He’s got to call our guy up on the phone and get an official quote he can print or broadcast. Only then will Peercoin be in the mainstream media, and often.[/size]
Next to the new video for peercoin, can we also put:
Hiring a Marketing/PR Person link to this thread:
http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2579.0
…or what ever you think is right. The “most recent posts” at the bottom of the main forum page doesn’t keep things on there long.
Was thinking like a “top 3 hottest projects” that is adjusted only once a month would be nice next to the “New Video for Peercoin”
[quote=“ppcman, post:14, topic:2134”]This will be a part-time job, paid on commission. Not commission of sales though.
For instance, they do a TV interview that gets broadcasted, they get XYZ number of peercoin
They answer a newspaper reporter’s questions that makes it into print article and published they get XYZ number of peercoin
They do a video interview that makes it into a youtube video with in excess of 25,000 views, they get XYZ number of peercoin. (i know you can buy views. how about organic views)
What ever they do, has to be compensated, based on their performance.
But they can’t do 200 interviews in one day. We have to limit their interviews to 5 a week or something.
[size=12pt]We definitely need a reachable PR person for the media. When the editor says “We need a comment from your Peercoin guy for the next news piece we’re releasing in an hour”, the reporter or journalist can’t waste time. He’s got to call our guy up on the phone and get an official quote he can print or broadcast. Only then will Peercoin be in the mainstream media, and often.[/size]
Next to the new video for peercoin, can we also put:
Hiring a Marketing/PR Person link to this thread:
http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2579.0
…or what ever you think is right. The “most recent posts” at the bottom of the main forum page doesn’t keep things on there long.
Was thinking like a “top 3 hottest projects” that is adjusted only once a month would be nice next to the “New Video for Peercoin”[/quote]
link added 
Fuzzybear
[quote=“Cybnate, post:12, topic:2134”]Before we could hire someone we need to do some really serious fundraising to built a fund where we can pay someone from for at least 3 months (3-6 months contract). On top of that it needs to be topped up every 2-3 months or so. Not sure if this community is strong enough to bear such a thing, but we can try. Anyway, I don’t think full-time would be feasible at all. Two days a week would already be great.
I’m also not so sure about one face though, especially for meetings and presentations all over the world you need a few people to cover that properly.
Instead of hiring someone we can also take a hybrid model with some marginal pay monthly but with strong incentives. E.g. pay for each interview, each presentation, each mention etc.
With that you would also be able to have two or three people on that schema. I think one in US, one and Europe and one in Asia would be the way to go.
The hardest part would be to find someone who is reliable has a decent Peercoin stake or other strong incentive and is available.
Whatever way we go, just make sure you have a good charter for this fund.
My suggestion to start with:
The target would be 3 * 500 PPC 3 month stick around payment + 10 x 100 PPC incentives (excluding any travel, entrance and accommodation costs where applicable) + one part-time person on a ‘salary’ for 16 hours /week (say 3 hours/day) = ~2500 PPC for 3 months (US$25/hour assuming 1 PPC=$2) = ~5000 PPC
So 5000 PPC to start with for just 3 months and then keeping our fingers crossed we can get some good candidates…
After they started you have to start fundraising again to cover the next 3 months etc. Also the complexities around taxes, managing an ongoing fund and hitting regulations makes this a very challenging one. There are good reasons why we are where we are now. I’m afraid that when you really hire people (beyond free-lance) you quickly have to establish some kind of a foundation to make it all work.
Won’t even want to start talking about stretch targets in this case…
So you already guessed, I’m not a fan of hiring people, but we can provide targeted incentives to a designated/pre-selected pool of free-lancers who can pick up jobs or suggest jobs to market Peercoin. That might work given enough funds.[/quote]
Good job @Cybnate! And I like the idea, that’s more realistic and achievable.
What about this guy?
[quote=“super3, post:17, topic:2134”]What about this guy?
+1
some other idea, because to me marketing/PR sounds a bit negative, what about calling it “cryptocoin or Peercoin education” (instead of marketing/PR), I guess it is just a name, to me the PR/marketing sounds a lot like a secondhand car salesman thing
It’s an industry term that the media associations with… We’re trying to reach the mainstream media and that’s the only way to do it. We need is to play the rules of their game.
We need what the rest of the industrialized world would call a marketing or PR person.
It’s an industry term that the media associations with… We’re trying to reach the mainstream media and that’s the only way to do it. We need is to play the rules of their game.
We need what the rest of the industrialized world would call a marketing or PR person.[/quote]
What about calling it Peercoin advocacy? And whoever does the job is the Peercoin advocate. We need to play by the rules but a little creativity to differentiate ourselves won’t hurt.
Just an idea, I’m not too bothered about it honestly.