Building a Digital Trust Ecosystem with Blockchain
Although we are connected through the digital world now more than ever, the term digital trust isn’t new. Digital trust refers to online security and data protection, usually in terms of how companies are collecting and using our personal data.
Customers are increasingly more aware and more interested in privacy policies and how their data is being used on the Internet. We all want to avoid having our personal data stolen or used in a way that we haven’t consented to. The number of incidents where data is mishandled is alarming, and this fosters mistrust among customers, which isn’t good for business.
It’s important to build digital trust within your company and assure customers that their data is safe and secure. In this article, you’ll learn more about what digital trust and a Digital Trust Ecosystem (DTE) is. We will also give you some examples of companies implementing digital trust at its core, and how blockchain technology fits into all of this.
What Is Digital Trust?
Digital trust is the “ability of an organization to inspire confidence within their digital ecosystem about their intent and capability to deliver the promised services.” Your business needs to be trusted by customers in order to succeed in the long run. Without trust, customers will run to another company with more secure offerings.
One example of how digital trust is implemented can be seen in Subex, a company devoted to digital trust that provides solutions to the world’s top 50 telephone companies. As you can see in their model, digital trust is a multi-layer matrix that works across various processes and systems. Digital trust looks different depending on the industry and technology used.
What About a Digital Trust Ecosystem (DTE)?
The technology research company Gartner defines a digital ecosystem as “an interdependent group of actors (enterprises, people, things) sharing standardized digital platforms to achieve a mutually beneficial purpose.” These various entities that are working together are independent, yet collaborating together through digital platforms and solutions.
A Digital Trust Ecosystem (DTE) uses standardized digital solutions that are working together within a trusted network. You can think of it as an intricate web, connecting various companies, people and organizations.
PharmaLedger: A Case Example of Implementing a Digital Trust Ecosystem (DTE)
One of our clients, the PharmaLedger Association (PLA), has built a DTE in healthcare to investigate, develop, and deploy blockchain-enabled solutions. Their philosophy is built on trust, where network participants are encouraged to collaborate and push innovation forward. The DTE is the external framework through which PLA operates.
PLA’s DTE is made up of regulatory authorities, healthcare providers, services providers, distributors and wholesalers, research and academia, insurers and NGO Payers, Biopharma manufacturers, and most importantly, patients.
What does blockchain have to do with a Digital Trust Ecosystem (DTE)?
Some of the key features of blockchain technology are the security provided, the immutability of data (everything stored cannot be changed or tampered with), and the traceability of data. Adding these and many other features of blockchain solutions to your company’s network creates the trust that customers need to do business with you.
Watch the short PharmaLedger Project explainer below to learn more about blockchain technology.
Tell Us About Your Blockchain Project
Are you interested in creating trust in your business with the use of blockchain solutions? If so, our specialized GoViral Blockchain Team can help. We are experts when it comes to inbound marketing, community management, and creating funnels for online sales – but we especially know how to write and create content around blockchain that gets others talking. Tell us about your blockchain idea.
Intro to NFTs for Marketing
What’s the deal with NFTs? You may have heard “non-fungible tokens” defined as digital artwork, but the applications of NFTs are so much greater. Here we explain what NFTs are, and how you can include them in your marketing strategy.
What is an NFT?
NFT stands for non-fungible token. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with fungi. Non-fungible means the token is unique and can’t be replaced or duplicated.
And what’s a token? A token is a cryptographic asset that lives on the blockchain and acts as a certificate of ownership.
In short, an NFT is a unique certificate of ownership.
NFTs are not synonymous with digital art. An NFT can represent art, either digital or physical, but it can also represent music, images, or clothing. Almost anything can be tokenized.
Why should I care about NFTs?
The movement from Web2 to Web3 promises to empower individuals by giving them ownership over their content and data. This includes decentralizing control—from a few large companies to individuals—through technology such as blockchain.
NFTs, which use blockchain for ownership verification, have become a symbol of the greater transition to Web3. An enthusiastic market for NFTs exists, waiting for brands to embrace decentralization and the shift in ownership from the few to the many.
Reasons to Use NFTs for Marketing Purposes
First things first, NFTs are relatively new, and the NFT market can be volatile. Think carefully before you use NFTs for marketing, and keep in mind there isn’t a long history to draw on to define best practices. That said, let’s take a look at how you can use NFTs for marketing to build your brand awareness, increase customer loyalty, and create new sources of income.
1. Increase Brand Awareness
You can use NFTs to build awareness around your brand. Awareness can be difficult to measure, but it’s essential to your success. If you create and sell NFTs in conjunction with a new product or service, you can gain attention while also communicating your brand’s values.
More and more, customers care about your values, and investing time and energy in NFTs can show that you’re committed to decentralization and individual ownership of content and data. In short, that you believe in the democratization of the internet.
Norwegian Cruise Line recently minted six NFTs to mark the launch of a new class of cruise ships. The initiative created buzz and attention for the brand, and communicated Norwegian’s commitment to freedom, flexibility, and cutting-edge technology.
2. Convert Customers Into Evangelists for Your Brand
When you’ve engaged a lead enough to become your customer, it’s time to delight them. One way to do this: create NFTs out of the building blocks of your brand. For example, you can mint a series of unique versions of your logo, or the original hand-drawn concept for your brand’s visual identity.
Think of this as pulling back the curtain for your loyal customers to more deeply connect with your brand. Giving them the opportunity to own a piece of your creation story will demonstrate your openness and transparency.
3. Raise Money by Monetizing Exclusive Content and Experiences
Once you have a group of loyal customers who evangelize your brand, consider using NFTs to monetize exclusive content. Evangelists may be willing to pay for videos, how-to articles, or other content they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
Exclusive content can make your evangelists feel appreciated. You could set up an NFT that unlocks this content, much like a one-time charge for premium membership. You can also hold in-person events in which ownership of an NFT acts as a ticket for admission.
Take Anheuser-Busch’s recent event, NFT Beerfest, which gave Budweiser NFT owners a chance to tour their flagship brewery, participate in giveaways, and enjoy live performances.
Interested in using NFTs for marketing but not sure how to get started? Share your ideas with our GoViral Blockchain team, and we’ll be in touch!
Takeaways from a Blockchain Convention
Our Managing Director Belinda Filippelli recently attended the European Blockchain Convention (EBC) in Barcelona. As Europe’s premier blockchain event, EBC brought together more than 1,500 attendees from around the world to discuss the current state of blockchain and its promise for the future.
Keep reading for a Q&A with Belinda on her impressions of the event, thoughts on marketing for blockchain, and key takeaways for the GoViral Blockchain team.
Q: What was your overall feeling after attending EBC?
A: What was interesting to me about going to the European Blockchain Convention was that a lot of the excitement and passion around the event was very similar to what I experienced when I started working in the digital world in 1999. I was working in Switzerland for a nonprofit association for languages, localization and globalization. And during that time people were saying “Wow so if I have a website in another language then I can sell in different countries” and everybody was really excited about all of the opportunities that was going to bring.
But also during that time there wasn’t a lot of regulation. This industry was really young. A lot of the talk was very idealized, but you could see that it was going to take a while for the rest of the world to catch up because technology runs so much faster.
And now 25 years later, sitting in an event about blockchain and Web3 had the same kind of feeling. It was exciting once again to see this is an internet revolution that’s coming. But it’s going to be a very crowded marketplace, and it’s going to take a while before industries and legislation come together to make solutions more seamless for the user.
So my overall feeling was excitement. People are working on solutions for the future but my overall impression is that we’re still very far behind. The industry is still very immature.
Q: In terms of end users, what do you expect to come first? What would end users potentially notice first in the future?
A: One of the things that was really interesting was that one of the speakers, Benjamin Bilski from Nagax, showed statistics that in 1998 there were 200 million people who were using the internet and now in 2022 there are 200 million people who are using blockchain. So the idea is that we’re basically at the same place with Web3 as we were with the internet in 1998.
If you put yourself back in that place, what were people doing internet-wise? In 1998 there were 200 million users but people didn’t have it in their homes. They didn’t have it in their hands. They didn’t necessarily need it to work or so on. But it was something that was out there being used. And some people were saying “oh it’s just a trend, you know, it’s nothing.”
And then by 2006 smartphones were really starting to penetrate the market. So if you look at those eight years, you can see that we went from nobody really knowing what the internet was to people having the internet in their homes, starting to have to use it for their jobs, to actually having smartphones and internet in their hands at all times. And I think we’re looking at the same thing with blockchain.
What exactly will enter the market I can’t say for sure, but I know specifically that with GoViral we’re working in the healthcare industry with the first industry backed movement to implement blockchain, the PharmaLedger project. You can see why they have the ability to do this because already these companies have implemented or taken on the technology they need to move to the blockchain. And that’s going to be handed to the user through different use cases, like eLeaflets that help you to see all the information about your medication.
So what I see for end users is that it’s going to come from big providers, probably in the supply chain space. Definitely blockchain is not going to infiltrate the US by people getting on OpenSea and doing NFTs or trading cryptocurrency. That’s not going to be the mass way. It’s going to be just like in 1998 when people were on the internet to develop and create things, and then it started to come to users through their telephone providers, through their home TV providers and so on. That’s how I believe it’s gonna come.
Q: You’ve mentioned Web3 a few times. What does Web3 mean?
A: Basically Web1 was the first iteration of the internet where you could only read it. It was information that was up there for us to read.
Web2 is what all of us know now. It’s what GoViral is built on. In Web2 you can publish and you can create: blogging, people being able to make off-the-shelf websites, social media. We suddenly had all this power to say “oh I have a voice now within the internet. I can talk back to my company, I can complain about a situation.” And that was awesome.
That’s what I built GoViral on 11 years ago was empowering users and customers and teaching companies that they now needed to listen. And that meant a lot to me. But over a decade of me running this company, people are feeling less and less empowered by this voice they have on the internet because they have no control over their data, they have no control over where their data is sold and they have no governance within these platforms. So Web3 is going to be a shift like blockchain to decentralized content, where I as the publisher own my material, it’s transparent how my data is being used, and I can take part in governance.
One of the projects at EBC I particularly found interesting was Distrikt. I actually learned about them first in Dubai at the blockchain summit in October 2021. Distrikt is the first ever community-owned professional social network completely on the blockchain. So it’s definitely something that people can try right now. Right now they have 20,000 registered users. I just love the idea behind it. It’s a great way to show what I was talking about before, which is the idea that with Web2 users had a voice, but now they don’t feel so empowered and Web3 is going to give that empowerment again with ownership, transparency, and governance.
Q: From the marketing side, for Web3 and blockchain-enabled projects, it seems like one of the challenges would be to communicate what you were just talking about: the problems that this technology solves. What other challenges do you see in marketing for blockchain?
A: One of the questions on the marketing side is that there are so many barriers to people adopting new technology because they have so many years of mistrust. And there needs to be a real shift in the idea of what it means for our data, our digital data, to be centralized or decentralized. We also have to be able to explain in a simple way the importance of the shift from centralized to decentralized.
But there are still going to be barriers. The most important thing is to show people how the technology is going to make their life better. And that’s not going to happen through a marketer like me, but through an industry coming and creating a solution.
I’m also working in pharma, and there’s a big mistrust of pharma. So it will be interesting to see how people accept this kind of information. But again, it’s technology that’s being offered to users that is not owned by someone, it’s not owned by these companies in pharma, they can’t use the data in any way. So I feel excited about it, but we’ll have to deal with a lot of negativity as well. Quite frankly in the 11 years of GoViral we’ve dealt with negativity because there are a lot of people who still hate social media and hate online marketing in general.
We just strive to make sure we’re doing work within the digital field that really matters to us, that isn’t taking advantage of users in order to gain money for companies, but really creating a nice community where companies are reaching the people that are most likely to want and need and appreciate what they’re offering. And without taking advantage of those users. At GoViral our way of creating inbound marketing and digital we’ve been really successful at that, and that’s the approach we take with blockchain solutions as well.
Q: What is your perspective on the vocabulary of blockchain and Web3? How do you address that as a marketer when, for example, people think of blockchain as synonymous with cryptocurrency?
A: When it comes to vocabulary and understanding, it just takes time. We can joke about having a family member that still calls it the world wide web, you know? Even in my own company we still will have conversations with clients where they’re describing their profile as a page or vice versa, so as a communicator words are important.
This technology is going to give us a whole new language that nobody really understands. I think blockchain, NFTs, the metaverse – it’s all going to be kind of interchangeable and there’s not going to be a lot of understanding around it. And that is always the challenge.
But I find the most important thing is to always tell real-life case studies. It’s not so important to explain to the user “oh but this is ledger technology. We’re using crypto but it’s a blockchain-based, etc.” it’s more important that they just understand that now you don’t have to pay fees on transactions at your bank, you’re gonna see the money come up automatically, or you don’t have to go to a mortgage broker or use a lawyer to manage your money, or to refinance your home, or to create a will and testament in the future.
All these things are going to empower us to be able to do things on the blockchain that we weren’t able to do before, but the most important thing is to show people that they now don’t need third-party intermediaries and that they’re going to save money. And that’s going to speak to them and make them adopt way more than even transparency, trust, and governance. Which is the blockchain line right now. I think the future will be: “Cheaper, Easier, and You Don’t Need to Talk to All These Other People.” That will be enough for people.
Are you working on a blockchain-related project? We want to hear about it! Share your ideas with us and we’ll be in touch.
Introducing GoViral Blockchain
At GoViral Digital we’ve been dedicated to performance-based, brand love marketing for more than ten years. Now we’re excited to introduce a specialized team within our ranks focused on blockchain technology – GoViral Blockchain.
Our GoViral Blockchain team helps clients seeking to develop blockchain solutions and bring them to market. Blockchain, you say? GoViral is investing in cryptocurrency and NFTs?! Not quite. There’s more to blockchain technology than these narrow applications.
In the coming years blockchain will influence many more aspects of daily life, including how we pay for and conceptualize healthcare, vacation rentals, ride sharing, and more.
With our expertise in inbound marketing, content marketing, community management, performance marketing, and creating funnels for online sales, we know how to talk about blockchain in an impactful way. As always, our focus remains on connecting you to your customers.
Communicating the benefits and promise of blockchain technology presents particular challenges, and we’re already hard at work for our clients in this space. Our client PharmaLedger is dedicated to creating blockchain-enabled solutions for the healthcare ecosystem.
The healthcare and pharmaceutical industries are complex, with multiple stakeholders facing challenges such as lack of transparency, coordination, and trust.
Just to name a few challenges: patients might wonder where their medications come from and when they will arrive, how to find and sign up for clinical trials, and who really owns their healthcare data. Scientists and pharmaceutical companies struggle to meet regulatory and ethical guidelines, ensure patient safety, and keep costs affordable. Doctors often find themselves in the middle of a complex web, not sure how to ensure trust with patients and get them the care they need. Take a look at our PharmaLedger case study to learn more about our efforts.
Why is GoViral all in on blockchain? Here’s what our managing director, Belinda Filippelli, has to say:
“I am so excited for the future that blockchain will create. Decentralization of information and governing power, less costs and admin, eliminating intermediaries where the corruption and inefficiency lie. Becoming true owners of our own sovereign digital identity. Future generations will have a completely different understanding of basic things like how they bank, using smart contractors instead of lawyers or agents, tokenizing physical as well as digital assets to invest in, build and share, and understanding how their everyday goods are made and sourced.”
We are proud and excited to continue working with clients through GoViral Blockchain. Blockchain technology is still new and not widely understood, with so many different stakeholders who need different information. Our experience building buyer personas means we know how to talk to your customers and build community. We’ve earned millions of Euros for our clients, and we’re not stopping anytime soon.
Ultimately, the widespread adoption of blockchain technology requires a greater paradigm shift. More businesses and customers outside the finance and tech industries need to understand what’s at stake, and how blockchain can improve their lives. Our expertise contributes to this shift, and we’re looking forward to a bright future.
Are you working on a blockchain-related project? We want to hear about it! Share your ideas with us and we’ll be in touch.