The Medium is the Mystery

I have had this account for quite some time, but I only posted the day I created it. (Thanks, David Weedmark, for the invite!)

Confession: Medium confuses me. (Which puts it right there with SnapChat, though the two are at different extremes.) Oh, I understand it intellectually — I just don’t understand it in my heart.

After reading a story on Medium by my Facebook friend, Marcy Massura, I flat out asked her on Facebook, “How do you decide what to publish on Medium?”

This is so embarrassing.

I mean, I was a content creator when content creating wasn’t cool, to borrow from a country song. My job — as the head of communication and education at a trade association—is to find the right content for the right people and put it in the right place at the right time (and pray the email gets delivered or the speakers show up). Yet Medium still mystifies me.

“You just know.”

At my association, we jumped in to social media much earlier than our counterparts. In the mid-to-late-2000s, I would sometimes be asked to speak at our peer associations about social media. (My session seemed to always be followed by a lawyer’s telling them not to do anything I just said or they’d get sued.) Most of the questions I got were more about how to find content and where to put it, which I found puzzling because…I just knew. (I later figured out that I also had to explain that I knew because I had very specific audiences for each social media channel, so where I posted depended on whom I was talking to. You can’t skip that part.)

I’m just confused.

I would share with you the words of wisdom that Marcy shared with me on that day, but…damn Facebook search. (I mean you can supposedly find a friend who has eaten in this same restaurant in France but woe be unto you if you want to find what you SAID LAST WEEK to someone!)

I would like to tell you that her advice has made it easier for me to know “this is a post for Medium” versus my personal blog or my work blog or Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or Instagram or Flickr. But it has not.

I’m a newbie again. (How cool is that?) And I guess I’ll just figure it out along the way!