Last week I announced the Steem Shilling Contest to encourage people to "shill" (promote) Steem. The main intention was to market Steem to the target audience of the cryptocurrency world/community and potential investors. The results are in :)

The prizes for the contest were:

• First place will get 75 STEEM.
• Second place will get 40 STEEM.
• Third place will get 20 STEEM.
• 15 honorable mentions will get 1 STEEM (each).

In addition to the STEEM prizes, @aggroed agreed to give resteems from @aggroed, @lovejuice, and @minnowsupport for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners. The winners can message @aggroed through PALnet Discord to claim this part of the prize.

Here are the winners:

First Place (75 STEEM)

@zoeyartanddesign created informative GIF images describing the benefits of the Steem blockchain, and posted them in several Facebook groups where cryptocurrency investors hang out:

You can read more about it here.

The reason I chose this as first place was because it was the textbook example of what I was looking for - promoting Steem to potential investors.

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Second Place (40 STEEM)

@indigoocean thought of a very creative way to shill Steem - by creating a video analyzing STEEM and Ripple (XRP) in the context of the criteria that GDAX/Coinbase uses to determine whether they list a new coin.

The reason I chose this one is because I really liked how it subtly promoted STEEM in a way that created material cryptocurrency investors would be interested in viewing. After drawing them in with interesting subject matter, the video educated them on why Steem is a great project.

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Third Place (20 STEEM)

@doomsdaychassis had a "Powered by Steem" design put on a race car!

The reason I chose this one was because I found it extremely cool! It is awesome to be able to say Steem is on a race car :)

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Honorable mentions

I decided to award 1 STEEM to everyone that I felt contributed in a meaningful way. You can see all of the contributions in the comments section of this post.

@trumpman @howtostartablog @yesaye @tezzmax @jasonshick @ackza @setapart @danieldoughty @cryptolite @firepower @bitcoinflood @outerground @hayatullahpasee @olusegun3386 @sanjeevm @katteasis @eddy2cul @connecteconomy @edwardian @ddangerwu @leoumesh @jie28 @mountainjewel @djoi @mobbs @dunsky @admiralsp @uniqueknowledge @cortexx @normalbro @neihy05 @bait002 @datascience @oscarcc89 @laxmikadariya @jazzresin @creativesoul @brianturner @moneyinfant @wdoutjah @itsandylandman @conradsuperb @herzaseptian @insideoutlet @teamnepal @melvadg @norkamoran @abieikram @harddeynike @varunpaherwar @allseeingewe @vintageverve @varignon @mfxae86 @apolymask @thenomadictales @dilimunanzar @ecoinstant @munadikiehl @taministy @gallantmayor @richgang @tedtv @jackdogho @georgie84 @thecrytotrader @foovler @fitinfun @isteemithard @anarcho-andrei

Thank you everyone for your participation!

I want to thank everyone that participated. There were a lot of great submissions, and I think everyone did a great job promoting Steem in their own way.

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Closing thoughts

I learned some things as far as what worked and what didn't. My main intention was to promote Steem to potential investors. I don't think I really hit the mark for that. There were a lot of great "shills", but the majority of the entries seemed geared towards recruiting more content producers. Not that this is bad - but it wasn't really the intent of my contest. I also think a lot of people submitted entries for things they had done in the past, even though the intent of the contest was to encourage people to do new things.

Planning "Round 2"

Based on my "lessons learned" I plan to host round 2 of the contest next week with some revised rules. Stay tuned :)