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In the last few months, SteemSTEM has slowly been figuring out the best way to take advantage of social media outreach. Now we are of course no experts in this. I, for example, had 13 Reddit karma points before all this which means I made about 2 posts, I think to fix random computer errors or something. I've only just got an Instagram account and so on. 

The more I look into it, the more something becomes apparent; *Advertising your product isn't enough anymore.*

I'm thinking of having a couple of systems in place:

# 1

Once a user is selected for our distilled episodes, they should, if willing, write a brief summary that gets published on Instagram. The article or the URL to the article will be omitted, but credit will be given, naturally, as the user sees fit. 

This is because Instagram doesn't allow hotlinks to any given site. and the only way around this is to perpetually change your account's description to include a link and I don't think many people will have the time of day to click out to an account and then start opening links. That's not the point of Instagram.

Will this help expand our brand? Well in terms of recognition, probably, but in terms of translating that to users onboarding to the blockchain, unlikely. This will never be the case while things are as they are when it comes to signing up. Until it's as simple as 'username + email', I don't need to worry about that yet. Recognition is what the focus should be for the near future.

# 2

Reddit is an even bigger problem. As @alexdory explained: 

>Reddit is a place for people to talk about their passions and interests. It's not a place to advertise in. But Reddit is also decentralized in a way, each subreddit has its own rules, set by its own moderators.

The Astronomy rules, for example, states: 

> Users posting content from a single site will be assumed to be driving traffic to that site and will be banned.

This is *clearly* not a place for plugging one's products.  Neither are the majority of other subreddits.  This makes sense and works for what it is, but it's not useful for our cause. 

So, rather than plugging, we should just generally become an active presence in the related subreddits, opening up the karma gates to then publish the articles directly onto Reddit, again giving credit where it's due. We will, of course, continue to publish on our own subreddit but this should also probably expand to beyond simply copying articles from Steem.

# 3

We should, in general, start encouraging debate and discussion over a give subject of our distilled 'winners', rather than simply posting and advertising that the post itself exists. Whether this comes in the form of a YouTube presence, a Podcast, a  discussion-related channel on discord, another reddit function somehow, I don't know, but we are all about engagement and we can't always depend on isolated comments to stand on their own, be replied to once, and then move on.  Engagement should circulate, or spiral deeper - you know, *discussion*. I haven't any solid ideas how to implement this just yet but the key point here is that it should NOT involve Steem directly. 

We want to move away from this community of, what, 200 people, and drive our name into the minds of the masses. 

Now, we cannot do this with money, and we cannot do this with controversy or clickbait, so we have it a little more difficult than usual because we can, by definition, only report truth and facts, giving us a severe disadvantage.  However,  I think it can be done if we bounce ideas around enough.

Thoughts?

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