Headmade Workshop: User Generated Content and Cryptocurrencies - New Perspectives

The last month in our agency was very dynamic. In addition to several new projects we are launching, one of the reasons was Izazov 2018 (Challenge 2018) regional forum of communication leaders, during which we held a "User Generated Content and Cryptocurrencies" workshop. This was a great opportunity to talk about the potential of blockchain technology with agencies and companies from the region.

We had no doubt that this is a topic that will be one of the key challenges in the near future. Blockchain slowly ceases to be a phenomenon that we know only through information about leading cryptocurrencies. Instead, we can recognize its influence in the various areas that most often represent important aspects of our everyday life.

Being fully aware that encouraging a discussion about the mostly unknown topic is not an easy task, we have chosen user-generated content because it gets completely new dimension on the social platforms based on the blockchain. Naturally, Steemit was one of the key examples on which we based our presentation and numerous conversations that we had during the two days of the forum.

We made a good decision.

During our conversations with colleagues, we concluded that almost everyone recognizes the potential of blockchain technology, and there is almost no doubt that it will mark a new era in the way that information are organized. Of course, this will affect the communication regardless of the channels through which we address our target public. So we tried to answer the following questions together:

How the environment in which users value content based on its actual contribution to the community can benefit us? Can such platforms initiate the migration of users from the dominant sphere of consumers into the sphere of content creators and evaluators? By asking this interesting question, we got mostly positive responses. These were certainly encouraged by the demonstration of a Steemit trending page and some of the categories.

We also discussed whether one of the consequences of the decentralization could be a permanent change in the content evaluation system? Most believe this is a possible outcome, because of the lack of censorship and the possibility of creating independent projects that will promote quality content, without restrictive policies and commercial interests characteristic for many leading social networks.

It is also important to say that various activities based on crowdsourcing principles were recognized as potential - whether it is a new generation of crowdfunding campaigns (without intermediary services) or different ways for a realization of CSR projects which influence the quality of life in different communities together with their members and the general public.

Everything becomes even more interesting in an environment like Steemit because of a possibility for crowdfunding the ideas without fear of permanent budget consumption (thanks to the voting power concept). Instead, we are enabled to continually reward the value, which is certainly one of the unique characteristics that we can not meet in traditional methods.

However, the most interesting thing was to talk about our readiness to apply such technologies to the projects we are dealing with. We agreed that one of the key tasks is the additional education in this field, as well as raising the overall level of awareness about the changes that are coming - which can be achieved only through intensive cooperation and distribution of knowledge. We still have to see how much we will succeed in this. There is no doubt - we have to be prepared, because opportunities we recognize today may become a generally accepted trend much faster than we can imagine.

Image source: Izazov forum FB page