We should consider replacing Blue Kirby with a new official mascot/spokesperson. This time around we should have someone who is not anonymous and more trustworthy. Marketing & communication with the community directly is important. yCulture should continue, but in a more appropriate manner. I just wanted to open the discussion here and gather thoughts and ideas from the community
Do we need a new community ambassador?
What/who could our new ambassador or mascot be?
EDIT: We really need to fill a role for public relations
Blue Kirby, in my eyes, represented a similar misstep PotCoin made in choosing Dennis Rodman as a spokesperson. I think marketing crypto goes awry when the only thought is choosing a ācoolā spokesperson with reach and not choosing someone who can commit to long-term representation of the project in a positive and intellectual light. This seems to be a recurring problem in crypto communities.
I believe the audience that will best adopt and represent this community is an educated one, meaning I would focus more time on strong written content to represent the project well, video training to make adoption easier, and choosing respected members of the crytpo community for representation. Not hype men, people an educated audience can respect. This is what brought me to Yearn, not Blue Kirby!
I also am curious who is managing PR for the project at this time. While none of the recent controversy around EMN impacted my opinion of YFI, I feel like there were a lot of missed opportunities here to educate the community about what actually happened. Not everyone is smart enough to understand how these projects work, and I just feel there needs to be some better control of how these matters are represented publicly. Too much of our DeFi token value is based on speculation from people not actively involved in these systems to not get a better grip on how the media represents the integrity of this project.
Sharing this not to complain, but because I believe strongly in this project. The Blue Kirby incident, IMO, just felt a bit juvenile for what Iāve come to expect from Yearn Finance.
+1 for official PR position that produces educational content/outreachā¦with a special mandate for ādefi crisis managementāā¦cause defi crisis seems to be a breed of their own!! There should be protocols put in place on how to handle these situations going forward. Step by step manual on how to handle future crisises.
honestly it would be cool to have funny defi mascot especially for defi twitterā¦but any such mascot account should be controlled by yearn PR teamā¦no more anonymous people in yearn PR please!
But also remember that strength of yearn is to be able to source organic talent from anywhereā¦so we should keep an eye out for twitter talents in various forms that are already doing great work and have a process in place to officially recruit them. An important step for such a recruitment should be for them to become public with their identities and other such requirements. Lets learn and improve
+1
And this guy/girl; should not use yEarn for his own purpose.
He/she should promote / help the protocol and not him/herself
That was very obvious since the begining . Some people; including me; tried to say itā¦ but you know how it worksā¦ People were crazy/enthousiast and didnāt care about that.
Some other protocols are doing that very well. Instead of 1 guy, we can do small contest/call (like for the NFT for yInsurance). More people get involved and then other people have choice. With Blue Kirby it was not the case and since the begining it was like a dictature. Doing only his personal stuff, creating private groups, make money using yEarn ā¦ Very bad mentality
Also i tried to help as i can. I have a blog about crypto; trying to focus more and more on Defi : cryptoouf.com
I tried to help with translations on Trello; but things need to be better organised.
It also depend what other people want. I personally try to write content with one article/guide and also tutorials. So even my grandma can use a protocol.
Happy to do it for the French community.
But do the community want something open to everyone ? so we can create very basic stuff. Or we keep it āprivateā. With very criptic tweet like it is at the moment. Not always fortunately
Absolutely no mascots, we are not a fast food franchise
Few, weesh and anime girls are not appropriate for what we are trying to build here.
Getting serious investors involved, increasing our TVL isnt going to happen with juvenile memes. That is not the yearn brand. Memes work for Based and other similar ones, but if we really want to be taken seriously we need to move on from that. It was effective to bootstrap things but weāre past that now.
Who ever does PR needs a real name, real face and with a real plan that is shared with the governance group to sign off on at a high level.
Letting some random run around the internet without a leash getting paid $7k per month is ridiculous.
Yes we need an official comms person. Nothing fancy, no hype, just touch base with the devs and convert whatever info they give into concise tweets so itās easy to keep up with the project.
I would love to be the communications ambassador. Background in communications and philosophy (i.e. writing). I have been following DeFi intensely for the past few months. I think that we need some more professional representation to decipher what the big brain developers are doing and translate it to the less sophisticated among us. At the moment, it feels like it is very cloak and dagger when it comes to the progress of governance, vault strategies, user interface, and so on. I think part of the price crash of YFI has been related to the absence of progress in these fields. I would definitely be on board for tweeting, but I think it would be far more beneficial for everyone if we had articles or blogposts updating people as to the growth of yearn specifically and the growth of DeFi in general. I have been keeping tabs on all kinds of new protocols with the intent of eventually proposing integrating these protocols for the sake of creating mutually beneficial relationships. Also, I am trilingual (Spanish, English, and French). There is a huge need to translate information and disseminate it to other countries. Latin America is a huge market opportunity and I can personally attest to the fact that they are starved for these kinds of financial instruments (e.g. Argentina). However, the language barrier is preventing them from accessing these tools. Whomever we decide should be in charge of communications should be capable of understanding these instruments at a high level and be able to explain it to someone who has never heard of cryptocurrency and how the financial system currently works and the solution that YFI represents. No more āpumping bagsā or creating a cult of personality based on memes. The responsibilities should be a mix of marketing, edifying, blogging, and most importantly managing peopleās expectations. Also, they should not be anonymous so as to engender trust in their authority as communications director. Of course, this should be greenlit by the community and multi-sig first.
I actually like the idea of a mascot. And I think itās ok for the individual to be anonā¦ the mascot/person can encapsulate the Yearn environment. Thatās what a good brander does.
A mascot is easier to associate a project with versus a boring face. Think Ronald McDonald of McDonalds. The King with Burger King. Wendy for Wendysā¦ apparently Iām hungry. Anyways, you get the idea.
To hit on my prior comment. I was hinting at a position thatās similar to top newsletter writers with a followingā¦ not somebody who operates a twitter account.
If all we want is someone cheerleading from twitter, then we should just make bantg the communications director and have his bunny be the mascot. I think that PR should be responsible for growing AUM by onboarding people from other countries like Asia and Latin America into Yearn. Regardless of whether they are anonymous, they should appeal to non-English speakers since the English speaking community can get the information by doing research or word of mouth. However, non-English speakers have a high barrier to entry. For example, explaining to people how to use Metamask, digital wallets, seed phrases, DEXs, staking, fiat on/off ramps, lending/borrowing, and so on. Most people are not going to feel comfortable depositing funds into an anonymous mascotās protocol that they just recently discovered online. They need to be handheld from the very beginning. This would require a lot more hands-on work, but the end result would be a boon to the YFI and DeFi ecosystem. I donāt think someone like bantg would have the time or patience to undertake such a role which is why specialization is so powerful. Also, we should not neglect the innovation that is occurring in other protocols like CoFiX, Cresco Finance, HEGIC, Nexus Mutualās shield mining of tBTC, etc. The communications director should have one eye on Yearn and another on the changing landscape of DeFi (which changes fast) and encourage symbiotic collaboration by reaching out to others in order to create sustainable risk-adjusted returns. Blue Kirby got us this far, but the next level of growth is going to require more than just mascots, memes, tweets, and cheerleading because anyone can do that. I am interested to hear from others what they think the responsibilities of a communications director should be.
@ejbaraza I think the best way to get more involved is to start using your skills to create content and share it with the community. Check out the Information section on https://ycosystem.info. There are some regular publications there that are really starting to do a great job of getting info out. Find a niche that you feel is missing, start building and sharing. Nearly everything is being created directly from community members who have just started doing something they were passionate about.
Whether the person is public or anonymous is less important, what is important is that they be the āofficialā spokesperson for all things related to Yearn. If developers like Andre do not want to engage in social media then they could use the spokesperson as their mouthpiece. This would also limit any damage to the brand from someone going off the cuff on twitter, youtube, etc. PR should be a repository of information that is vetted for the sake of directing new users of the protocol whenever they encounter an issue (i.e. troubleshooting). Great customer service is priceless. The quality of information should result in YFI being the gateway drug to digital assets rather than Bitcoin. PR should have privileged access to upcoming products and write articles explaining what they do. For example, StableCredit, synthetic rebased dollars, single-sided AMM, and so on. By educating the community, it minimizes the likelihood of people FOMOing into YFI and then shortly thereafter dumping (i.e. price speculation). PR should be trying to attract investors with a longer time horizon. This coupled with my idea to use the yYFI vaultās fees to buy YFI on the open market and deposit it into Maker DAO to mint DAI and maximize the ROI of YFI would limit the downside risk of holding which is good for everyone. We want YFI to be as profitable as can be by staking it in governance because it encourages active participation. I mean who wants to engage in governance if you can lose 70% of our capital in a week. I am part of other well-known protocols and their engagement is almost non-existent (like 2 replies per post). The biggest moat we have is the community which is why our efforts should be towards bringing as many people as possible into the DeFi ecosystem and educating them as to the long-term vision of YFI so that they do not lose faith and decide to dump or short. Managing peopleās expectations is critical for preventing this sort of behavior, I am sure some people have dumped because of the changing timeline on the yETH vault. PR would be involved with explaining the importance of governance, the implication of proposals that pass/fail, and have journalistic integrity by reporting the facts free of bias. For example, explaining the pros/cons of the current fee structure or a new fee structure which most people are in the dark about. There is nothing wrong with individuals writing articles on their own, but we canāt expect them to be spending 40 hours a week on a pro-bono basis. This is why the spokesperson should be paid to produce value. If they only onboard 1% of India, China, South Korea, Latin America then they have more than paid for themselves with the additional human capital and financial capital that they bring. As well as the network effect from these happy customers. The fact that most comments are in English implies that there is a lot more we can do to reach non-English speaking countries that have never heard of smart-contracts and cryptocurrencies. To reiterate, if you speak English all of this information is easily accessible through Reddit, Youtube, Twitter. However, if you donāt speak English you are simply out of luck because there are few resources for you to turn to. Regardless of who is tasked with this role I will still be here making my contributions as best I can. In case people donāt know Andre has released two articles on Medium if you want to check them out: https://medium.com/@andre_54855/crypto-economics-perpetual-liquidity-and-il-offsets-197558347a53
Great post! Yes clarifying the implications of the various projects/votes going on would be of great value. Im some what technicalā¦but lots of times its just hard to follow and understand the implications of a specific vote or feature unless u r a domain expert in that areaā¦and im assuming its only going to get harder and harder as the ecosystem keeps evolving into more complex structuresā¦
A core component of the official PR channel should be an ELI5 breakdown of the hotest features/votes coming up and their implicationsā¦then im assumimg the broader community of supporter/influencers/hottest mascosts of the dayā¦can take that info and spread it aroundā¦
The official channel would focus on completley fact based unbiased explantions and ofcourse the broader community of supporter on twitter can take it and run with itā¦adding their own color to spice the messaging a bit as per their style
This way we have a clearly fenced off official yearn communication channel and a loosley structured community of supporters/influencers surrounding it that is organic - helping to amplify/interpreting the messaging coming out of Yearn PRā¦best of both the worlds.
Yes, it is imperative that we coalesce on an official narrative and have social media market and brand as they see fit. Also, I think that there should be three types of information based on the target audience: amateur consumer, mid-level consumer, and outright professional. Based on your level of understanding, you can choose at which level you want to engage. I am still on the fence about whether the spokesperson should be anonymous or not, but we should definitely have some sort of incentive structure that prevents them from disappearing into the night like Blue Kirby. Maybe a 30-60 day vesting period, if they rug pull then they lose everything. I think this would align everyoneās interests.
