Hello!
About six months ago, I asked everyone a question that I ask basically everyone I meet: "How do you share what you learn?"
It's a question I've been thinking a lot about, particularly as chat programs like Slack become popular in workplaces. At conferences, I now see people sharing on Slack or in private Facebook groups instead of Twitter. This is fine, of course, but it isn't necessarily sharing knowledge publicly. As we continue to share with smaller communities, it feels like we're heading towards the opposite of an open web. We're sharing — but not necessarily in a discoverable or searchable way.
Responses to the question poured in - from people all over the country - and I'm happy to share them with you today.
As always, please let me know if you have any suggestions for future newsletters — or just want to say hello. The web version of this newsletter lives here, if you'd like to share it with others or read it in another format.
Mel
Next three newsletters:
1. How people in Wyoming get their news
2. How you would improve the calendar
3. We look at public media outside of public media (what does that even mean?)
Vanessa
I really appreciated this information sharing. It's such a thoughtful framework to think through
1) why I write,
2) why I share
3) why it does/does not matter if anyone else actually reads it.
I've found the channels that come most naturally are Instagram (for visual work) and TinyLetter for written work. I think all technology for sharing is extremely dependent on how you use it. In my case, both are part of a daily practice (a la #ContinuousPractice and #TheYearOfMaking). Both platforms provide an easy way to send out a small blip of information daily - and allow readers/partners/cooperatives/conspirators to engage in a way that is meaningful for them. Daily is probably overwhelming for some people, so I like that there is the option to not have to engage if the reader doesn't want to. There are TinyLetter readers who read the note with coffee before sunrise every morning. There are people who read a week's worth of newsletter at the end of the week (and I get a week's worth of responses in a one hour span). I like that people can choose to delete, skim, read, engage, read as archive, share OR NOT with the TinyLetter.
I'm also not sure that I am sharing what I learn. I don't know how to describe it. I guess I think that we all just want to connect and be heard, and that writing - to an audience that may or may not actually be there - fulfills that desire for me. I just like to share, or the idea that I could be sharing if anyone is on the other end of the line. The navelgaze-y TinyLetter lives here. The #365QuoteProject is here.
Heidi:
futuraprime:
There's an interesting question corollary to this question that I struggle with a lot, which is how you learn what to share.
David:
Sometimes I'll tweet it out but I suppose I'm something of a Luddite in the sense that I am not obsessed with saturating my audience. I've read stuff that has told me you can never over-hype, just under-deliver, but I don't like carpet-bombing my audience with the same message over and over again. Despite how wide-ranging you can be with the Internet, I still believe in writing and communicating for humans and treating them as individuals, not groups of people to be targeted. I will tweet something out as the muse strikes and when I have an epiphany or read something interesting and worth sharing. If they miss it, they miss it. If it wasn't meant to be, que sera sera.
That said, I talk about everything I read or learn about obsessively offline. Over coffee. In conversation. In the car. Always to friends. I share it more in the context of trying to figure out something more for myself, so I can then with the next piece or the next Q&A I do, have a better understanding and have workshopped it or road tested it. I like getting feedback on the things I share or think.
But sometimes I just like to keep what I learn to myself and let it incubate. Some things you just have to digest and process before you can fully understand what you even think of it. Not everything has to be instant!
Dan:
Hi Melody,
I favor a couple of ways to share what I've learned.
I think that focus of reach is at least as important as breadth of reach, and so I think about that when I'm sharing what I have learned.
The other thing to think about is building social capital before you want to share what you have learned. That means helping other people out, whether that is giving them feedback, sharing their work, helping them in another way (hookups with your network or job opportunities) or even just meeting them.
If pitching to a reporter, I have found it is especially important to reach out to them with interesting stories that aren't based on my current needs, but the same is true with friends.
Thanks for the provocative questions and I hope you had a great wedding/honeymoon! Ed note: We had a lovely small wedding. Last summer. Apologies for the somewhat-lengthy delay.
Josh:
This is a great question. I use many of the methods you describe below, but I find the most important way to share something is through conversation with others. Small group phone calls, conference workshops, even small emails to targeted folks with the invitation to discuss. But I think my goal in sharing is not necessarily to reach the widest possible audience in the shortest amount of time, but rather, to plant seeds where they might grow and spread over time. For that, meaningful conversations are the best platform.
Benjamin:
I think the defining factor here is the content of the actual concept that you learned. I think the fact that we've have so many ways to share information, ideas, and challenges creates the necessity for everyone to be more discerning as to where they share which ideas.
If I find an interesting article about social issues, broad ideas/concepts, or open-ended articles, I'm more apt to share that kind of information on Facebook, because I know that information will be more useful to the people I connect with on Facebook. If I see an article or post about something more specific or targeted, I send that via an email or I mentioned specific users in a tweet.
In the end, it's less of challenge to decide how to share information and more of a challenge to create an appropriate hierarchy in your social circles. You outline this issue yourself in describing the limitations of each medium.
Anna:
See, this is my problem - I have something important and relevant to share nearly everyday. And I struggle with how to share it in a way that actually gets people's intention. At a time when people are constantly bogged down by different forms of virtual communication, it becomes I frustrating to try to make things stand out. So here's what I do -
Using 1, 2, 3, and 4 from your last below, adding either all caps or a catchy phrase that actually gets people to pay attention. Like "READ THIS TO MAKE YOUR DAY BETTER!" Or something of that sort.
In person face to face contact. As challenging as it can be to get a bunch of people in the same place all at once, ESPECIALLY if it's a huge amount of people, I would so much rather spend my time talking to people out loud using my voice (which I know they will hear rather than an email, which has far more likelihood of getting ignored).
But seriously - help! There's got to be a better way to communicate to a large group and actually get their attention.
Erin:
I post interesting words/weird factlets I've learned on Twitter with the preface "TILT" ... the best thing is that about 1/10 times someone asks me what "TILT" means and then THEY learn that "TILT" means "Thing I Learned Today" :-)
John:
I find that sharing things on Twitter and Facebook are effective for me, particularly if I write a tight, SEO sorta message and include a link or photo. And naturally, if a Jay Rosen, a Jeff Jarvis, a Steve Buttry or a Mathew Ingram share it or engages with me, it gets kicked around the net more.
Getting my blog on a good reader -- I use Feedly -- also helps. Naturally, it's really about getting followers on Feedly.
Scott:
In my mind, there is very little difference between #1 and #9 except Facebook actually tells you what your organic reach is. A billboard is highly ineffective - the number of people that see it and actually ACT on that information is very low. This is why online ads on hyperlocal sites are performing so badly.
When I learn something and want to share it with others - if I think it's REALLY important - I'll likely do almost all of the above. Because I know to reach the majority of the people I want to get to, I'd have to post to multiple mediums. I'd also put it on my own blog and use keywords to try to make it as "findable" as possible. Because the most effective way to get a point across is to be found when somebody has the "intent" to know what it is you've learned.
Wayan:
I built my own community website hyper-targeted on my professional speciality that has 8,000 subscribers to its 3x a week RSS-to-email service. 6,000 of those subscribers open at least one email a week. So on average, any post is read by ~2,500 people in my profession via email and web.
Alessandra:
I tweet stuff a lot but also use twitter as a filing system of sorts to recall when I want to mention something in conversation. I am also friends with a lot of people I meet on twitter so the conversation is always going and fairly seamless.
Erin:
I prefer email newsletter or in person. Regardless of the size of my newsletter list, I try to remember the individual. If my experience positively influence another, then it was worth hitting publish. With in person, I like to quickly dive deep and get into the meaningful and substantive elements of what I am learning (or listening to what they have learned). In general, I value depth over breadth and the individual over the masses.
Amy:
I believe in the importance of the collective unconscious. I think it's more about the lessons learned as a whole than the individual. I find when speaking to friends and co-workers that we're regularly learning the same things, even if we follow different people & outlets online. So I share what I've learned on my blog without expectation, okay knowing I'm adding a single thread to the bigger picture.
Paulina:
Is the question how do you share something with everyone or how do you share something with someone? If I mass-email or group text, I assume that about 50% of my friends will see it, and if I post it on FB or Twitter I assume that 5% will see it, but if I gchat someone or send one email I expect a response about 80% of the time, unless it’s a YouTube video and they’re at work.
It used to be that if I sent someone something on Pocket I could practically guarantee they’d read it, but now it’s ubiquitous and too many people send each other too many articles.
If you do an in-person workshop, though, you can guarantee that 20-30 people will actually learn the thing you share; I think the worst way to share what you’ve learned is via webinar - everyone’s checked out and probably on Buzzfeed.
Maayan:
Is "as many as humanly possible" because you think everyone needs to know, or because everyone who needed to know was seeking this lesson learned and you happened to be there to fulfill the need?
For all the things you listed, there are some I prefer in the scope of sharing over others because when I learn something, it doesn't mean that someone else is ready for it right then and there. Since it's a part of my learning process to share what I'm doing, that part of it is for me in the moment, and it happens because it has to. But! If others want to learn what I learned because they're ready for it, I already did my public and comprehensive sharing in the form of a blog. When all those humans who need to know ask their psyche (read: Google), the things I learned will be there when it's the right time for them.
Part of the reason I began easing back on presentations this year was thinking about the input/output based on the amount of time that went into producing that learning experience for the amount of people that were there to absorb what I was talking about (also, who was benefiting from my presence and what that was worth to me and to others, but that's another can of worms entirely). While the public speaking element was a valuable skill for me and a worthwhile experience for the audience, the skill-building and presenting to a focused in-a-learning mindset group was flash in the pan rather than long lasting. "You had to be there" is not necessarily a desirable learning model.
To give you a more tangible time breakdown of input/output, this is from the unpacking of my travel in 2014.
[Now,] I’m prioritizing opportunities that get the most out of my preparation for the most people. This blog post took an hour to write, and it’s going to live for as long as this blog/the internet will be around. It’ll be helpful now, it’ll be helpful later, and it’s good for me and good for you readers. In contrast, an average presentation experience this past year required around 20 hours of background work (planning, coordinating, writing, slide-making, practicing), anywhere between 6-24 hours of travel time, and one hour of speaking. If I was feeling up to it, slides would be posted within a few days of presenting, and if I had time to share a blog post, I would do that too (fact: I did not).
Sophie:
I think about this a lot: continuing education is my non-profit business & my personal jam, so I am always learning and thinking about how others learn.
Given how few people will see anything I write - either for myself or on behalf of my organization - in any one venue, I embrace redundancy. I'll always post the same content - tweaked for the tone of each platform - across FB and Twitter, and if I can make it work in other spaces, at Tumblr, Instagram and/or Pinterest, too.
We then also repackage all of our best content (regardless of favorites/likes/shares/re-whatevers) in a monthly newsletter for our members. I've also been experimenting with Smore as a way to repackage our best advice (particularly on topics I'm asked about frequently) & still-relevant archived webinars on a wide variety of library topics.
I don't recycle content on the same platform (though maybe I should? I'm open to the possibility). If I've tweeted something once, I don't tweet it again, but I DO thread tweets, because I find that it gives readers useful context, puts more of our voice/material in people's feed, and it's been a successful strategy for convincing people in & out of libraryland to follow us.
Very much looking forward to what others have to say!
Rob:
I'm having the same sharing problem as you for the same reasons.
An observation: Each networking site's connections are growing exponentially. Photos and videos are bandwidth intensive and bandwidth is finite. The networking sites seek to make money by simultaneously restricting the message's audience and offering to boost your audience for a fee.
It's hard for me to see this ending well.
Nick
I try and share what I learn and discover across multiple platforms. So that means sharing it on my Twitter feed, sometimes multiple times over a period of days, linking it in my newsletter about bears, IMPORTANT BEAR NEWS, sending it directly to friends via email if I think it would interest them, and, perhaps most commonly, simply telling people in my life and work about whatever it is I learned: sharing new ideas and surprising discoveries in my living room, out to eat, in a coffee shop. If I learn something new and want to share it and discuss what it means, the best way to spread is to talk it out. Very low-key analog, but effective, I've found.
Greg
I publish a small fortnightly free circulation newspaper (circ 4400) and do most of the reporting myself. The paper is mailed to every household in the core circulation area.
Several years ago, I began offering my readers (and anyone else) the opportunity to subscribe to email updates. These go out, via Constant Contact, when something important happens in between issues of the print edition. I have attracted about 15 percent of my readership to sign up -- not that impressive a percentage.
We also have a Facebook page, which attracts about the same percentage (and is not terribly active -- my fault.)
Lately, I have found the most effective way to push things I learn (or know) out beyond the reach of my current readership, is to join active Facebook Groups devoted to particular interests that coincide with the beats I cover.
Best example is Parents for Moore, a countywide group that advocates for increased funding for schools. I joined the group. When I write an article on the schools, I put it online and post a link and summary in the group. I also follow hot topics in the group, and provide factual information when I can. This has raised the profile of the paper and my profile as editor, as well as providing useful info to folks in the group.
Outside of work, I also find special interest groups on Facebook the best way to share things I learn about my hobbies. I'm into letterpress printing, and a group devoted to that seems to be the best way to share new things I learn from ancient books on printing. In the old days of the Internet, I found listservs were good for this. But Facebook makes using photos easier.
So, in short, special interest Facebook groups seem to currently be the best way to share new things I learn or knowledge that I have.
Paul
Quora. I don't use this platform to share what I learn, but many others do.
Lauren
I think we have to consider the other side of sharing: who’s listening? I think the success of sharing often comes from a connection with the people you are sharing with. Perhaps community building is one of the most important parts of effective sharing, regardless of avenue.
If there’s a rabid community learning together, any of the avenues you’ve outlined can be effective. I have a small moms group on Facebook, about 10 people, that is super active. I don’t miss anything that happens with that group because it’s important enough for me to check even if I don’t get a notification.
Kate
This is an interesting question. I am looking at it in a few ways:
How do I learn? Learning for me is something that is happening constantly, through experience, study, active seeking - and for me, requires reflection to actually discern what I've learned. That usually means personal reflection, and can certainly be expressed in writing. I have to say that I do struggle with expressing myself through my writing as insightfully as I can explain it to someone else or organize it in my head.
In many cases, I need to take an active step to really integrate the learning. I tend to do that by:
Teaching someone else: what I know, and how they can apply it to their lives. That for me is a big part of management and coaching, as well as school. One thing I’ve done extensively in grad school is study sessions, both structured through the school, and unstructured through the networks I’ve made. For instance, tomorrow morning, I’ll get up and hopefully get 2.5 hours of alone study time at the coffee shop, and then meet someone for a few hours of teaching for a class we’re both in. See this example also in the world as pair programming, one off partnerships, mentoring, etc.
Showing someone else: In many cases, I’m incorporating what I’m learning into the way I approach real problems. A good example - I’ve learned a lot more about certain aspects of NPR’s business, and what they can be, in the 8 weeks since Lily left. That was practical, on the ground training due to a few obligations I had to pick up. Now, how I apply that is to look at making recommendations for the future based on what we’ve learned from the present. I show what we’ve learned, and it informs what we’re proposing. Think about retrospectives, process changes, or continuous improvement as analogues. Or just how the first time you do it, you’re feeling it out, and you improve on it the next time, and the next. That’s showing your learning.
A few other thoughts around why I choose to share something:
Publishing or Guiding the Conversation: This is probably closer to what you’re looking for - how do we document what we’ve learned. I try to write targeted and complete business messages to share updated learnings with the right people internally. I also try to write something complete and targeted at the person who would most need it externally, if that’s the case. In many cases, my mission with that is to guide the conversation in a certain direction. So I take what I learn, and show it by applying it to that conversation.
Personal Branding: This one is a bit of a tougher one, but in some ways gets at the heart of what we’re looking at. What I say, and what I publish, and what I share all comes down to how I am shaping how people see me. So my choice of how I share what I learn is heavily informed by what persona I am supporting. Vehicles for that incluce a presentation, on a panel, in public posting, in content that I’m sharing. I spoke on a number of panels regarding social media and community management in my last role, and I’ve stepped back from that now - not because I’ve forgotten everything I know, but because I’m consciously trying to build up other public expertise. What I publish evolves along with that. That’s a stickier one, since I know you don’t react well to the term of branding, but that’s the truth to what I do, and to what many people do. I can speak intelligently and with insight over almost anything. I’m learning new things in that vein every day. However, what I choose to share says more about who I am striving to be.
What I use actively, and what I have stopped relying on: In many cases, I’ve learned something that turned out to be NOT as useful - or not as useful anymore based on where I am in my life. Those are insights that I’ll pass on to others in mentoring relationships, almost like tools that don’t make sense for me to have anymore, but that I want to make sure still exist in the world. In other cases, I may not choose to share them - those are things that aren’t as valuable now, even if they were valuable to me at the time.
One other useful concept that I picked up from school is an analogy to firefighters. During the fire, the firefighter draws on her instincts and on what she's learned to be more effective in a crisis. Any time I’m acting - moving something forward, actively pushing at something, working - that’s all firefighting time. At the same time, a firefighter also values her firehouse time in between the crises. That firehouse time is the time to integrate, and reflect, and practice - to build up the muscles she needs, and reflect on what you’ve learned while firefighting. This is the time to integrate, to learn, and to improve. Consciously making the choice to value firehouse time - by blocking time off on my calendar to write, publicly or in a journal, talk to others, study, do other things - that’s something I’m trying to work on.
Annie
Your stats made me feel fatigued, at first, but it also made me question again the mad rush for all this reach. It would be much more valuable to me if I communicated something I learned to 7 people who could clearly understand me and would then take some action. That can have tremendous impact.
We don't have a good way to measure the pond ripple effect of what we share, or the "long tail" of what we create online. But when I report up to validate my existence to those who measure my work, or to those I am in partnership with, i give more than clicked or viewed or shared numbers. I try to convey the power in the individual stories that are true results of my work.
That said, your stats also make me realize how profoundly difficult it is to be heard, or to capture someone's attention long enough to have that kind of impact. Instead of hoping for Reddit magic, should we think of making our digital content more like crafting a book? Should it be made to last, put in a reliable format and indexed so it is easily found on an Internet shelf? Should it be annotated to help the seeker discover it when that time comes? Should we all be doing more to participate in fortifying our archives for future generations of learners?
One archivist I talked to recently said hardly anyone builds proper storage and indexing into their workflow. Someday, she told me, when none of our current publishing formats work on new systems and all that blogging disappears, they'll view our digital age as the new Dark Ages, with little discernible information to tell them how we lived or what we were communicating to each other.
The answer to your question is complex, and we don't have time for it. We're all capable of breaking news or going viral now, which is amazing. But we must also build more resources for each other that foster learning and sharing of what we know. Then ultimately the digital "classics", proven to be most valuable (determined by whom is a whole other conversation, but the democratizing nature of the Internet should influence that for good), will endure.
Matt
As an academic, I'm supposed to share what I learn through peer-reviewed publications. The problem is, the only people who read those things are other academics, so the information usually takes a while to make its way out of academic circles.
Laura
1. I post on Twitter. I like thanking people for their content if they have helped me learn something new. But my follower count is small so few people see my tweets. I also wonder what would happen to that little archive of things I've learned/shared if Twitter suddenly went away.
2. I go to conferences. Running a workshop/going to breakout sessions is a great way to share ideas but...
A. I'm an introvert so too much conference time is exhausting for me and
B. Conferences are self selected audiences and a lot of ideas work across industries... not just the intended industry.
3. I talk to people at the airport, in food truck lines, etc. Some of my favorite things I've learned have been from times my flight was delayed/ I had a long wait time @ a ticket counter/ sat next to someone cool on a ferry. Being stuck in a line is a great time for sharing.
Dylan
Strangely enough, I've begun to share things I learn primarily in person or via individual text messages. The inefficiency always seems to be worth the depth of the subsequent conversation.
Amanda
1. Offer to talk at a Meetup (which is still a small audience but at least an active (hopefully!) listening session.
2. Offer to talk at conferences (again, focused audience).
But realistically..
3. Write it on a piece of paper. Tape to the back of bathroom stalls every where you go. Keep it short. Keep it readable. Keep it humorous.
{I did this in high school with my bad poetry. I called it "guerrilla art".}
Machiko
I don't do these things.. but this is how I've noticed others do this. I'm not trying to mock it, but I don't necessarily love it either.
Naming/Marketing/Selling the thing-you-learned:
- Come up with a fancy name for something you've learned. Make it learnable, buyable, a thing you can get certified in.
- Market this. Make a #Hashtag.
- Write a few blog posts about it to hook people in. Preferably include a number of steps. - Go to conferences and do talks and workshops about it.
- Make an e-book to subscribe and learn more! Or more special content, like videos, podcasts, e-mail newsletters, Facebook groups named after this idea.
- Turn it into a 12-step program and get people to learn it, become teachers in it.
How this gets open-sourced: Another thing I've seen in web development is for this new learned thing to become an open-sourced tool, often something like a measuring stick. For example, Sandi Metz, an amazing web developer/author/teacher in Durham, NC, wrote a book in which she laid out her "rules" for writing methods. She did the conference talk circuit, the podcast interview circuit, now is paid to teach this. Other people then took this idea, and made command line tools (SandiMeter) to check your code against her rules.
Naming is really big, I think. Alicia wasn't the first person to coin the term "imposter syndrome", but her Medium post about "imposter syndrome" as a web developer -- accompanied with a very easy-to-understand graphic -- made it seem like she did because it seemed like she was the first to apply it in this scenario/industry/niche of people. And that term seemed to make it easier to spread this idea/lesson around.
Sonya
I talk to people. I blog. I social media. Occasionally I publish zines. The audience is pretty small every time I reach out and communicate with the world, but I'm okay with that. Maybe it'll have a ripple effect, maybe it won't, but either way, I got to say my piece and connect with other human beings. It doesn't have to reach everyone to make a difference and make me feel heard.
Tom
If what I’ve learned is worth sharing - and really sharing - then it’s about turning it into a curriculum of sorts. Over the last four years, I’ve learned more about Wi-Fi networks than I ever thought someone with a liberal arts background could learn. I’ve learned about co-channel interference (networks on the same channel), adjacent-channel interferences (networks near each other), noise thresholds, interfering technologies, etc.
The first thing you have to figure out is: Who needs to know this? It’s probably not everyone. It’s a subset of people. In my case, it’s other solo sysadmins, and maybe some of my friends who have Wi-Fi networks in crowded buildings in DC.
Once you have an audience in mind, it’s about seeking them out where they are going to be anyway, and getting them there. Conferences. Meet ups. There are calls for presenters, and it’s time to go talk about this knowledge that you’ve got. These are scarce, but your idea is good, so roll with it and write it up.
A call for presenters means you have to have the kernel of the presentation, not the whole of the presentation when it’s time to submit. You’ll have months to work the rest into shape, so write the elevator pitch version and submit that. You’re going to hear no once in a while. Rewrite and submit. Rewrite and submit. Rewrite and submit. Over and over til you get accepted somewhere. Look locally, there will be some lightning talk groups, where you can workshop the idea.
Now get your talk written and get ready to go onstage. Thankfully, a lot of these talks are now periscoped, or recorded for YouTube. Keeping the rights to publish your slides publicly is key, same as keeping the rights to make your video presentation public. Not everyone will let you do this, but fight as hard as you possibly can to publish your work publicly. If you let that info get hidden away permanently, you’re throwing it into the ether, and maybe it’ll stick, and maybe it won’t, but with tangible leave-behinds like videos and slides, you’ve got an amplifier for that knowledge.
You’re never going to tell everyone everything in a deck or a recording. But you can get a good start. You can level the playing field a bit, and it’s like a preview for potential speaking engagements.
Now you’ve got:
A - An Audience
B - A Presentation (a humanization of a subject, putting in context for learning’s sake)
C - A Venue for Distribution
Finding a presentation place is probably the hardest part of this, but every audience has a venue, a place where those ideas are brought together, and you can get in there. Getting speakers is one of the hardest parts of any meetup or conference, and that’s where your willingness to present and talk is critical.
This is all a lot of work. But you’re going to get a lot broader reach - especially outside of your original circle - it’s just going to take longer, and require more work.
Worth it. Seeing that sysadmin finally see the light about co-channel interference fixes, or network design for dense Wi-Fi implementations, or even just understanding beacon frames, it’s worth it.
Ivan
You hit the most targeted interested audience and let them help with the sharing. How News Cat Gifs took off back when.
Katie
I forcibly subscribe everyone to my newsletter.
Jason
An old friend has held annual salons where guests are requested to prepare a simple lesson. There have been lectures/presentations, debates, cooking demonstrations, small group discussions, and posters. The whole thing is very light-hearted and friendly, with one rule: during a lesson, all due respect is granted the instructor.
Angela
I knit or spin on a spindle in public: in coffee shops, on trains, in theater lobbies before shows and at my seat at intermission, etc. Often, I am approached about it, and I share what I know. Yes, it's a small audience, but always an inquisitive one.