From reading most of the comments below its obvious not many people understand the difference between STEEM and Steemit. But I am sure most of them didn't read the white paper when they joined, because its about social media to them, not necessarily about the technology behind the token, so Im not suprised.
Obviously we need to see some big advancements like hardfork20 and the release of the SMT protocol so other tokens can be distributed on the steem platform.. Obviously supply and demand will kick in after that, driving up the price becuz there are more companies needing bandwidth and SP to run their platforms on the steem blockchain and there is only a limited amount. (I actually did an article about this not to long ago).
I also think more interaction from the steem dev team and the witnesses, regular updates letting people know whats on the agenda and maybe a timeline of some sort so we have something to get excited about. People are rather fickle creatures and can lose faith in something fast without real communication..
I believe all of these things combined could absolutely take steem to the next level, the technology is solid and people love the idea behind it, but don't u think the dev team of a social media conglomerate should have better communication with its supporters, or its witnesses if nothing else? So the message can atleast be passed along.. I think so..