Blockchain technology is filled with paradoxes. Here is what we know about the general mass understanding of the technology:
1. There is no such thing as lack of explanation of blockchain. Whatever major media outlet you choose, it has proposed its option of interpretation to what technology is whether it’s for 6-year-old or 99-year-old. That’s how it works for kids:
2. People don’t really understand blockchain. As multiple publications and scientific works prove, the understanding of technology, its meaning, possibilities, and risks is rather vague.
This poses an interesting conundrum before blockchain product companies, especially those whose audience is not developers or anyone involved in tech field professionally.
If you want to launch, let’s say, a decentralized platform for marketing automation for e-commerce, how to make sure they understand what the offer is about? Should they have at least a clear idea of how the technology works? And if yes, how to make sure they do?
Let’s get to the bottom of it
The first question here might be:
Why bother at all whether my customers understand blockchain or not? The primary purpose is to help them benefit from the product, and the understanding of its core idea is secondary.
However, here come the risks. People who spend their lives building blockchain definitely understand possible roadblocks. What about a regular audience? Let’s take a look at just several misconceptions that regular John Doe can buy without even questioning.
Blockchain and Bitcoin are synonyms
This one is fairly self-explanatory. People confuse blockchain and Bitcoin all the time, and this happens because Bitcoin is unarguably the most famous example of working technology implementation.
How do most people find out about blockchain? Online, of course. Here lies the central issue: even when you google something about blockchain without even mentioning Bitcoin, it pops out all the same — even though users were never asking for it. No wonder it’s easy to confuse these two if even Google does so in its search results.
Take a look at our mini-investigation:
We have just googled ‘the risks of blockchain’ without even mentioning the word “Bitcoin,” but it showed up anyway.
Blockchain has something to do with finances
Same as the previous one, it was born because of the huge popularity of crypto coins. Considering how much news we saw explicitly about blockchain implementation in currencies, it’s easy to think that this might be all there is to the technology.
Just recently we saw a question on Quora where a user asked:
It’s not just the problem of one person. Everyone has this question, wondering whether blockchain might be of use in any other field. This can be quite a bummer if you are dealing with a product outside banking and financial world.
To work with blockchain, you need to invest or develop it
Almost anything you can find about blockchain concerns either its development (technical discussion and experience exchange) or, what is even more common, investing.
Should I invest in blockchain? How can one make the passive income from the industry? How to evaluate the risks before I put my finances in the field?
That’s why some people get the feeling of blockchain being tricky or even dangerous. Just after casually mentioning blockchain in conversations with some of my friends you can get confronted with questions like:
Isn’t it too dangerous? I had a friend who wasted all the fortune on the blockchain and then… (something bad happened).
Are you sure it’s not a bubble? I heard people said it’s just a fad, nothing more.
This blockchain seems suspicious to me. I heard it’s used by criminals and scammers.
And it’s just a beginning
Of course, listing all of possible misconceptions and discussions in one article is pretty tricky. Still, talking to the friends or family, we can put up with some misunderstanding and even pretend we haven’t heard some of the most absurd thoughts.
However, let’s think of it from the other perspective. Could our clients share the same mindset?
If you develop a product, oriented at a non-technological audience, they might share the same concerns and doubts your family and friends do. Could be, they don’t see blockchain as an advantage of your product but rather as a risk factor that should not be trusted.
Honestly, we’ve been thinking about this for quite a while now. The truth is, blockchain is growing and penetrating to different fields and industries, making a lot of positive changes — or at least that’s how we perceived it. But are users ready to be disrupted?
Ask yourself this question if you:
- Implement a blockchain solution in the non-technical field.
- Constantly have to explain to clients what it is that your product is actually changing.
- Need to clarify for customers and investors that your product has nothing to do with Bitcoin or scammy schemes.
What if blockchain product owners and developers start educating customers?
If there is so much misunderstanding around the technology, why not think of a way out from this loop? Instead of complaining of people’s negligence, it’s way more productive to start doing something to solve the issue.
How did we approach the situation?
Triggmine is a decentralized marketing automation platform oriented on SMB’s owners who might not necessarily be versed in blockchain.
However, it would be easier for us if customers had at least the basic knowledge of how the technology works. It allows them to understand our tokenization principles and be more invested in our ICO, not mentioning the fact that it could answer many of the questions, received by our support agents.
We started targeting non-blockchain audience with materials on marketing.
It’s not reasonable to start explaining blockchain right away to those people who need at first to obtain the general understanding of both the general concept and our product. So we started helping people to enter the field from afar, making Medium posts on marketing automation.
https://medium.com/triggmine/asian-ecommerce-is-booming-a-case-for-marketing-automation-549822ec2ebc
https://hackernoon.com/whats-wrong-with-existing-marketing-automation-services-86713bb6ed6a
Our audience liked it. So we started slowly moving on to in-depth materials on blockchain specifically, starting out easy, of course.
Assisting with learning blockchain
https://hackernoon.com/5-reasons-why-we-need-to-define-security-of-blockchain-c146253e7e81
https://hackernoon.com/blockchain-became-overhyped-lets-do-something-with-it-9fcf1010de62
Such materials gave us a possibility to give our customers expertise both on the issues of marketing automation which is the initial purpose of the company but also keep them up to date with recent blockchain news.
What did it change?
The first change we felt was in the attitude of investors. Now, whenever we received doubts, we could redirect such concerns to our blog since we know that we are very likely to already have it answered. People who were interested in financing our development somehow became much more willing to do the investments when they saw their questions already being answered.
Customers did not start following the tendency right away. Quite often we would receive a question from the client with something like “Can I invest in Bitcoin on your website?” and it was apparent that a person hasn’t really gone through our posts (we can’t make anyone do it, right?).
However, later the situation started to change. Not only we receive a much lower amount of ridiculous questions but also our clients trust us more when they see our writing published or Hackernoon and major media outlet.
It seems safe to say that our strategy worked out for us
Still, we’d be curious to know how other companies and experts managed to educate their own followers and how it worked out for them. Could you share your experience? We’d love to read your insights on the topic.
P.S. And for more updates like this one follow Triggmine on Medium. We share in-depth insights every week — be sure to not miss anything.