The Magnificent Seven is the name of Matt's weekly digest. It's released every Sunday at 0700 GMT/BST and contains seven interesting things from a few different categories (systems / ecology, philosophy, technology, movement / health, politics, and other).
The first issue went out on 19th July 2020. It's now at 200+ issues and 1,600+ interesting things sent—approx. 300 of which can be seen on the Mag7 Subset (the full archive is coming). Its subscriber count hovers around 60 people, its typical open rate is 50-70%, its typical click rate is 7-15%, and there's sporadic replies and messages when a particular sent item resonates with a particular recipient.
There's no promotional effort or marketing campaigns in play for Mag7, yet new subscribers do still trickle in and old subscribers do still trickle out. The object of this post is the trickling out. Not because of the impact on some business-critical downstream metric—Mag7 drives no business, after all—but because we think the attrition can be attributed to what we've come to call "dumb sharing". To the fact that people dislike some part of Mag7 as-is but are only able to opt-out of receiving the entity as a whole.
As described above, Mag7 consists of:
7 things from 6 categories shared every 7 days via email
It presents subscribers (existing and potential) with a single, coarse choice: receive it, or don't. This is the very definition of dumb sharing: a multi-dimensional output is collapsed down to a single dimensional preference ("receive", "don't receive"). Instead, consider some of the latent possibilities:
Monthly consumption: 28 things from 6 categories shared every 28 days via email
Category omission: 3 things from 3 categories shared every 7 days via email
Heightened tempo: 1 thing from any category shared every day via email
Different channel: 7 things from 6 categories shared every 7 days via WhatsApp
Keyword muting: 7 things from 6 categories shared every 7 days via WhatsApp excluding items that mention "Apple"
Generating these alternatives is non-disruptive for the producer of the output, a value-add for the recipients because they can align received outputs with their own preferences, and a boon for both parties as it allows new patterns of sharing and interaction to emerge.
In a business or professional context, "dumb sharing" is less of a problem. Although they're not perfect, there's established approaches (and a labyrinth of possible applications) for:
Gathering customer data
Identifying and validating segments
Creating and distributing targeted outputs
Managing those campaigns and interactions across channels and platforms
Integrating them into wider operations that achieve high value organisational outcomes
These practices represent "smart sharing" (something we'll go deeper into in a later post). In a consumer-ish, peer-to-peer output like Mag7, however, those approaches cannot be accessed by anything other than an unwieldy frankenstack of right-sized tools and processes, a payment for an overkill enterprise solution, or by using the thing we're working on: Subset.
