Excellence on ILLUMINATION
Quality & Excellence Matter
Creating prominent content to inspire, move, and motivate our readers
Background
Throughout history, we humans strive for quality. Our cognitive brain is hard-coded for improvement. We don’t settle. There is no destination for quality and excellence. Quality is a journey. As the adage refers, there is always room for improvement.
Quality depicts a degree of excellence. We perceive quality as a distinctive attribute or characteristic possessed by people, process, products, and services.
The industry has a high focus on quality. For example, in the early 1920s, the concept of quality management started emerging. In the 1940s, what we now call TQM (Total Quality Management) had high focus mainly popularized by Deming, Feigenbaum, and Juran.
I don’t want to go into details but to create awareness on TQM. The attached diagram illustrates the eight elements of TQM as referenced by ASQ. A picture can tell a thousand words.
From my experience, agile approaches help us increase quality in a pragmatic way. I provided my industry view on the quality aspect of agile approach in the attached article.
Quality concerns and matters to the leaders. I shared my research findings on leadership excellence. You can learn more about the characteristics of excellent leaders from this article.
Significance of Quality for Content Marketing and Strategy
As it is crucial in all walks of life, quality is critical for content developers and writers too. Content strategy and market is the context of my article today.
As writers, we want our content to be meaningful, appealing, and engaging.
We need to develop a benchmark and set of criteria aligning with our writing goals and reflecting our values. Each writer is unique; hence each of us needs to have our own set of criteria for our content strategy and marketing. We can leverage the generic guidelines and principles, but we must tailor them for our needs and aspirations.
Design Thinking can be beneficial for writers to improve the quality of content. As a Design Thinking professional and thought leader in the industry, I simplified Design Thinking approach for writers in the attached article.
In a nutshell, Design Thinking enables us to think like our readers and have empathy for them. Design Thinking is a consumer-oriented agile approach aiming to increase quality in the lifecycle from inception to implementation and product consumption. The key message is to put ourselves on our readers’ shoes and have empathy for their needs and wants.
To improve the quality of our articles and make them reader-centric, we may ask a few questions during the content development phase. For example, we can ask the following key questions:
“When I publish this article, does it add value to my readers?
“What value do I add specifically?”
“If I were the reader of this article, how would I feel?”
“If I was the reader of this article, how would I rate this content?”
“Do I inspire and motivate my reader in this article?”
“Did I provide sufficient content to articulate the topic?”
“Is my content unique and authentic?”
“Does my content offer clarity, brevity, and impact?”
The last question hits the mark for improving quality. By asking this simple question, we condition our mind to focus on providing clear messages in fewer words and providing valuable content which adds meaning, knowledge, new perspectives, and insights to our readers.
As writers, editors, and readers in our community, we will develop common criteria to improve the quality of our content. This collective intelligence can make our publication more appealing, compelling, and visible to a larger audience.
Quality improvement is one of the critical strategies for ILLUMINATION publication and community.
My guidance stemming from architectural and design thought leadership in the industry is to understand the constants, work with variables, and change the parameters based on constraints and dependencies. I will help our writers, editors, and readers to understand these industry practices in upcoming articles under different topics.
My pragmatic view on quality is to focus on how we can improve our quality with 20% investment (time/effort) yielding an 80% gain. By applying this simple principle, we can hit the mark for our quality improvement goals.
The bottom line for this article: My vision is to make ILLUMINATION a distinguished and eminent publication. The path to eminence requires quality and high standards. Therefore, we need to raise the bar gradually and together. To this end, I propose a 30-day challenge for our writers and editors.
30-day Quality Challenge for ILLUMINATION Writers and Editors
This challenge is a tactic in our content marketing strategy.
The purpose of this challenge is to make an experiment to break the walls of so-called “curation jail” termed by Medium writers.
By using this experiment, we aim to kill three birds with one stone.
While increasing the chance of distributing more articles to topics from ILLUMINATION, we raise the profile of our publication to appeal to our readers and improve the skills of our readers leveraging our current capabilities.
What is the challenge?
1. Choose a high impact topic from your domain. Something that may matter and appeal to a wide audience.
2. Write the intended article using your unique capabilities. Imagine you are submitting a paper to a Tier 1 Scientific Journal. Use the principles of clarity, brevity, and Impact.
3. Review the article using writing best practices and Medium curation Guidelines.
4. Ask one of our writers to review it critically. Take no offense for the feedback. Ask them to be as honest and as brutal they can be. This challenge can take us out of our comfort zone. If you need inspiration to deal with criticism check this article.
5. Ask one or multiple editors in the community to review it for you critically. The list of editors is at the end of this article. We have 50 talented editors. Their credentials are recognized in the industry.
6. Submit the article in the next 30 days using the best tags. Please consult other writers and editors for the best tags that can suit your article.
Expected outcomes of the experiment
Considering we have 150+ writers, I expect at least 100 high-quality articles submitted to ILLUMINATION. My educated and conservative guess is that we can have at least 20 articles which can be distributed to various topics.
Imagine, if we have 20 articles distributed to multiple topics in a month, this can help our publication reach to a milestone.
Besides, this experiment can help us develop hypotheses on Medium curation process. Currently, we are working in darkness. The process does not provide feedback. How can we improve if there is no feedback. It does not make sense to me. Our hypotheses can shed some lights and illuminate the process. Our proactive activity and empowering leadership can contribute to the quality goals of Medium and can make Medium even more appealing for new subscribing readers.
Let’s take the risk, invest on this experiment, demonstrate our capability, and grow rapidly. Once we achieve this 30 day goal, we can replicate our success and apply learning to stretch our goals. Within a year, we can be a distinguished and eminent publication adding value to our invaluable readers.
We have nothing to lose. We have a lot to gain. I expect this experiment can improve our writing skills, increase communication and collaboration in the community, and raise the profile of our publication.
Look forward to your consideration and investment on this experiment.
Request for Help
In terms of editing, if possible, I want you to help me improve the attached article, which was not distributed to the topics for [yet] unknown reasons even though the topic is important for society. I wrote this topic second time with care and focus on curation guidelines but it was rejected again immediately.
I am confident about the importance of this topic. Autophagy is an important subject with many health benefits for all of us. I want to raise awareness on the research. It is so important that there is even a Nobel Prize on this topic.
I am proudly and humbly as persistent as J.K. Rowling on this topic. My plan is to submit it at least 35 times until one of the sensible curators understand the importance of this topic for our society and allow my message to be distributed in topics. With your feedback, I want to erase any potential pitfall in my article.
Please help me understand what is wrong or missing in this article. Help me understand my blind spots and increase the quality. With your help, I will improve it and submit it again and again until it is one day distributed to the topics. I want to turn this setback to an opportunity, as mentioned in my article yesterday. I want to sharpen my AQ with your kind help.
In this context, there were also several high impact articles which were not distributed to the topics for unknown reasons. Most of us are disappointed.
For example, one of our insightful writers Tom Byers is requesting feedback on the attached article; let’s help Tom how to improve his content and increase visibility for his insightful and high-quality content. This specific article written by Tom demonstrates substantial thought leadership therefore I am disappointed with the rejection.
As ILLUMINATION community, we choose light to the darkness. Transparency and visibility are essential to us. We can depict our values and manifest outcomes with illumination. Our values are diversity, fusion, innovation, serendipity, and synergy.
Introductions
Today. the following writers introduce themselves. Let’s read their fascinating and inspiring background and connect with them.
Articles Distributed to Topics
Three great articles from ILLUMINATION were distributed to the topics.
1. The Final Misdirection by Michael Ritoch distributed to #Poetry
2. Saying Goodbye and Formalizing our Losses by Julia E Hubbel distributed to #Mental Health & #Self
3. What’s The Connection Between Your Gut Health and Anxiety? by Nicole Linke distributed to #Mental Health #Health
Many thanks to Michael, Julia, and Nicole for creating further visibility of our publication to #poetry, #health, #mental health & #self topic readers.
Progress Update
We had many articles in the last 24 hours. Even as an avid and fast reader, I hardly finished reading them in my three hour reading time.
Here are the stats from the publication dashboard.
15,909 minutes of read
17,896 views
284 followers
149 new visitors
150+ writers
50 editors (knowledge curators)
We gained 29 new followers since yesterday.
We had several new writers joined us. Thank you for making our new writers to feel at home, as part of our growing and caring community.