Where Will Matter Take Medium & Brands?
Thoughts & questions on digital publishing and brands.
I’ve been on Medium since February and love it.
The content is great (sure, maybe you have to look sometimes — but doesn’t the work make the gems worth even more?).
The connections I’ve made have been some of the best I’ve made in the past three years.
And the platform as a publishing tool— through Medium’s dedication to simplicity — is my favourite part.
See: I’ve been blogging for over four years, using various platforms (Blogger, Tumblr, Wordpress, etc.), and my issues have never involved thinking and writing. My issues always involved designing a post I feel does my writing justice (yes, that’s a bit of a pretentious thing to say, but I’m proud of my words — I work hard on them). And Medium provides me that justice.
Now Medium has Matter.
Up until Tuesday, I was unfamiliar with Matter, besides knowing it had a Kickstarter campaign back in 2012 that peaked my interest. Now that I’ve explored it and read the messages from Mark Lotto and Ev Williams, a campaign and a question stick in my head like a fork turning meat on the BBQ.
The Campaign
I’ve harped on Medium, with colleagues, and anyone that will listen about my love for Vans’ #LivingOffTheWall campaign since I discovered it through an Adweek article. The campaign does some amazing things:
- Uses precision to define its target audience.
- Embraces the culture, beliefs, ideals, loves, passions, the skin and bones of the target, depicting it in all its eclectic glory via a documentary series.
- Provides a simple, in-my-face website to consume the content that is on brand.
- Makes me feel something in my ether — the sort of thing Simon Sinek preaches about and every brand, marketing, ad, communications, and businessperson looking to increase profits must always think about.
- Makes me want to buy Vans.
And I think Matter will lead to a quicker and more efficient means for brands to produce a home for something like #LivingOffTheWall through Medium.
The Question
What will brand strategy for a platform like Matter look like?
To quote Ev Williams’ in regards to Matter’s look and purpose:
“ For instance, you’ll see the Matter homepage is substantially more vibrant than most Medium collection pages. To be clear, we’re not giving our publications special treatment — more accurately, we’re making them eat our own dog food.”
I dig the look of Matter’s page and am confident that once the dog food has been consumed, publishers will have a new, vibrant, and engaging tool to add to their marketing/advertising/branding arsenals. Just look at Felix Salmon’s article about Buzzfeed to see how in-depth a brand can get or Matt Bors’ article to discover the possibility to be short and sweet and you’ll see the vast ways the future of Medium as a platform could fit into a brand’s content creation efforts. But instead of waiting for that future to come, it’s time for brands to start asking and answering questions so the future doesn’t leave them in the past:
- Who is our target? Do they even know about Medium? Is their knowledge of Medium, lack thereof or not, relevant? Does the target contribute to Medium or just read articles? What collections does the target already follow?
- What would a dedication to long-form content look like for our brand? Do we have the team already? Is long-form something our target is embracing already or will we need to coax them into embracing it? How might we coax them?
- What types of content will we create? Written? Infographics? Cartoons? Videos? Podcasts? Where is the limit and how will we define it?
- How should we produce the content? Should it be original, repackaged, or a mix of both?
- How will we drive Audience Engagement to our new platform? What effect, if any, will this have on other Audience Engagement efforts?
- What will our KPIs be?
And once those are answered, and depending on how Medium decides to grow, perhaps your brand will need to ask this:
How much will Medium charge our brand for this tool?
