Unfortunately, ethereum seems to be doing the best job currently, mainly because of all the media attention.
the media attention.
I think we should proceed with marketing in two ways:
1) using guerila-style, immediately rewarding marketing which includes all you have said before and some of what I have said in my marketing proposal and here:
In addition to what I suggested in the marketing proposal brought before, I think there are 2 things which will bring an immediate and huge amount of attention and cash flow into NEM: 1) Launch and get a place into top 10 -15 on coinmarketcap and 2) do everything necessary to bring NEM on one of the premiere and most popular exchanges.1
References
1 I think although counter-intuitive, this may be one of the most effective ways to bring volume into our currency, go into the spotlight and market ourselves at the beginning. Mintpal looks better than most exchanges and sucks less. But more importantly it is the premier exchange for altcoins, has good customer service, has not been compromised or hacked until now, people have traded already thousands of btc/day on it and have btc at disposal there. Blackcoin reached its peak on and probably because of mintpal, same with darkcoin. If we would get on mintpal the result would certainly worth it. It would probably be the easiest way to make btc flow into NEM. From experience I can tell the reputation of the exchange on which the coin is listed is an important predictor of limits in coins volume, meaning people will no way trade 100btc in one trade on bittrex or poloniex but would comfortably do so on mintpal. This is why coins like balckcoin and darkcoin have made it their mission to reach mintapl. The fact is that when almost any coin is created, it generally gets first listed on bittrex and poloniex. After a couple of days, if the coin is interesting enough and it attracts more than 100btc daily volume, the coin is secretly evaluated by mintpal to be added there. Some are added only when they reach 500btc/day volume, some are added only through voting and even paying for voting. Some are never added because it's probably too hard.(NXT is a good example.) The was a time when cryptsy was the premier altcoin exchange, but that time has passed and cryptsy seem to be heading the wrong way.
When a coin grows in price and volume, we generally tend to attribute all the credit to interesting things like innovation, marketing and other stuff, missing the point that the market is a bit more complex and often counter-intuitive in many ways, and the majority of price increase and volume may in fact come from manipulation which is strictly coordinated to accompany innovation and good news(see bitcoin and dogecoin manipulation examples). In the same way, I think we tend to overemphasis the short term effect of innovation, marketing and other stuff over getting listed on a very popular and relatively trustworthy exchange. But looking at the facts and experience, the latter in close coordination with the former may be responsible for the most part. It may even be so due to initiation of some complex chain of events that is utterly invisible at this point. Think 80/20 principle but instead of 20 put 1 or 2 factors.
2) long term/high impact marketing(this is what ethereum is doing):
Besides that, one of the most important things we could do for NEM in the long term is find one or more persons which should be "the faces" of NEM at conferences, interviews, and do what Vitalik Butering does for Etherium, capturing the imagination of technical people and intelligentsia by kindling intelligent discussions and intellectual experiments regarding how NEM works, what we can and could do with it, what problems of previous coins we solve, etc. This is the highest point we need to target, which if we do correctly, will overflow and bring news about NEM into all other sub-layers of society.