Hack the MIX Hackathon
The art of sitting down and penning one's thoughts in lucid prose is fast dying! High-Impact content in the Twitter age is no more than a paragraph in most people's dictionaries... If the MIX is to reach more people (who increasingly don't have time to do anything other than work-work-work!) its going to mean talking their kind of language. If there were a simpler means to share ideas, like a Twitter word restriction format for initial shortlisting, we might see a lot more people weighing in. My idea is, if you want more people to come on and share their ideas, then make it a lot easier and shorter to begin with. Once they are onto the MIX, they can be convinced to write more detail! (
Thanks a lot to all of you who have weighed in on this thread. I'm taking away 3 related suggestions: (1) encourage people to be brief when they submit an initial version of the hack/story, (2) make it much easier for people to get a sense of what a submission is all about and (3) make the best content more accessible (MIX catalog).
thanks again
Michele
Thanks for this feedback Stephen. Did you happen to see our last Quick MIX campaign? http://www.mixprize.org/quick-mix-1 It was something along the lines of what you're proposing, gathering short, tweetable nuggets of insight from the MIX community. The first one we did was tied to our recent Innovating Innovation M-Prize challenge and is closed now, but we're considering doing more things like this moving forward.
It sounds like you're suggesting adding a "Tweet this" field to our longer Story and Hack contribution templates, which I think is a great idea!
The QuickMIX was a great start... wondering if there are other ways that we can summarize some of the best long-form ideas so that they are quickly scannable, and people can easily find hacks or stories on topics they are interested in right now. Maybe a catalog of the best hacks and stories, sorted by topics or tags, each with a short 1-2 sentence executive summary that someone can read before jumping into reading the full piece?
A Best of the MIX Catalog, perhaps?
I think that if the content is good, and of a certain quality, people will read it. But, it takes time for people to learn that the content is good and worth their time. For me, I think having more enticements into the content is a good thing, and these could be brief. A good example is the HBR weekly hotlist email that goes out each Monday. It provides a lot of info about content highlights for that week - and you get something of an idea of what it's about and who the author is from the email. The mix has the "mix fix", which is great - but I think more could be done with email newsletters and promoting via social channels.
I think that a MiX Catalog is the best way to put this idea into play.
To be quite honest, I'm skeptical that the tools that I need to revolutionize my organization are going to come in Twitter-length nuggets.
...maybe I'm just too old-school.
You need to register in order to submit a comment.