Medium Day — What an Experience!
Saturday was Medium Day 2024, a 9-hour free virtual event jam-packed with 104 wonderful, informative sessions.
It was virtually impossible to see it all, since — other than the opening and closing sessions — there were between 4 and 10 sessions running in parallel with a new group of sessions starting about every half hour of the day!
Just a few highlights
While helping with Medium Day production, I was helping out in a few of the sessions, though hopping around to check out multiple sessions meant my time in most was brief. Here’s a few where I got to spend some extended time listening in.
State of Medium 2024 — Tony Stubblebine
Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine kicked the morning off at 9am EDT with the informative “State of Medium” presentation. This was not your typical “State of…” address. Tony talked about why Medium is the way it is: free of ads, subscription-mostly access, and payouts to writers. He was particularly proud of reaching the one million Medium subscribers milestone on April 9, 2024. He finished the session with twenty minutes of Q&A from pre-submitted questions and attendee-submitted questions in the chat and Q&A boxes.
How Does Story Distribution Work on Medium? — Zulie Rane
Zulie Rane, another member of the Medium staff, listed her title as “Product Storyteller,” and having never met her before, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Her energetic presentation explained details of how your Medium story filters its way through the process of being presented to other members, whether through the various mailing lists that highlight articles, or directly searching online. Watch this if you want to understand the process, and learn a few details of how you can effectively tweak your article to reach people that want to read your material. Zulie was clear: this isn’t about getting seen, it’s about getting read.
The Path to Pivot — Jason Shen
Do you see yourself as an entrepreneur, but can’t seem to break through to financial success? Jason Shen spoke from his experience turning failing and failed startups into the next big thing. And not failed startups of other people — his own startups that didn’t quite make it. He does plug his book at the very end, and if you watched Tony’s opening session, you’ll remember seeing a copy of The Path to Pivot on Tony’s bookshelf.
Skateboarding and Human Rights — Viriato Villas-Boas
The full title of Viriato Villas-Boas’s session is What Working in Skateboarding and Human Rights Taught Me About Writing, Communicating & Navigating the Contemporary Political Landscape.
This was the most emotional session I attended. Abandoned at birth, growing up in a children’s home, and later adopted, Viriato covers his emotional growth and journey from Portugal to the UK where he studied and learned the value of vocabulary in relationships and communication, oral and written. Watch his session to get the full impact of his life, and his dedicated work helping others.
Finding your thing
You can watch any of the sessions in full! If you are already registered, go to the Medium Day 2024 lobby, click Schedule, then the Filter button:
From there, you can select specific tracks of sessions you might be interested in.
Or just select All to browse the full list and find something that grabs you. Read the session information, more about the speaker(s), and watch as much of each presentation as you like. All free, as a thank you from Medium.
Not registered? You can still register here for a few weeks and watch all the sessions at your leisure.
The key: people, platform, and planning
I had the delightful privilege of working with the Medium staff during the set-up of the event, starting back in early July, working directly with Carly Rose Gillis, Medium’s Content Operations Lead.
The entire event was hosted in a Zoom product called Zoom Events, which can accommodate hybrid and even in-person events, but really shines with full on virtual events from single-day extended meetings with just a few individual sessions to multi-day conferences with multi-track concurrent sessions. Medium Day fell right in the middle: a single day, but with multiple tracks and concurrent sessions.
Carly and her team had began the event development process earlier this year, and we had met in a weekly Q&A session called “Zoom Events Office Hours,” hosted by Zoom. She reached out to me to explore “possible production help” in early July. Lately I’ve done a lot of what I call “Zoom Events Navigator” consulting (ZEN!) and was happy to join the team.
Creating and editing a Zoom Event is no trivial task, though it can be done with a primarily non-technical staff, provided you have ready access to guidance from someone with Zoom Events experience. I help my clients navigate the often-complex behind-the-scenes settings to get the look and feel you’re striving for. Carly already had a great plan in place and was way down the path of entering session and speaker information.
The day of the event had very few issues, and the team quickly learned what I discovered many years ago: working on an event like this is 5 minutes of chaos (getting everyone ready to start their session) followed by 25 minutes of watching and listening to some of the most amazing people and presentations, then repeat the process until the entire event is done.
Jump in and watch a few sessions!
If you missed Medium Day and want to watch a few sessions while experiencing the Zoom Event platform, you can still register, look through the schedule, and watch recordings. Registration won’t be open much longer, so don’t wait. Register here!
If you catch this article after the event registration is closed, check out Medium on YouTube. There are videos from the inaugural Medium Day 2023, which was simply held in a number of webinars.
I look forward to seeing you at Medium Day 2025, scheduled for September.
In the meantime, if you’re thinking that something similar to Medium Day might work for you, drop me a note in LinkedIn.
