If it’s good enough for Jeff Bezos…
Access PR's Andrea Kerekes argues Medium.com is the one important trick Australian marketers might be missing out on.
Elon Musk has been all over it for a while now and Jeff Bezos exposed his Mr Pecker blackmail scandal there just last week.
Mike Cannon-Brookes will recommend a good read and everyone can get inside the head of Gary Vaynerchuk.
There are 90 million unique readers monthly who spend an average of seven minutes reading each article and it’s the fastest-growing open content platform in the world.
It’s Medium.com and this six-year-old online platform is redefining blogs, content, communications and thought leadership.
In Australia, it’s not so well-known. Yet.
Launched by former Twitter Chairman and CEO Ev Williams, Medium is a free platform-CMS-community hybrid that also offers a subscription model.
Williams wanted to establish a simple, cut-through platform that shared real opinions and real ideas to a network of like-minded people.
In the US, companies, major brands and executives routinely include Medium.com as a key channel in their owned and shared thought leadership platforms.
Publishers like The New York Times and Bloomberg are using Medium to host and distribute their content.
Marketers are increasingly including Medium.com as part of their digital strategies to drive SEO and to engage with their audiences.
In a content-driven world, Medium is “an appealing playground for adventurous marketers looking for new ways to associate their brand with great content,” according to one of the world’s top marketers, entrepreneurs and influencers Neil Patel.
So how does it work?
Thankfully, Medium is driven by content quality, simplicity and relevance. You can write, draft and edit pieces to upload or just read.
Readers can tag, highlight or recommend other Medium content as well as share through their social media channels.
Its clean user-friendly design serves to focus on the content.
Medium’s curators search for the best content and push up pieces that are topical, well-written or offer original insights.
There is a choice of more than 90 themes to feature your content or to follow, from business topics like leadership and marketing, to tech, to creativity, to travel.
Users create a custom feed based on themes, tags, recommendations, publishers and authors.
Best of all, there is a large built-in audience that helps grow your own target audiences and engagement more quickly than starting from scratch.
And with the rise and rise of audio and sonic branding, Medium links seamlessly with podcasts – as well as offering audio strategies and insights from international leaders in the area.
It also allows for Google Analytics integration and has a limited amount of its own built-in measurement for posts using three metrics: views, reads and recommends.
Essentially, despite being a relative newcomer, and having an unwelcome dip in its success a couple of years ago, Medium has snared a great position in the burgeoning ecosphere of high-quality content.
Better still, it crosses seamlessly into the new marketing reality that needs to tap into the power of personalisation.
So far in Australia, a handful of publishers, journos, digital agencies and are active on Medium, but I couldn’t find any Australian brands or marketers involved (happy to be enlightened!).
Others have dipped their toe in a couple of years ago and left. I would suggest it may be time to take another look.
And if you have never checked it out, do yourself a favour.
Best case? Medium becomes a strong thought leadership platform for you or a smart way to amplify your brand.
Worst case? You find yourself browsing articles from some of the world’s most creative, brilliant and thought-provoking minds. And maybe learn more about why Jeff Bezos will never take another ‘below the belt’ pic again.
Andrea Kerekes is the founder and CEO of Access PR.
I can’t stand Medium. It might have started with the best intentions but it’s become a collection of good reading experience antipatterns. The relentless popups asking you to join. The fact that if you press PgDown it scrolls you a few lines down from what should’ve been the next bit to read. It’s a shitshow.
The line I like about it is: Medium. For when your ideas are neither rare nor well done.
That said, there’s definitely opportunities for marketers to get messages out. It’s another off-site platform to target.
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Interesting, Simon. So far I haven’t had the same experience but maybe I am still in the honeymoon period!
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I’ve been a subscriber to Medium for a while and I find it the most diverse and interesting of my “go toos“. It’s jam packed with edifying content and anyone who dismisses it out of hand isn’t using it as it was intended. It’s all about words and writing really. My subscription also gives me links to other portals as well. My only concern is that it will get too big!
50? Medium…
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Does it allow for Google Analytics integration, in fact? It looks like that was one of Medium’s features for a limited time. Now it appears to have been phased out. I’m trying to find more information on this, but reporting on it is hard to find.
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