Is Medium ready to embrace social change?
In my opinion, social interaction is definitely one of the key areas limiting medium’s opportunity to become an even more powerful player in the online arena. As a writer, Medium provides a unique opportunity to reach readers but in its current form, active social engagement is awkward and clunky.
Social media is a frivolous phrase but in this context ENGAGEMENT isn’t and should be a huge priority for growth.
As a writer, one should not need to manage multiple platforms to engage with readers. One only needs to read 99% of blogs and online publications to experience the proliferation of tools that currently enable social commentary ‘on the same page’ to realise that social interaction is a fundamental part of establishing a thriving community. Notes, responses and highlights just don’t do it well enough and more importantly not everyone who reads content on Medium wants to write so there is little point to them joining yet another website, or is there?
Collaboration is Key
As a publication owner, I often want to chat or connect with writers within my own publication or reach out to other publications but this requires using other platforms including email, twitter or using notes; all of which makes the process fairly cumbersome and disjointed. Its difficult to remember people’s tag names and if you want to say something in more than 400 words, its not possible to tag everyone and say what you want to say in a single note. I have also found it impossible to respond to a note when reading it in a mobile environment.
A simple solution to this would be to create Groups to which you would have the ability to add members (they should also have the ability to accept or leave should they wish to do so) So if you wanted to open a discussion with a selected Group of individuals, you would be able to do so simply and quickly. A simple but effective strategy to improve the ability to ENGAGE.
How are others doing it?
There are a number of platforms that encourage social engagement such as Disqus, Quora etc. I have used Quip on collaborative projects and find it represents a great example of how social engagement and interaction could be better implemented on Medium.
Medium is doing a lot of great things and the team are constantly evolving and tweaking their platform but I think that they sometimes neglect to conduct relevant research into what their core writing community wants and needs.
I love the openness of the Medium platform, I love getting notifications about new articles by my favourite writers but as Medium grows in popularity, it will become more difficult for a writer to be heard, particularly with corporates wanting exposure for their products.
