Overview: Social Web

"sometimes organizations get so caught up in showing off their use of social media tools that they forget that those tools have a purpose – strengthening the relationship between an individual and your organization. A healthy social strategy includes both content created to get new folks in the engagement funnel AND to strengthen the “passion-c…

In studies, people report that they feel better after venting. But researchers find they actually become angrier and more aggressive. People who vent anonymously may become the angriest and most aggressive.... We typically sound angrier in print. And when we write down something, we can reread it, over and over, and stew. With e-venting you don…

Let’s hope [Beme] catches on ... and make social media about real people again -  not their carefully edited versions, and certainly not companies, Institutions and all the others choking up my feed with their marketing as they desperately try to appear human.

A decent long read: on @medium, The Optimal Post is 7 Minutes: "Don’t feel constrained by presumed short attention spans. If you put in the effort, so will your audience." - The Optimal Post is 7 Minutes — Data Lab — Medium

social media platforms are ... the main avenue through which we make comparisons with our peers, acquaintances, celebrities ... those comparisons are often what we base our life-expectations on, these platforms can lead to anxiety about our place in the world... Most of the content on social media wasn’t improving my life — in fact, by taking u…

One of the best longreads re: the future of news media I've read in a while: "Websites... have been able to accumulate enormous audiences with incredible speed by harvesting referrals from social networks... Websites plausibly marketed these people as members of their audiences, rather than temporarily diverted members of a platform’s audience.…

Every brand, every company, and every person has a story to tell, and visual storytelling is a very effective way of sharing your brand’s message and engaging with your customers. - The Science of Storytelling Through Facebook Images

"I — and all other Medium users — are... generating content so that someone can make money... in return ... Medium does what? Medium’s sole value is giving me an easy way to write and driving traffic to my writing. Admittedly, it does a good job with that... Medium owns your content. It owns it to the extent that it can copyright it and use…

 "...responses aren’t visible from the stream, it’s not immediately clear why some show up below a post and others don’t…Today we’re rolling out some changes to make things more clear..." - obvious responses — The Story — Medium

An odd mix of sarcasm and good advice: "Just show up early, write an interesting bio, post a flattering picture. Then continue to show up. Contribute. Better, contribute something original, something entertaining. Don’t worry if no one reads it at first, just keep doing it.... Try and meet the founder. Keep talking to them about the platform…

Most are aware that Small Authors complain about the lack of views/reads. I have yet to see a credible explication as to why this really is, though quite a bit of advice as to what to do about it, which usually boils down to keep plugging away and it will come. That’s not exactly encouraging to newbies. So what is the culprit?

"LinkedIn is emailing the 500 people it calls its “Influencers” and asking them for permission to automatically hand their stuff to other sites that want to republish it in full.... Influencers get more distribution for their names and ideas... LinkedIn gets to advertise LinkedIn... letter to Influencers asks for permission to translate their p…

Last week’s edition included 13 links across 3 topics. This week I go the ‘Special Edition’ route and focus on one topic: Medium. 

I think the distinction between platforms and publishers is misunderstood.

IN RESPONSE TO: Thanks for sharing this.  “While this makes sense it would make more sense if Medium existed in a vacuum… most authors are prepared to put up with a second-class authoring tool in return for a shot at a first-class audience. ”

"The EU Commission and Parliament probably spend hundreds of millions of euros on comms projects every year, but almost nothing on stimulating the emergence of the European Online Public Sphere..." - Posted to Story-Europe's Medium publication to give Catalyst project some content to kick DebateHub’s tyres with.

So I put together a landing page, sent a few newsletters to myself, then wrote a post on Medium. It featured 75 outstanding pieces of journalism ... my Minimum Viable Product. Naturally, nobody showed up to read the post. Then, somehow, Rand Fishkin (the CEO of Moz.com) found it and spread the word " - The Medium Viable Product — Thoughts on…

Absurdist is a relatively young publication that I’d launched on Medium on December 31st, 2014. At the 6 month mark it had already grown past 10k followers, pulling in anywhere between 50–200k reads a month. It takes a lot of work and collaboration to build and grow a publication. - Building a Publication — Yung Rama — Medium

What separates Medium from everyone else is that responses create this amazing platform for discussion and stories breed their own little ecosystems. So why don't we treat responses and their result with as much respect as we currently do recommendations?... a story that inspires twenty responses is more "successful" in my opinion than one that…

"there’s something missing in terms, I think, of the user experience of linking content to a particular author. - Medium has a small author problem — Medium

While most the activity on LinkedIn occurred within the first 24 hours after posting, Medium was more of a slow burn... led to shares from outside networks. Of the 1,500 views of my article, 500 came from Facebook, 400 from email, and nearly 300 from Twitter... For years, we’ve been warned away from such tactics... in a world in which Facebook …

IN RESPONSE TO: The numbers game can get so depressing. "In order for Medium to be a good place for writers to get feedback, everybody has to lighten up a bit. The platform isn’t helping. The comment feature adds to the social constipation... following the conversation feels like digital spelunking." - In order for Medium to be a good place …

IN RESPONSE TO: Why Fiction Writers Should Find a Home on Medium "I turned to Medium with the hope of cultivating an audience, but I’ve become a bit disenchanted... if you don’t already have a bit of a following OR better yet the power of numbers that joining a publication provides, your work has a slim shot of getting viewed." - I turned t…

IN RESPONSE TO Medium Would be a Much Better Network with Direct Messaging... I’ve seen far too many new social platforms I’ve used collapse under the weight of the “navel-gazing debate” of users. - The tricky business of social platform development — Medium

If you’re a fiction writer, Medium may feel like a place you can go to for practical tips and encouragement about writing and networking among many other practical ideas on a variety of topics, but it may not feel like a place for publishing your latest short story. But Medium is a rapidly growing network that’s perfect for fiction and nonfiction …

IN RESPONSE TO The Web We Have to Save... Unlike a blogger, it’s very hard to isolate and ban Facebook or Twitter. A blogger can be placed in jail, a network of people on a platform with millions of users is much harder... [BUT] these platforms have their own censorship mechanisms... Facebook is doing better now but ... many things were bloc…

in some ways, it feels like there’s a wall between users on Medium. Currently, the only two ways to communicate ... are through Notes and Responses... communication can quickly get lost. It’s hard to keep track of all the conversations you’re having without one central location ... And why are Responses treated as posts? ... Responses taki…

"I can accept that. Here are my theories on why Medium sucks and I would like for people to tell me why I am wrong.... Why are comments so deprecated here? ... The recent I Racist post ... garnered 33 “notes” on one paragraph... it is painful to read as a bizarre little sidebar on the side of the page... nobody is here. Everyone is cross po…

The conversation continued through various responses and notes in different responses, blooming outward, but at that point to actually follow it you needed to perform a very impressive feat of what Gutbloom so aptly calls “digital spelunking”. Which then led everyone to discuss what could make the social part of Medium better... the thing I’d m…

I don’t post on my website anymore, at least not with the goal of getting any traction. Instead, I post almost entirely on Medium... the success I’ve see on Medium is in direct correlation to my commitment to sharing my voice .. create and share, not for the sake of getting anything in return, but do so because you are choosing to be generous…