The problem is that you lack control…
People mistakenly only think of censorship in terms of controversial political speech. But the real underlying issue for ANY business is that in order to reach and convert more customers, you have to convert them in the environment they are already in, but that is a space you do not control or own.
If we’re talking about SEO, you don’t control Google’s algorithm. One minute you can be getting all these clicks and customers, then once you’ve hired people and setup infrastructure to handle all this traffic, they can randomly at their whim change the way things rank. Then you have to fire staff or go bankrupt. In fact, this happened in 2015-2017 [1] when Google changes its policies and some businesses went under.
If we’re talking about regular social media, you have near zero control. For example, Facebook in 2019 changed their algorithms so that business pages don’t rank as well as personal pages. [2a] This dramatically reduced the sales and reach for many companies. [2b] And they hadn’t allocated a budget to pay for every single post to reach their own fans, as though it was a fresh new ad.
Even worse than that, your best converting ad-copy and most persuasive messages can be canceled because some low-paid worker for a social media company thinks your ad violates some arbitrary and vague policy. In fact, this problem is so severe, copywriting podcasts often mention having a backup or second version of persuasive messages in your A/B testing, in case the first one gets banned.
Some marketers, who aren’t aware of decentralized protocols or new technology, will mouth off about email lists. But due to the centralization of the internet, email is usually just Google. Google controls what gets labeled spam and how your content is received.
Numerous SEO companies have found that Google is extremely biased in what they favor. [1] And even if you don’t land in the spam folder, you’re competing against literally everyone else making noise. How many junk emails do you receive a day? Yeah, everyone has an email address, but there’s a lot of competition for attention.
The problem with email is even deeper than that. Because so many competing companies are spamming, people frequently change and abandon email addresses. So you’re spending all of this money to acquire names and addresses on some list, that then becomes not relevant in a short period of time.
Even if I accept the flawed premise that you control your email list with government domain names, you need to get NEW people on that list to grow. That means communicating with them on a different platform you don’t control.
So what is the solution? Meet encryption as identity.
“Encryption as identity” is a phrase to describe a network where the user uses encryption to control and own resources of value. In this case, their social media account. All encryption is a public and private keypair, the public key is your username, and the password is your private key. You then sign for messages to prove it’s you that’s really posting it. So only you have access to your own account.
This is how Bitcoin works, your wallet signs for transactions to prove its you. But its also how Nostr and Session work. Nostr is like a decentralized replacement for Twitter. And Session is a decentralized replacement for Telegram and email. These concepts might seem confusing or technical, but the encryption happens behind the scenes. To the end user, it appears to be simple and similar to the platforms they are already familiar with.
If your business is marketing on Nostr and Session, nobody can stop you from posting what you want and reaching your fans. In fact, the encryption behind Nostr is so strong, that Edward Snowden endorses the platform with nearly 100 thousand Nostr followers. [5]
As social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk points out, it’s when platforms are new, that there’s the highest chance of getting people’s attention. [4] So it’s not about the total number of users, but the quality of their attention, and the relevance to your industry. If you’re looking to appeal to technology, cryptocurrency, finance, conservative, libertarian, male, and/or even business startups then you’d can’t afford to miss out and let your competition beat you to getting big on the protocol.
Jack, the previous CEO of Twitter has strongly financially supported this with 14 Bitcoins [6], as he sees the undeniable value to owning your identity and brand, compared to Twitter’s arbitrary censorship.
Considering it’s free to get started, with pure upside, what are you waiting for?
Watch our tutorial on Nostr’s basic clients
Sources for this article found here.