Hello cryptofameboy, thanks for your thoughtful response.
I understand why one might question the effectiveness of this program in theory, but in practice its been quite effective.
So some accounts will reach over 1000 Impressions, I am sure of that. But likely not with quality tweets or even megathreads (a megathread is a multiple tweet cascade focused on high-quality information and summaries)
This simply hasn’t been the case.
Here’s why: Some accounts (small-med) have cracked the code to some extent on what it takes to go (relatively) viral on crypto twitter. We have accounts earning $1k-$8k/mo participating in this program, and the aggregate impression results are beginning to eclipse those garnered by our official account.
If we calculate that, Medium contributors need to get 2000 people to click on the article in the BEST case. In the worst case, they need 5000 to get $100. Again, I do not think the average crypto account has this reach or force to make this happen - especially not often.
There may be a mismatch between the expectation that this program is suitable for anyone to make a decent wage and that it is actually available for anyone to participate and try their hand. The purpose of incentivizing based on the attention it receives is to orient participants toward what we find valuable - which is delivering product value context to a lot of people.
I’ll quickly touch on a few more points raised:
I’ve done a ton of first hand research into what crypto influencer and publisher rates are, I don’t necessarily consider the list you sent over to be the kind of opportunities that we would look for (high context, highly targetted, engaged DeFi native audiences) - we’ve been deliberating about how to do a broader reachout campaign to “larger” accounts (think 5k-100k followers), where we think the numbers provided are, in fact, attractive (perhaps too much so).
I think the rest of the argument that money can be better spent based on social media advertising rates (we cannot advertise on large social media platforms) is lacking the market data context we used to come to these price points. The idea behind impression mining is it is, in fact, the lowest cost per impression we can achieve with regularity.
I want to second everything @LemonadeAlpha has laid out here. Impression mining has been vital for the emergence of several extremely high quality Index Coop related accounts that consistently produce viral or semi-viral content.
Looking back to the pre-impression mining days - you never saw IC on Twitter. Now every time I open up Twitter it’s just a wall of Index Coop tweets.
I firmly believe that impression mining is setting the standard for generating marketing in an organic and exciting way.
IMHO we don’t give impression mining enough credit for how much the reach of IC has increased over the past four months.
Huge shoutout to the entire growth team and especially @LemonadeAlpha for driving this forward.
Thanks for your long answer. Fantastic numbers for Cryptotexan, he seems to be an outlier though. The other numbers just prove my point. This campaign is not suitable for most CT people.
Even a Twitter account solely focused on driving content for IndexCoop like @documentingDPI is getting only 77x8$= 600 USD a month.
Let us assume all “Documenting Accounts” are for one person (I don’t know).
Estimated 230k Impressions equal 1840 USD a month. Decent salary, if part-time. Underpaid if full-time.
For everyone else, the numbers don’t look good.
There may be a mismatch between the expectation that this program is suitable for anyone to make a decent wage and that it is actually available for anyone to participate and try their hand.
I do not think that you should pay more money by the way. Just that this program is not suitable for most crypto people. And you should market the program differently.
But do not understand me wrong. It’s a fine way to motivate certain active people in your community to work for you. But there is no difference to just hire them or others as permanent Social Media Managers.
If you want wide participation, other methods are better. Meme or Content contests, Flash Tasks (pay people for special tasks), Airdrops, Lotteries, Ambassador programs
But I guess you found some good people with this campaign. So at least recruiting wise it was a success.
Thanks for sharing these thoughtful reflections @Cryptofameboy - and I think we need to be careful not to be caught inside our own echo chamber on this topic.
The crux of your thinking is that the current incentives framework does not do enough to incentivise participation in the program. To pull out some stats:
Index Coop official + Document series (run by the Growth team?) accounts for 60% of total impressions
is 10% of total impression through impression mining (ignoring @Crypto_Texan) a success?
How many individuals have participated in impression mining over the last month? What is our target number for engagement?
Are we factoring in the overhead of managing the impression mining program when working out the cost per impression (an additional $4,000 a month right?)
@Crypto_Texan I would love to know your thoughts on this topic since currently, you account for 30% of total IC impression. What was the influence of impression mining on your engagement with Twitter? What would you recommend we can do to attract 10x more Crypto Texans to grow our presence on this platform?
Hey Joe, as I believe I’ve mentioned to you, the impression mining program is currently being piloted on a small scale to understand how it reacts (if you recall we’ve already adjusted the rate downward once). we have done little to no promotion of its existence since it was launched and we’ve done little to no outreach.
I consider it a success considering all participants, sure Texan is highlighting a pareto distribution but I don’t think its fair to segregate him and wonder about the success. I can’t speak for Texan but I don’t believe he was using Twitter in such a way before.
The documenting accounts participate in impression mining and are run (and have previously been run by) members of the growth team who were and are eligible to participate. We do not consider the documenting accounts part of growth, per se.
13 accounts participated in July
We should be factoring in the additional <$2,000/mo administration cost, good catch.
We have been discussing quite a bit about how to amend and scale this program going forward, but the focus is on enabling more impressions, not necessarily more participants. We do not view widespread participation as a primary goal.
A few concrete steps that could help unlock the participation, impact, and onboarding ease (maybe this is an issue?) that is desired which we are doing/looking in to:
Revamped, more information rich, and better-publicized impression mining program home page
Gamified mechanics: participants compete for a share in an (increasing over time) bounty
Wow, 30%, didn’t realize it was that high - pats self on the back
For me, the majority of my best impressions come from long and thought-out threads about MVI, BED, DPI, or all of our products together. I try to make these simple, informative, and retweetable. I believe the intent of the program is to allow individuals to leverage their existing network. I am scanning the Index discord, governance forums, twitter, other protocol discords to find information to share that my followers will appreciate enough to retweet. (getting retweets is key to success here). But I’ve worked hard to figure out what works and what doesn’t. I have spent ALOT of time on some threads that go absolutely nowhere, I have spent zero time on some tweets that go parabolic - sometimes you just get lucky and get retweeted by Ryan S Adams and/or Documenting Ethereum. My tweets are still in beta mode.
In talking to some of the 40k+ follower accounts on crypto twitter (on Discord, CwtC, Telegram, etc) - the reason they might not participate in impression mining is because they don’t want to appear “too shilly” or give off the wrong impression that they are getting paid to tweet. With great follower count comes a greater responsibility and I think most of these big crypto influencers want to at least appear unbiased. But if Crypto_Texan with 1,700 followers constantly tweets about how awesome DPI is, not a big deal. I also go back every week to see which ones did well and why. Try to make my tweets relevant to any news currently ongoing, etc.
My first impression mining submission was 0.39 INDEX. When it hit my wallet, I was like “wow, this is awesome”. Realizing that I can learn about these Index products, post about it on Twitter, and make money while learning. It was really motivating to me at least.
IF I had to make any changes to get others involved (I think the program works fine as is). MAYBE, for new joiners, the tweet-specific threshold could be set for a 500 minimum vs 1000 for the first 3-4 weeks. Which would incentivize new joiners with lower follower counts to get started and incentivize them to learn more about IC and IC products.
It is also strange to reduce the reward from low (10US$/1k impression) to lower (8US$/1k impression)! For me it becomes only a hobby, but surely not an earning. So far 18 US$/week - that’s a weak result.
Late to the party on this thread but just want to add some thoughts and context. First up @Crypto_Texan is no “outlier”. I have witnessed his followings explode from posting non-stop (98% sure he doesn’t sleep! lol), relentless, consistently high-quality content. From experience, this prolonged campaign seems easy from the outside but it is incredibly difficult to sustain fresh content that remains relevant. His success from the impression mining program in my mind comes down to the following: relentless hard work, drive, passion and creativity.
As for the documenting accounts, they too started off with 0 followers and grew after months and months of hard work BEFORE the IM program even existed. 100’s Of hours were spent growing the first account with no direct compensation at the time. (The numbers above are actually not the peak impressions from those accounts.)
Therefore I would argue that the numbers above are examples of what can be achieved through determination and effort. Not outliers that in any way that put others at some sort of perceived competitive disadvantage.
To be blunt: If anyone out there wants a flexible, fun, challenging, creative, autonomous, interesting, rewarding job that can be done from anywhere in the world (including your bed), at any time and scale their hours up and down at will, setup an account, get posting and get paid. The above accounts can act as useful guides for inspiration.
I’m not sure why we would remove the documenting accounts or CT from the numbers and then say only 10% of impressions come from impression mining? They qualify for IM so they are the results of IM.
The IM program imo is fair, open, equal access, and directly rewards impactful work on a contingency basis in a way that provides fair value for IC and those participating.
YES - Twitter success, like essentially everything we do at Index Coop boils down to hard work and hustle.
I have been amazed watching @Crypto_Texan’s success over the last few months. It seems like only yesterday he had basically 100 followers. Great example that creativity and hustle goes a long ways. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had at least 5-10 other people in our community capable of generating the same high number of impressions and making a real income off of impression mining.
Totally agree that the impressions outcome is proportional to the amount of work put in to generate quality content and does not necessarily need to have a huge clout to start with. @Crypto_Texan is definitely inspiring and leading the way on this. Also more a person researches and learns about IC and products to post great content, the more invested they are with IC and thus will help with development of high quality long term contributors in the community. So a win-win on both sides. Only suggestion would be to include incentivization of engagement metrics for the content on top of views in the future, once we move past the goal of awareness to the goal of engagement and then eventually more towards the bottom of the funnel and I know we are already discussing and working on this part.
The success of impression is a function of the number of ACTIVE followers interested in that topic. He joined December 2020, follows 2,442, and has 1,767 followers. He posted only about IC 4,651 tweets.
To compare my Twitter account:
I joined in March 2008, follow 4,929 and have 4,296 followers, and tweeted 112,800 times.
My tweets shift now from AI to IC, so it will take a while to catch up with Crypto_Texan.
Currently, I tweet only 9 times per day for IC. For AI I still tweet 21 times per day.
To improve my income, I must increase the ACTIVE followers. As ACTIVE I mean, that the tweet will be displayed to more people, who are interested into that subject.
Props @Crypto_Texan for kill’in it on twitter on behalf of IC.
I’d just like to take a minute to recognise that while impressions are the quantifiable measure (KPI) being rewarded here - there’s also some brilliant reputation building going on via twitter
To all the guys this also includes, excuse my bias I just want to recognise some of the #women-in-index crew for their high quality, intelligent, thoughtful and pretty damn funny content that I’ve seen this week. @jujube@0xMitz@caf and Chase (sorry don’t know your gov. handle Chase, someone let me know and I will edit)
Just want to add despite my mini protest that the IM program is fair I am strongly for this type of engagement and idea exploration. 10x’ing CT might just break the internet but it would be well worth it!
To that point, I would concede that we can do a better job of sharing and publicising our success stories and supporting and encouraging new people into the program.
Engagement Analysis
Points well raised on this front. Whilst our primary focus is on increasing our “top of funnel” metric aka impressions, engagement is of course an important quality-focused metric. Currently, analysing all aspects of our Twitter data requires a lot of manual processing across fragmented data sets, and automation is either not possible or a big lift. Thankfully, however, we have made some huge improvements to the process recently so there is a lot more come. There are 3rd party tools available that can help with analytics and interpretation we are reviewing, some of which are not cheap so there are some trade-offs in that respect.
The last few weeks have been focused on breaking down our content by-product to give us a high-level overview of the situation. And then last week looking into easy wins to increase impressions ie scheduling tweets over weekends.
Hi @Cryptofameboy thanks for the thoughtful analysis in your first post here. here’s my POV on the most important things impression mining gets right for our DAO:
rewards results rather than inputs
drives organic content in a bottom-up way
let’s flesh these out to find positive sum solutions that are additive in value for both the coop & its community members especially the meme competitions. it’s an idea that’s been brought up a few times, but never implemented and I do feel our meme game isnt as strong as I’d like it to be.
Hi there! Specifically around disclosure, no problems as far as I am aware. Generally, the initiative has done very well. @NFTZach and @TheYoungCrews keep track of things and yo may find out more in the Coop’s Impression mining discord channel.
hi @Cameron_Notional, overall impression mining has been a great success & we are seeing other DAOs begin to emulate the program – highest form of flattery. happy to chat about the finer points if you want to reach out on discord, i’m theyoungcrews#1461.
especially the meme competitions. it’s an idea that’s been