To make NEM successfull you need to answer the ultimate question. Why should anyone (private NOR commercial) use NEM instead of Bitcoin? If you can answer this, assure everyone about this an spread the word. That's the only way to make NEM successful and independent.
In fact there is no huge difference between any crypto currency. It all comes to the community and the economy behind any crypto. Today there is no real solid value in switching to NEM from any other crypto. However, in the very near future there will be tons of reasons. For instance, decentralized asset exchange is one huge advantage that will be coming live in the very near future. In addition to asset exchange, NEM will support smart contracts. These are huge advantages over all other cryptos.
For now NEM would be better in terms of:
- No inflation.
- Multi signature transactions.
- Encrypted messaging.
- Light weight blockchain/algorithm.
- Prove of importance "will be more valuable in the future when NEM gets more popular".
I don't think there is any other crypto that can have multiple harvesters "miners" working in parallel, each independent from the others, but on the same node.