This article describes a three-pronged plan to promote Steem in the region around Chester County, Pennsylvania. Efforts are directed at general advertising, attracting business and non-profit investors, and recruiting interactive users from local colleges and universities.

---

Introduction

This is a response to Steemit's post, 100 DAYS OF STEEM : Day 67 - Monday Challenge - My Local Steem Promotion Plan. In this post, I'll be commenting on what a promotion effort might look like in my community. Hopefully, some of these ideas can also be applied in other communities.

Because of an anticipated change in my employment situation in the near future, I will not be able to lead an initiative like this, but I would be willing to provide some level of advice - in the form of location specific information - and other support if the effort were undertaken by someone else. ( Frankly, no one wants me doing cold calls, anyway ; -)

A Local Promotion Plan for Promoting Steem in Chester County, Pennsylvania

Chester County, PA

Chester County, Pennsylvania is located in the south-eastern part of the state, about 20 miles west of Philadelphia, PA, and 8 miles North of Wilmington, Delaware. In texture, the county varies from (very) small urban centers in places like West Chester, Downingtown, Phoenixville, and Coatesville to suburban, and even rural areas. I live on the outskirts of West Chester, which is the county seat, and also a college town. Students from the West Chester University of Pennsylvania (when not shuttered by pandemic lockdowns) make up about 17,000 of the county's 500,000 residents.

According to wikipedia, when ranked by annual per-capita income, the county is ranked 35th nationally and first in Pennsylvania.

One of the main highways and business corridors that runs through the south-eastern portion of Chester County is route 202, which I believe handles somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 cars per day (when not shut down by pandemic lockdowns).

If I were to develop a marketing plan for the local area, I would start by focusing on West Chester, and the nearby 202 corridor.

It's worth noting that outside of the county, on the nearby "main line" area of Pennsylvania, there are many other noteworthy colleges, including Villanova University, Bryn Mawr College, Haverford College, and others. Of course 20 miles away, Philadelphia has schools like Drexel, Temple, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Because of its relatively high ranking for annual per-capita income, Chester County is an attractive area for finding investors, and because of the presence of local and nearby colleges, it is also an attractive area for recruiting interactive Steem platform users.

My local promotion plan, then, would focus on three main prongs: general advertising, investor partnerships, and attracting interactive users. For investor partnerships, I would focus on two categories of potential investors: local for-profit businesses, and local non-profits. For attracting users, I would focus entirely on local colleges, starting with West Chester University of PA, then moving on to other schools in the region.

General Advertising

My general advertising effort would focus on the 202 corridor and local media publications.

The highway already has electronic billboards where advertisers can purchase advertising. According to this site, billboard advertising in the Philadelphia area costs about $900 to $5,000 per month with COVID discounts, and $1,500 to $12,000 during normal times. In general, that translates to a cost of about $5.21 per impression.

Additionally, my own home is adjacent to the highway and zoned for commercial use, so it might even be possible to place a sign on my own property that would be visible to about 20,000 people per day, although I'd need to learn more about the zoning and other regulatory restrictions. If it passes regulatory/zoning requirements, an advantage to this is that I might be able to accept payment for advertising in STEEM or SBD.

Finally, I would place advertising in local media outlets like the Daily Local News and the West Chester Patch. I have no idea what this would cost, but maybe a partnership could be arranged where they discount the advertising cost and receive high-value upvotes on some amount of content that they cross-post to the Steem blockchain (subject to quality standards).

This advertising would focus on both investors and platform users, with a priority on investors. I have no idea how much it costs to create a professional-quality advertisement.

Investors

Attracting investors is a matter of showing the investor how the blockchain can enhance their ongoing activities. To this end, I would focus on cold calling and/or in-person visits to for-profit and non-profit business investors that operate along the 202 corridor.

Local businesses

Loyalty Rewards Programs

An idea that I had a while ago is that a business could purchase a sizeable stake of Steem and offer a rewards program to their patrons by upvoting the posts of people who visit the business and post "selfies" inside the store. This way, the business could reward their customers and also generate revenue for their own business. Instead of being a loss-leader, the rewards program is flipped and begins generating revenue.

Businesses that are well-suited for this use case include retailers, health clubs, and other busineses that depend on physical customers in brick and mortar locations.

Business profiles

I would attempt to attract businesses to the blockchain by appealing to their vanity. To do this, I would interview local business owners or managers and post profiles of their businesses on the blockchain. Hopefully, it could be arranged for these profiles to receive upvotes from high-worth Steem investors so that when the business representatives view the profile, they would see a well-rewarded post.

I would point out to these business owners and managers that they could use the blockchain to communicate with their customers and generate revenue while they're doing it.

Businesses that are well suited for this use case include businesses that engage heavily in social media interaction with their customers.

Along these lines, I have even considered launching a dedicated Steem account that would be dedicated to highlighting local business profiles every single day, but I never found time to begin such an initiative.

Non-profits

The nice thing about non-profits is that they already have a community that is determined to support them. So, a non-profit organization that joins the blockchain would be motivated to recruit its own supporters to do the same. And the supporters will be motivated to invest in the blockchain so they can increase their support.

In a wealthy community like Chester County, what can be more appealing than supporting a cause that you care about and earning interest from the blockchain and also curation rewards while you do it?

An ideal non-profit that comes to mind for me is the Brandywine Valley SPCA (BVSPCA). People love cute animal pictures. The BVSPCA could post original photos of their rescued animals every day, and their supporters could support the organization by upvoting the photos. It's not in my area, but another one that comes to mind for the same reasons is the Wolf Sanctuary of Pennsylvania.

Other obvious non-profit organizations that could be approached include the large number of churches in the area, where the churches could encourage their existing congregations to support them through the use of blog posts and up-votes. Wealthier members of the congregations would even figure out that they could support their church more, and simultaneously increase their own curation rewards, by increasing their Steem holdings.

Other possible subjects for recruitment include the Chester County Parks, Longwood Gardens, the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, or even the National Park Service, who runs the Valley Forge National Historical Park.

Attracting interactive users

As mentioned, I think the best place to focus on interactive users in my area is in the local university. I already sketched an outline for recruiting at universities, so I'll repeat that here:

This is not my forté, but for whatever it's worth, here's some brainstorming:

• Start with colleges, not high schools, just to minimize potential legal/regulatory/ethical issues with recruiting students under the age of 18.
• Pick a few starting colleges
• Set up a "fast pass" to the account creation process so students from those schools can get quick/immediate account creation.
• Set up and manage Steem communities for the schools.
• Identify on-campus "influencer" students from other social media platforms or other research (maybe focus on comp. sci., journalism, communications, and other "friendly" majors?)
• Hire some of them into 1-semester part time jobs to bootstrap the schools' communities with photography, videos, or articles about campus life; to share those articles with followers on other platforms; and to recruit their peers into the Steem community.
• Provide them with guidelines about privacy, copyright, key security, accessing exchanges, etc.
• Advertise on campus, near campus, in the school newspaper, give away T-shirts & gear to students, etc...
• Make sure the communities are well-curated & moderated until they get off the ground. Keep rewards at realistic levels to manage expectations, but don't let them be ignored.
• Partner with Appics, Actifit, and/or others on the initiative?
• At the end of the semester, transfer community ownership to... someone... not sure who... faculty? admin? student? alumni assoc? endowment? Might vary by school...
• New semester, new schools. Experiment with different sizes and types of schools. Revise the program and scale up for more schools per semester as time passes.
• Hopefully, at some point, the network effect will take over and new schools will start coming online without active recruitment efforts. Not sure why, but for some reason the number "50" sticks in my head for the number of schools when Facebook hit some sort of tipping point. > - Maybe achievable in 3-4 years?

As noted above, I would start this effort at West Chester University of PA and then expand to other colleges along the "main line" and eventually into Philadelphia.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would say that recruitment in this region should mostly prioritize investment. I believe that Steem needs somewhere between 1,000-10,000 (upon reflection, maybe that overstated it) 100-1,000 times as many curators as it has authors, or maybe even more. Many efforts in the past have focused on attracting content creators, but without people investing in curation, that leads to a collapse in the token values.

As a result, I think the ideal recruiting subject is an organization that already exists with a central entity who could act as a content creator, and who is already surrounded by large numbers of supporters who could become investors.

As one of the wealthiest counties in the US, Chester County is an ideal place to seek investors. In my opinion, the second priority for the area should be to seek interactive users from the high concentration of colleges and universities in the area.

Although I have written this with specific examples from Chester County in mind, I hope some of the general ideas could also be harnessed in other regions.

---

Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

---

Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

Steve is also a co-founder of the Steem's Best Classical Music Facebook page, and the @classical-music steemit curation account.

Follow in RSS: @remlaps, @remlaps-lite