Topic: Why I think blockchain will revolutionize small business marketing - page 2. (Read 662 times)

A currency like bitcoin can help many businesses that have very low profit margins, and this is possible because if you were to process the very same transaction with a bank, the bank will subtract a portion of that transaction and keep that money for themselves, but when it comes to bitcoin the buyer only needs to pay the transaction fee and you keep the rest of the money for yourself.

I believe on the same thing. While cryptocurrency is at the turmoil right now and greatly riddled with so many scams and frauds, the technology behind this all which is the blockchain that is the one which is more important and has the potential to revolutionize many sectors including the SMEs players. Small business can be lean and can easily adopt to new technologies provided there is already an available infrastructure they can easily use...this is now the challenge of many providers to come up with the effective, robust but very much affordable platform for small business that can bolster their business and can level the field in the face of so much competition for customers' attention and purchasing power. This is the time for small business to shine...

The transparency aspect is actually a very good way to start when it comes to new businesses utilizing the blockchain technology. At least for one thing, blockchain allows the secure sharing of business processes within companies and partners, which can be related to business activities, contracts, records, and so on.

All these things make sense for a business trying to bring the future quickly into the present and I believe it would go a very long way for the development and growth of such business in a short time. nevertheless, we should still not forget that all these depends on how well the team is ready to work as blockchain technology itself will not just be some magic wand to make businesses successful out of nothing.

Small businesses in their custody will face certain difficulties in terms of capital and scale but they on a small scale they can diversify their investments and can reach the blockchain.

Why did you decide to use the NEO platform if it would make your tokens easier to he listed in exchanges if it was an ERC20 token issued in the Ethereum platform.

Have you considered less known but time tested platforms like Burst maybe?

I am working on a blockchain startup to help small businesses with marketing. I am looking for feedback about my logic and idea so please help me out!

To start, I think there are some strong commonalities between a successful business and a thriving blockchain project:

Commonality #1 — Solution Focused
Business: Any successful business needs to be solving some sort of problem for a group of people. It can be as simple as “I want a coffee shop at this corner on my way to work” or it can be “I want to get survey results faster”.
Blockchain: Time and time again it has shown how institutions have failed us. The lack of transparency and their drive for self-interests at others’ expenses left all of us feeling frustrated or even betrayed. Blockchain aims at solving that problem and eliminates the middleman.

Commonality #2 — Trust Earned
Business: No one would trust a restaurant that constantly causes people to feel ill nor will we trust brands that violate their own value. Earning trust from others is difficult but highly rewarding when obtained. Unfortunately, trust can be lost easily when things go wrong.
Blockchain: It is the first real alternative that has shown potential in solving the trust issue with centralized institutions like banks or government. Through the use of smart contract within the blockchain, users no longer have to trust another human being to handle their transactions.

Commonality #3— Network Growth
Business: Throwing money at advertisement can only go so far. It is normally the referrals and returning customers that will ultimately make or break the business. A business that has already earned customer trusts can acquire returning business much easier than from a brand new customers.
Blockchain: A highly involved network of users is key to success. There are contributors and then there are beneficiaries. Sometimes it takes just one person’s influential action to get it going. It wasn’t until someone bought 2 slices of pizza with 10,000 Bitcoins that people realized this “digital money” can actually be used and have value.

Current Non-Blockchain-Based Marketing Options
There are so many options for businesses to consider. Aside from social media, there are e-marketing, print media, radio, TV, billboards, direct mailing, and all sorts of other ways. And in each categories of marketing methods, there are countless companies trying to compete with each other. While I doubt that blockchain can truly disrupt all the ways of marketing, I believe it does have some unique advantages that businesses can benefit from.

Our Answers to Use Blockchain to Benefit Business Marketing

• Blockchain makes cryptocurrency possible and it can be a unique reward system that stands out against thousands of loyalty program out there
• Blockchain's decentralized mechanism allows us to implement a platform-wide user contribution process that connects them with businesses, which in return can potentially give them lots of exposure

For more detail, you can read the original content from my full article on Medium -> https://hackernoon.com/what-can-blockchain-do-for-small-business-marketing-7a1458f1784c

Thanks for reading and please feel free to comment below. I love to hear what this community thinks and if we are on the right path.

The blockchain technology has been identified as a means of supporting and boosting upstarts and small businesses. The open source protocol, transparency, and peer-to-peer interactions makes it suitable. Your idea looks good on paper. Time to get to work.

We are considering to build the solution under NEO blockchain so I don't think we will have enough volume to over take the platform. So Challenge participants will just simply sign up the Challenge that got posted. Then when they complete, they are rewarded with tokens. They won't be having nodes nor voting power under this structure.

That being said, we have considered to build our own blockchain in the future. In fact, our co-founder is investigating the idea now as we suspect it may cost a lot of GAS for the community validation mechanism when we are scaling. We prefer to have registered businesses to be nodes instead just anybody. We are targeting specifically at small business owners, which mostly aren't techy/interested enough to coordinate a global 51% attack of a blockchain. Business owners will have to option pay tokens to post Challenges so should be in their interest to be a node as well.

I am not sure to understand, from a company point of view, why a company should implement a cryptocurrency instead of the traditional loyalty program. And the same, from a customer point of view. Why a customer would prefer a cryptocurrency instead of the loyalty program.

Are you talking about a cryptocurrency that could be listed on an exchange? Or just a token usable on the site only. Because in case it's about a crypto I see a problem in. Let"s says the token triple or more within months, the company will so start to see reduced profits and so losing money.

Probably not. If it involves cryptocurrency then its not going to be very good for small businesses as it will be manipulated. But if its just for the product manufacturing, accounting and licensing and whatever, this blockchain technology will be one of the greatest of all as it can be traced back down to where and who the product were because of transparency.

Proof of Completing Challenges lol. It might work, might not work, but it would depend on having people solving the challenges. What about the nodes? Does each challenge solver have to run one, or can they join a pool?

How do you protect the system from 51% attacks? The challenge solvers might collude and hard fork the project.

I am not sure to understand, from a company point of view, why a company should implement a cryptocurrency instead of the traditional loyalty program. And the same, from a customer point of view. Why a customer would prefer a cryptocurrency instead of the loyalty program.

Are you talking about a cryptocurrency that could be listed on an exchange? Or just a token usable on the site only. Because in case it's about a crypto I see a problem in. Let"s says the token triple or more within months, the company will so start to see reduced profits and so losing money.

And don't forget about more particular examples like smart contracts. For example, I follow closely SciDex. They are creating a new type of smart contract generator for complex transactions. So that even regular businesses that need legally binding contracts can be on the blockchain. That’s improving the whole blockchain ecosystem, if you ask me.

These are really good questions. In fact, I've asked them to myself and the rest of the team a number of times. Below is what we have came up with that helped us to solidify the use of blockchain for our solution.

First, we want to utilize blockchain's ability to gather consensus from all users for marketing purposes on an immutable and transparent ledger. Nodis.io allows businesses to post up Challenges for people to participate and receive crypto as reward. Upon completion of a Challenge, participant will submit the proof (image, video, etc) on our website for validation. This is where blockchain comes in. We will open up to all users on our platform to validate the submissions. Majority side of the voters will receive a small portion of tokens as reward for the effort. All votes will be tracked and recorded for transparency. This community validation process will give businesses significantly more exposure. The best part of all is that this whole process can be automated. All businesses have to do is post a Challenge and done. This can potentially solve the lack of time issue. And when participants/voters are paid in crypto, it'll resolve the lack of money issue. The only cost is that businesses are required to post up discount vouchers for exchange with tokens.

As for the token pricing fluctuation issue, that's truly a tough one. We will be listing on an exchange as we are looking to do token sale. Our current option is to have a fiat-to-token conversion calculator so that people know how much token to pay for each voucher.

I hope these explanation helps!

Your logic is mostly correct "although I did not understand the third point" but you have to rephrase it to be attractive.

For example, you can set up a coffee shop and use Blockchain to ensure transparency.
The coffee was grown on day X, using the equipment x, and then harvested using x, packaged x, and made by x, all these steps checked using blockchain to ensure the highest quality.

High transparency leads to trust, as the customer will ensure a high-quality product with the accents requested, leading to confidence in the store without the use of trademarks.

For the rest of the points, I think you confuse the concept of "Blockchain" and "Cryptocurrency," correct me if I am wrong.

This is a very good advantage of bitcoinchain. I think a sincere government or society will welcome blockchain because of this transparency and trust that it builds. With blockchain, you don't have any doubt about any transaction. Sometimes, when you are even making a transfer transaction, even without total confirmation, you can see the transaction already in motion and you are assured of no manipulations.

Your views are very good. But there are too many barriers to using blockchain. Since the technology has not really been applied, there are no laws and many countries have not really recognized.