Overview: Online Strategy

If you already have a blog, consider posting new or old blog posts on Medium. This is what I do, and it’s helped breathe new life into old work.... - WHY MEDIUM IS GOOD FOR YOUR WRITING CAREER — Personal Growth — Medium

"Innovation is exploding in every direction. With all of these “smart” things — smart cars, smart phones, smart watches, smart glasses — it’s a designer’s job to figure out the best way to deliver content in such a vastly connected world. The projects you’re working on at this very moment will be interacted with on devices that didn’t exist wh…

What does the rise of digital distributors mean for the Open Web?... is there a point at which distributors create enough value for publishers to stop having their own websites? If distributors are capturing market share because of a superior user experience, is there a future technology that could disrupt them? And the ultimate question: who will…

Facebook seems to be giving Notes a reboot... looks like nothing else on the website: It has a clean, white-space-filled design with extravagantly readable type. It looks, in other words, like Medium. - Facebook, Medium, and the Personal Press Release - The Atlantic

"by simply learning from disciplines like urban planning, zoning regulations, crowd control, effective and humane policing, and the simple practices it takes to stage an effective public event, we can come up with a set of principles to prevent the overwhelming majority of the worst behaviors on the Internet... Businesses that run cruise ships …

"... that encourages conversation around stories and can help create community on Digg, instead of farming out that chatter to Twitter or Facebook... This year could be a tipping point in how media companies employ reader comments and conversation...expected to debut this fall. You can sign up to follow the project — and be a beta tester ..." …

If you don’t want comments on your website, that’s fine, don’t have them. But don’t act like comments are some sort of intractable problem that can’t be realistically addressed by mortals. They’re not... you could fix this, but your priorities are elsewhere.... Having threads that close, having moderators that redirect entrenched disagreements,…

Social and mobile have fundamentally altered attention. Platforms for self-expression and communication are the largest and most important media companies of the millennial age, dominating share of attention and engagement for young people. And the behavior of the young is predictive of the future. - May I Have Your Attention, Please? — Medium

"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…

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

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?

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 …