I also market technology for a living and continuously do research to understand what goes through the heads of my buyers as they investigate and evaluate solutions like mine. Knowing what will go viral is a hope, not an art.

Because it can’t be planned, I don’t even think about what might go viral, I think about what might be really useful to my audience and the challenge they are trying to solve.

The unfortunate thing is that the monetary reward system in Steemit does not reward you for knowing and serving your audience, because there is no way to identify, reach, or engage your audience.

Upvotes from whales is akin to Googles algorithms that reward inbound links from highly ranked sites. Imagine if instead of upvotes from whales being what matters, it was some expression of how useful your content was to your target audience. What if I had a limit of 10 upvotes a day or 100 a week, and I could use them any way I want, and give all 10 to one article because it was super helpful to me?

I think that the current barriers to getting your content seen will prevent Steemit from ever being a social network for marketers to engage their audience with highly useful content and ideas.