Codified in the Hyperledger Foundation Charter, the Hyperledger Foundation Marketing Committee is a driving force in the work we do building the enterprise blockchain market. It’s a members-only group that is led by a nominated and elected chair and vice chair.
This year, we welcome a new chair: Helen Garneau, CMO of Indicio. Helen served as vice chair previously. Our new vice chair is Maryam Mahjoub, CMO of Simba Chain. As the leaders of the marketing committee, Helen and Maryam will guide messaging and marketing strategy for Hyperledger Foundation and work to maximize growth opportunities for members of all sizes. To foster an active community of marketing and business leaders, the monthly Marketing Committee call, held the first Tuesday of each month, will transition to the Business Development call.
This shift in focus for the monthly call is just one of the signs of Helen’s and Maryam’s new leadership. We asked them to share some of their thoughts on this committee, their roles and the market in general. Read on for their answers:
What is the marketing committee? Who should be part of it?
Helen: The Hyperledger Foundation Marketing Committee is essentially a working group for enterprise marketers from across the Hyperledger Foundation membership. Participation primarily consists of being part of the marketing email alias, where members can share news and learn about marketing updates and opportunities, and a monthly meeting for representatives from each member company to have the opportunity to learn more about the communications strategy and get a peek into the marketing and PR efforts of the Hyperledger Foundation. Members walk away with tips, content, and opportunities to incorporate into their own marketing strategies and campaigns.
The real magic of the Marketing Committee is when members participate and use the opportunity to announce the projects, products, and events they are involved in. This meeting, and the associated email list, is a place for connection among the members of the Hyperledger Foundation. Don’t feel limited to having someone in a traditional marketing role attend the meeting or follow the emails. I encourage members to make sure they have someone from their team participate, read the emails from other members, and take notes from the meeting. This could be from the CEO’s office, the business development team, PR, events, or comms teams. All are welcome!
The collective mindshare of the Hyperledger Marketing committee is probably one of the most valuable PR and Marketing resources in all of enterprise blockchain!
Maryam: The Marketing Committee has helped me understand what are the opportunities within the foundation for marketing to other organizations interested in blockchain technology. It’s also provided the opportunity to discuss the unique challenges we face in the space with my counterparts at other organizations. Anyone who wants to gain more insights on how to market their brand to other members or in general would benefit from participating.
What are some of your top priorities for 2023?
Helen: If you haven’t picked up on it already, my goal this year is to entice more Hyperledger Foundation members to interact with the marketing committee. It is my honor to Chair the Hyperledger Marketing committee. I’ve participated in this group for nearly five years. Starting out, I didn’t really understand how to communicate the open source advancements and projects that our team was engaged in, but it was this group that really opened my eyes to the ways that I as a marketer can add value to my company and how to communicate about our participation in the open source projects. I hope to bring more markers and business development representatives into the fold of the regular happenings of the Marketing Committee.
I’d love to see more members sharing news, attending calls, and leveraging the plethora of marketing opportunities that the Foundation offers. The speaker’s board, use cases, vendor listing, event participation, monthly content themes, and inclusion in press releases are just a few of the benefits included in member benefits for dues paying members.
Along with seeing more existing members leveraging their membership benefits, I also look forward to onboarding more marketers to our newly renamed monthly Business Development meeting. The Hyperledger Foundation is bringing on new members every month, and I’d love to provide ways for their marketing representative to become aware of the benefits, resources, and tools so they can make a smooth transition into the Marketing Committee.
Maryam: As a marketer, my goal is to garner more awareness and understanding of SIMBA Chain. However, collectively, we still have a long journey ahead in the adoption of blockchain technology. So a major goal is to focus on providing education of the capabilities (and limitations) of blockchain in various industries – helping garner more interest from innovation teams and more understanding from web2 companies who are curious about blockchain but don’t know where to start. I’m also excited about working with other blockchain companies – discovering how we can work together to grow our customer base, how our technologies can align for a better solution, and so on.
What, in your experience, can organizations gain from tapping into Hyperledger Foundation marketing and business development activities?
Helen: Companies and organizations that are already dues paying members of the Hyperledger Foundation have the opportunity to tap into a wealth of collective industry knowledge across one of the largest and most active communities at the Linux Foundation and hear from the leaders in enterprise blockchain. There is no other equivalent to what the Hyperledger Foundation Marketing Committee offers. Every single member of the Hyperledger Foundation has the opportunity to become further informed about enterprise blockchain market traction, campaign and communications lessons learned, and tap into opportunities for further collaboration.
Maryam: Hyperledger Foundation offers access to a group of organizations actively building (or looking to build) on the blockchain. This audience is very hard to find elsewhere. Most events, media and audiences are heavily geared towards crypto, and not business solutions. With tools like the newsletter, webinars, case studies and in person events, there is a lot for marketers to take advantage of, and various ways to get key conversations going.
What are some of the opportunities you see on the horizon? Challenges?
Helen: The Hyperledger community is doing a fantastic job defining enterprise blockchain and promoting the benefits of using distributed ledger technologies for a wide variety of real business challenges and opportunities. We’ve been writing, speaking, and educating the market about Hyperledger projects. Now is the time to promote and highlight the awesome deployments and projects from Hyperledger Members! Case studies are a fantastic resource to put some “legs” under the story behind the work that is being done in the community. I expect we’ll see more high-profile news coming out of our community very soon.
The challenge comes in getting members, most of which are moving a mile a minute, to take time to include Hyperledger in their promotion or launch plans. This community is primed to connect and engage with one another. I hope to encourage and see more cross-company collaboration and see more connections being made between vendor companies in the space.
Maryam: The negative media on NFTs and crypto has been hard on the entire industry. The current market slow down has also put a lot of innovation projects on hold. Realistically, blockchain is still at the innovation stage, slowly creeping into early adoption. We have a long road ahead until we reach the chasm. I think one critical piece most of us have not yet resolved is “what headache are we curing.” The more explicit we can be about that, the more we will make blockchain not just desirable but a necessity.
We also need to reduce the barriers to entry before we see any real leaps in the space. How do we introduce a complex technology and its wide array of benefits without being overwhelmingly technical or complicated? How do we highlight the possibilities of our solutions, without real world use cases to back them up?
I think we all recognize the opportunities blockchain provides. To foster them, we need to resolve these challenges.
How do people get involved?
Helen: The easiest way to engage with the Hyperledger Foundation Marketing Committee is to sign up on the email list and get the monthly meetings in your calendar. Reach out to Benjamin Thomas and the Marketing and PR email aliases with any news, announcements, or questions. We’ll be happy to answer any questions or help promote your wins across the enterprise blockchain community!
Maryam: In the prisoner’s dilemma, the best outcome is when both parties cooperate. This applies here as well. We are a community – we thrive with cooperation and collaboration. I would love to hear from others what they are missing in their go to market strategy or what they are looking to achieve in 2023. I have no doubt one person’s feedback will resonate with the majority of us. So together we can work to address them and improve activities for everyone. I think open dialogue, networking and leveraging the marketing activities set in place by Hyperledger Foundation will help us all move the needle.
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The monthly, members-only Business Development call is the first Tuesday of every month at 11:00 am ET/8:00 am PT. There is also a monthly call for Marketing Committee members in Asia Pac. It is the second Tuesday of the month at 11:30am India ST/2pm HKT Singapore/3pm JST. For more details, go here.
To sign up for the marketing committee email list, please contact the Hyperledger Foundation marketing team. If you aren’t a Hyperledger Foundation member, talk to us about joining so you can be part of this grow-focused community. Email our membership team here.