I’ve read they are in charge of public relations in another thread. And they received a grant for marketing if I’m not mistaken. But what have they done? What is their duty as far as PR? Is there anything I can look at of their marketing? Cheers
Ha. Crickets. Kind of what I thought. Glad the grant went through
I can speak only about the work that they have done for our team’s app (FutureICX)
They have contacted us to boost our only presence according to Ricky Dodds’s request as part of their campaign. They seemed professional in their approach - requested articles, materials that they could use, they were polite, requested feedback on the edits that they have made etc
They have published 4 articles for us, consisting of edited parts of the article that I have posted for FutureICX on the IconDAO forums. They have posted the articles within two days (approximately a month after they have contacted us). I myself am not very familiar with the sites that the articles were listed on, however I do not know many of them and we have received the publicity for free so we were happy with the outcome. Here they are:
This one seems with expired security certificate, so there is no preview of it.
There was a turning point for us though - I got a message on TG from a guy accusing us of engaging in a bot campaign. It sounded absurd but I engaged with him to see what he meant anyway. After getting some info from him, it turned out that he was actually right - all the twitter users that have posted and re-tweeted our articles (outside of the standard followers that we have), including the authors of the articles and the Transform members that we were working with, all without exception have had thousands (the largest one is with 41k) of followers but absolutely no engagements on the daily posts that they have made (I am talking about literally 0 likes and re-tweets on absolutely all posts that they have made - which for an account with that many followers is literally impossible unless the followers are fake)
I have gathered a list of 10 twitter accounts, consisting of the 4 article authors, a Transform group member and 5 accounts that seemed part of the campaign and have confronted Transform about it. In response I got a vague ‘‘Their social media is their own’’ and a passive-aggressive threat to halt their PR efforts for our team and cancel the upcoming interview article that they were preparing.
As we currently are focussed on the Icon community and the effect of this specific PR campaign was questionable for us anyway, we have decided to take on their offer. I am still not sure whether they are legit or not (they might absolutely be), we just found a possible negative association and questionable value for our team.
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Very interesting. I have seen other icon p-reps being pushed by OBVIOUS bot accounts before and was wondering about it. People have heard of transform group before but they usually have only heard what they say about themselves. I got a response from Benny that they are in charge of ‘social media’ for ICON, if that is the case and what you say is true, yikes. It seems like we got bittburgered yet again. How much was the grant for these guys for? I’m sure we could have got a full-time social media manager ( a real live person ) for the price, or less.
Looking up their proposal they got $50,000!!! For this? We really need some answers on this. Is the grant program turning into ANOTHER leaky point where icx gets dumped onto exchanges?
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Can we get a statement from the team on this? Shouldn’t PR, public relations, come from THE TEAM? If it’s second hand, third hand knowledge being pumped by bots, and the team itself has no idea what they do, that’s a HUGE problem.
I think most of the articles being published about Icon in things like coin telegraph etc. are pushed by Transform Group. At the bottom of the articles it tends to give the media contact and it often says XXX@Transformgroup.com or whatever.
They have some pretty big blockchain projects as clients and crypto media outlets such as cointelegraph, coindesk etc. are more likely to take their releases seriously because of this and publish as a result.
So with that in mind I do believe they are working on PR for the project, it’s just not as in our face.