Happy to Be Here. May I Ask You Where the Data Is, Please?
How a real dashboard could improve our writing and overall experience on Medium.
Back in the days when I was a management consultant, my colleagues and I would spend hours fine-tuning a stakeholder power map and drafting talking points accordingly before any significant interaction with a prospect or a client.
A power map or stakeholder map is a fundamental tool in project management: it allows a group of people to formalize and share a common understanding of the people directly or indirectly involved in making or influencing decisions related to a particular issue and implementing them. Based on the map, a team can agree on how to engage with each stakeholder or group of stakeholders, adjusting the conversations to the level of interest, influence, and level of buy-in of each person or group of people.
Today, as a diplomat and a public speaker, it would never occur to me to draft a speech without knowing who the audience is, their education level, the gender ratio, and how familiar they are with the matter at hand.
I understand who I interact with on other platforms, but the Medium member remains a faceless mystery.
I post different types of content on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I know that my community on Twitter is younger, more international, more educated, and more progressive than the people following me on Facebook.
It is also wider; even though (or maybe because) they are exposed to more diverse opinions, I would say I have a lesser influence on them, and my tweets usually generate less emotional responses and private feedback than my Facebook posts.
As a result, my tweets and threads are more straight to the point. They cover more complex issues, whereas, in my Facebook posts, I would take more time to break some concepts and tone down my sarcasm as much as I can (which is not that much, I have to say).
And on Instagram? Oh, I just post cute pictures.
Now, as I make my débuts on Medium, hoping to add my voice to this ongoing conversation, I feel like entering a conference room full of people for a meeting, blindfolded and unaware of who the attendees are, what they think about the issue at hand, and even unsure what language they speak.
Who are the Medium readers? Who are the Medium members? How often do they come around here? What’s their age? What’s the gender balance? How many of them read French, my preferred language? What’s the breakdown per country? What is the proportion of readers from Europe? From the Global South?
I write for myself, but it is with the deliberate intention to connect with a specific audience that I publish anything anywhere.
A full-fledged dashboard providing insights on the Medium members (not only on my stories’ statistics) would not influence what I write about but would probably improve how I talk about issues I care about.
Knowing a few things about who is reading us would allow authors to write more compelling stories. As a result, members would spend more time on the platform, and more readers would be willing to become members. It is definitely a feature a decent proportion of authors would be willing to pay for.
The data obviously exists somewhere. If it were made available to the authors, it would not only benefit all Medium members but also, ultimately, its shareholder(s).
