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bubonickitten · 4 years

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Summary: Jon goes back to before the world ended and tries to forge a different path.

Chapter 3 is up!

Chapter 1 (tumblr // AO3) | Chapter 2 (tumblr // AO3)

Full text + content warnings under the cut.

CW: brief claustrophobia; some grief and loss stuff; a few more instances of casual misgendering (not malicious; just some wrong pronouns here and there due to the speaking-in-statements thing, but thought I'd mention it just in case); a single LORGE spider. Also, Jon gets to do one (1) swear, as a treat. SPOILERS through MAG 169.

Chapter 3: Rift

Jon doesn’t remember the hill being this steep.

Or maybe he’s just winded from the long trek through the wasteland. He’d had to pass through a long stretch of territory fought over by the Buried and the Vast. The ground there was practically a minefield, pockmarked with sinkholes. They would start out as quicksand traps and suffocating tunnel entrances, only to be hollowed out into yawning chasms and cenotes, then ultimately collapsed all over again by a retaliation-minded Choke. It was an endless cycle of petty rivalry and animosity, and passing so near their battlegrounds left Jon breathless with a discordant mix of claustrophobia and agoraphobia.

Worse was when the Dark managed to sneak its way into the mix. Whether it was Too Close I Cannot Breathe or the Vast’s abyss, the Dark could always find a way to exploit subterranean spaces – and it could never resist reaching out to needle at an Avatar of the Eye, no matter how inadvisable it was to cross the Archive these days.

As Jon drew closer to Hill Top Road, he left the warzone behind for a mostly featureless landscape punctuated with the occasional foxholes of the Slaughter and pockets of the Forsaken’s fog. Eventually those too gave way to a seemingly endless dust bowl of soot and ash – a sprawling domain claimed by the Lightless Flame.

The house at Hill Top Road is the only thing still standing in the midst of kilometres of Desolation-scorched earth. The charred terrain stops abruptly at the foot of the hill, a stark line demarcating the boundary between the Blackened Earth and the territory that Annabelle Cane has staked out as her own. Jon had half-expected an invisible barrier to stop him there as well – the last time he was here, Annabelle had forbidden him from returning – but there had been no resistance when he stepped over the border.

As he hikes up the incline now, he finds himself worrying over what that might mean. Is Annabelle expecting him, inviting him in? Is she simply tolerating his presence, curious to see what he’s up to? Could he be powerful enough now that even she cannot stop him? Or is he once again wrapped up in the Web’s machinations, doing exactly what the Mother of Puppets wants?

He shakes his head. No. He and Martin talked about this. There’s no point in obsessing over the Web’s motivations, letting the memory of Annabelle’s statement paralyze him with indecision. Better to just… keep moving forward.

And it’s not like he has anything left to lose.

Jon continues up the hill, increasingly winded, his bad leg throbbing angrily, and he thinks to himself again: he really, really doesn’t remember it being this steep.

Before long, he’s standing at the threshold of the house at Hill Top Road. The dread permeating the place is just as palpable as he remembered.

He waits for the Distortion’s inevitable appearance, determined not to let her startle him this time. As if on cue, a door creaks open on the ceiling above him.

“Interesting.” Without preamble, Helen lands noiselessly on her feet beside Jon and peers around curiously. “I wondered whether Annabelle would let me in.”

So did Jon. Maybe he should be concerned about – no. He shuts down that train of thought before it can pull out of the station.

“You still haven’t explained what exactly you plan on doing here.”

Honestly, that’s mostly because Jon hasn’t figured it out yet, either. He only Knows that this is where he needs to be.

The Eye wants things to change – as much as it can be said to want anything. Setting the question of its sentience or lack thereof aside, at the Panopticon he had been able to Know things that the Beholding had previously withheld from him. He might be stronger than the other Avatars and monsters lurking about the world, but he’s not arrogant enough to believe he could overpower any of the Fears themselves. If the Ceaseless Watcher gives him access to knowledge, it’s because his Knowing will facilitate – or at least not inhibit – its plans, which means that he must have the Eye’s… blessing, to be here? He shakes his head; he’s getting caught up on semantics again.

Point is: he Asked a question and – as usual – he was given a scrap of an answer and left to puzzle the rest out for himself. All he Knows for certain is what he wants to happen, and that this is where he needs to be in order to make it happen.

“Jonathan.” Helen says his name with a playful lilt and leans further into his personal space. “Are you going to share with the class?”

Without a word, he sidesteps around her and walks further into the house. In her statement, Anya Villette had mentioned a door under the stairs leading to the basement, but the last time Jon was here, it was nowhere to be seen. He hopes it’s there this time.

“What are you looking for?”

Jon drags one hand down his face and sighs. Having Helen tag along is like taking a road trip through hell with an easily bored and… well, deeply annoying child. Huh.

“I won’t be ignored, Jon –”

Jon bristles, redirects his gaze, and stares daggers at her with a few more eyes than strictly necessary. “Some magically appearing door.”

“You aren’t being very kind to me right now, you know.” She tries to sound wounded, but really she just sounds pleased to have gotten a reaction from him.

Jon gives an irritated huff and continues forward through the entrance hall. He treads softly, all too aware of every subtle creak of a floorboard. He doesn’t know why he’s bothering muffling his footsteps. It doesn’t matter how quiet he is; Annabelle will know – probably already knows – that he’s here regardless. Still, there’s just something about the house that demands a certain amount of fearful reverence. Disturbing the silence just feels like a bad idea.

Helen doesn’t appear to have the same concerns. In fact, it almost seems like she’s going out of her way to announce their presence. Of course.

Jon catches a glimpse of the staircase as he rounds the corner and – yes, there’s a door under the stairs. A plain, painted white door with a brass handle, otherwise unremarkable and entirely unassuming.

And yet…

As he tries to approach it, he finds himself rooted to the spot, overcome with a sense of trepidation. He feels his breath coming faster, shallower; feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Every one of the Archive’s eyes locks onto the doorknob and for a moment he swears he feels tiny, feather-light legs scurrying down his spine. He pulls his pack tight against him, using the physical weight of it to dampen the tactile hallucination.

“I hate it,” Helen says darkly. Jon jumps just slightly at the break in the silence, and a few of the Archive’s eyes suspend their rapt scrutiny of the door handle to glance in her direction. Her posture is tense where she stands, staring warily at the door as if it might lunge at them. Jon has never seen the Distortion look so… unsettled.

She’s right, though. The door is wrong. More than that, it’s the exact same flavor of wrongness that he felt the first time he saw A Guest for Mr. Spider, and again when he reached out to knock on the monster’s door.

Back then, he hadn’t known that the concept of wrongness could be broken down into so many distinct subtypes: the uncanny disquietude of the Stranger feels fundamentally different from the compulsion of the coffin, the sensation of worms tunneling through flesh, the Distortion’s nonsensical corridors, the Lonely’s suffocating fog.

The pull of the Web is in a class of its own, and the sight of the door in front of him drops him right back into the memory of the day he opened the book – the day he took the first step on the winding path that led him, inevitably, to this exact moment. It’s such a fitting parallel, he wouldn’t be surprised if it was orchestrated down to the finest detail. He knows the Web plays a long game, but precisely how much of what has happened was in perfect accordance with the Web’s plans? What even is the Web’s –

No. Stop fixating on the Spider, he reprimands himself for the umpteenth time this… day? Whatever; it’s not important. He forces his legs to move.

“You’re sticking your hand in a bear trap, I hope you know.”

“I knew opening the door was a stupid thing to do,” Jon says, nonchalant. “So I opened the door.”

Helen breathes a surprised laugh. “Was that a joke?”

“The idea that this is all some grand cosmic joke,” Jon rattles off drily, “thousands of us running around spread horror and sabotaging each other pointlessly while these impossible unknowing things just lurk out there, feeding off the misery we caused –”

“Terrible.” Helen groans and puts her head in her hands. “Here I was, ready to compliment you on finally finding a sense of humor, and you have to ruin the moment with – with existentialist brooding.”

Jon chuckles quietly to himself and takes another step forward.

“Wait.” Helen reaches one long-fingered hand in Jon’s direction, then falters and pulls back. For a moment, she seems to wrestle with whether or not to continue. “What’s behind the door?”

“A scar in reality –”

“Yes, I know about the rift. What do you expect to find in it? An answer? An escape? A means of suicide?”

“A metaphysical quirk of this new reality’s divorce from the traditional concept of time.”

Jon pauses, chewing on his bottom lip as he looks inward and browses through his catalog.

“It bends and twists and returns to what it was,” he settles on eventually.

“I told you not to use my words.” Helen gives him a warning look, but it’s fleeting, because a moment later his meaning sinks in and she huffs out a short laugh of disbelief. “Wait – wait, wait, wait. You think you can… what, turn back time?”

Jon grimaces and makes a noncommittal seesawing motion with one hand.

“…could emerge back into the world that she remembered.”

Helen starts laughing in earnest now. “You think you can time travel?”

Jon just shrugs, unashamed. He knows he should feel embarrassed – back when he first took the position as Head Archivist, he would have scoffed at anyone making such a suggestion – but at this point, is it any more or less unrealistic than anything else that’s happened?

“Alright,” Helen says, stifling another giggle, “I’ll grant you that there’s a rift in space and time. People have traveled through it before.”

Jon gives an enthusiastic nod. After her encounter with the crack in the house's foundation, Anya Villette had found herself temporally displaced. What would stop Jon from also –

“However,” Helen continues, “what makes you think you’ll just rewind your position on this timeline? It could just take you to a parallel world, leaving this one behind to suffer and decay. Would you abandon what remains of humanity like that?”

Seeing as Anya Villette appeared to have also been spatially displaced, Jon has already considered this possibility. Helen probably knows that, too – she’s well-acquainted with his tendency to overthink things. She’s just trying to tap into his chronic self-loathing, demoralize him, make him doubt his own perceptions. It’s a familiar pattern, one Jon used to submit to far too easily.

“…better than staying here with this strange woman.”

“Ouch.” Helen brings a hand to her chest in mock offense. “You’re being awfully cruel today.”

Jon flashes an entirely unapologetic smile.

“I was being serious, you know.” A knowing mischief creeps into Helen’s eyes. “You’ve always been selfish, but would you really run away from your mistakes, save yourself and damn the rest?”

Unfortunately for Helen, she’s arrived too late to this particular debate. Jon already spent the entire trip here berating himself and second-guessing his conclusions, and he’s just about gotten it out of his system for the time being. Self-recrimination as an inoculation against the Distortion’s manipulations – now there’s a concept, he thinks wryly.

“Do you honestly believe you deserve to escape an apocalypse that you brought about?”

God, she’s persistent.

“Now there’s only one thing I have left that I value,” he says simply. “That I love. And I cannot lose him.”

It’s the truth: the final deciding factor for him was, as it so often is, Martin.

“You would potentially forsake this entire world just to reverse your own loss?”

“There was nothing left to save.”

It never gets easier to admit it out loud, but that doesn’t change the truth of it. This world is already forsaken. Humanity is dying out, slowly but surely, and Jon harbors a guilty feeling of relief that their torment will not be eternal after all. As far as he can See, there’s no way for him to save the ones who remain. There never was.

His power was never meant to help anyone. For a long time, the only action within his grasp was to hurt – and so, he went after those who deserved to be hurt, because the only other option was doing nothing at all. But seeking revenge never saved anyone, never even made himself feel any better. If anything, it only made him feel emptier, more and more alienated from whatever human part of him still lingered – and that was a very dangerous place to be.

And when he and Martin decided together that he needed to slow down, to maintain some distance between himself and the Eye? Well… nothing substantial changed in the slightest. He didn’t get any worse, but he also didn’t get better. The world continued to suffer just as much as if he were to sit down and take no action at all. Nothing he did or did not do made any impact whatsoever.

He Knows intimately that he cannot banish the Entities from this world as long as one person remains to feel fear. Once that last person dies, there will be no one left to save. Hell, depending on how human he still is by that time, he may very well be that last person, and the Dread Powers will just have to ration him. And why shouldn’t they? They’ve all had a taste of him more than once. He’s an unfinished meal. They could just resume hacking away at him, demanding their respective pounds of flesh one after the other until nothing remains – until finally, mercifully, the Fears themselves would wither and die as well. He just doesn’t want to consider how long that could take – no. Best not to dwell on it.

The point is, there is no future for this world. There is nothing left for him to do here. His only hope is to prevent all of this from coming to pass in the first place, and this… this is the only lead he has. And besides, Martin –

“You do realize that you have a vanishingly small chance of seeing him again, don’t you?”

“I decided to take a risk and try it anyway.”

Helen looks put out at his easy dismissal, but she really ought to know better by now, Jon thinks. He might be chronically plagued by self-hate and a visceral fear of being controlled, but Martin is his anchor in more ways than one. Their relationship is proof of Jon’s own capacity for free will, and his decision to go after Martin in the Lonely remains one of the only things he’s done where he’s never once wondered whether he made the right choice. He doesn’t think he’s ever been more confident about anything than he is about their love for each other, even if he doesn’t always feel like he deserves it. Helen really couldn’t pick a worse seed with which to sow self-doubt.

When she sees that Jon isn’t taking the bait, she changes tack.

“And assuming this scheme somehow works as you hope it does, and doesn’t just get you shunted to some hellish pocket dimension – which it almost certainly will – you do realize that your little scene with Jonah Magnus will mean nothing, don’t you? This future will be erased, he will not suffer for eternity – he won’t even remember that it was ever a possibility.”

“For all her anger, there was no thirst for revenge in the Archivist, only an eagerness to expunge an infection that had gone unnoticed for too long.”

“Then why bother confronting him? I know it wasn’t for closure – if you were at all capable of letting go or moving on, you would never have been a candidate for the Beholding in the first place, and we wouldn’t be here now.” Jon just barely manages to not flinch at that. Luckily, Helen doesn’t seem to notice that she struck a nerve, instead staring up at the ceiling in contemplation, as if trying to decipher Jon’s motivations on her own. “So, why? All those messy emotions it dredged up and for what – the drama of it all?”

“I live for the monologue,” he deadpans.

“Jonathan!” Helen gapes at him in exaggerated shock. “Was that another joke?”

She could stand to tone down the condescension, Jon thinks. It isn’t his fault if people overlook his sense of humor just because they never think to listen for it.

“Are you certain about this, Archivist? You have a history of reaching these points of no return and choosing the worst imaginable path.”

Even at the very end, the Distortion just can’t resist one last chance at undermining his confidence. Despite the cockiness underlying her taunt, Helen has a hungry, almost pleading look in her eye – desperate, like everything else in this place that feeds on fear, for scraps in the midst of a famine that will never be remedied.

Jon reaches out and grips the doorknob with one hand.

“Even the end of the world can’t stop you throwing yourself on a grenade. Can’t say I’m surprised. I’m not following you in there, though.”

“Thank heaven for small mercies, I suppose.”

“I am trying to have a heartfelt goodbye, Jonathan,” Helen says, not sounding sincere in the slightest. “I doubt this will go as you hope it will, but I’m fairly certain that no matter what happens, I won’t be seeing you again. I won’t wish you luck, but… well, it will be interesting to see whether one of your half-assed plans might pan out for once – not that they ever have gone according to plan.” When Jon’s resolve remains strong, Helen sighs – and this time, her disappointment does sound genuine. “Well, if you’re sure…” She trails off, giving him one last hopeful look – once last chance to fall apart under her skillful denigrations – before her shoulders slump in resignation.

Not content to leave it at that, though, she does offer one last parting shot: “Do say hello to the Spider for me, won’t you?”

An involuntary shudder courses down Jon’s spine as he remembers Anya Villette’s statement – the massive spider legs reaching up to pull her into the crack in the foundation – and compares it with his own memory of the book, the door, and the monster lurking within. Helen breathes a contented sigh at his ripple of unease – basically a snack for her, at Jon’s expense. Fine. She can have that last little morsel of fear from him, as a parting gift.

“Sometimes you just have to leave,” Jon says firmly, turning the handle. “Even if what’s on the other side scares you.”

And, oh, it does.

Miraculously, Helen allows him to have the last word. As he pushes open the door to the basement, he hears Helen’s door creak open in unison. By the time he’s staring down the stairs into the dark, her door has snapped shut and popped out of existence.

The staircase pitches down, down, down, stretching far deeper than it should. It’s too dark to see much of anything, and it takes a full minute of descent until he notices that there’s a slight curve to it. With every step, the air grows warmer and more stifling. The revolting sensation of walking through cobwebs becomes a constant, but any time he reaches up to brush away the web clinging to him, he feels nothing but his own bare skin.

A few minutes in, his bad leg starts twinging again, and he holds on to the wall to steady himself. Before long, his mind begins to wander to the horrifying possibility that the staircase is interminable, and he’s overcome by an image of a funnel web spider waiting patiently for unsuspecting prey. He tries to push the thought away. Just keep moving.

Between the lack of visibility and being lost in his own head, he doesn’t notice the sharp turn in the staircase until he plows right into the wall, a sharp pain erupting in his left shoulder from the collision. He throws one hand back to steady himself and only barely manages to stay on his feet, his bad leg protesting as he throws his weight into it. After briefly taking inventory of himself and experimentally putting weight on his leg again – painful, but not unbearable – he gropes blindly for the wall again and uses it to guide himself forward, more slowly this time. It isn’t long before the stone of the wall gives way to cool, damp earth, and he shivers with the memory of the Buried.

After several more sharp, nearly 90-degree twists and turns, a faint glow starts to permeate the darkness. A few minutes later, the staircase opens up into a large, dimly-lit space, garlanded with spider silk. The ceiling, walls, and floor are composed of tightly-packed dirt, and Jon has to fight back a rush of claustrophobic panic at the thought of being surrounded on all sides by the crushing earth. It’s short-lived, as it’s crowded out by a much deeper, more primal fear when he sees the fissure in the ground ahead.

It’s a repulsive, crooked thing, oozing with a pervasive, tangible feeling of wrongness. It should not be there. It cannot be there. And yet there it is, boldly existing where it has no right or reason to be, a gnawing, open, inflamed wound in the fabric of reality, pulling him toward it like a black hole. It’s a compulsion stronger than the coffin, an abomination more uncanny than the Stranger, a malice deeper than any Dark, an inevitability on par with Terminus itself.

Jon hates it. At his first glimpse of it, every one of the Archive’s eyes fly open, greedily drinking in the oppressive presence of something so unfamiliar and anomalous, leeching off of Jon’s terror as he beholds it. The scrutiny is fleeting, though, as the sight of it turns corrosive and blistering; all at once, the eyes shrink away and retreat, like a school of fish spotting a bird of prey swooping down for a meal. It takes some of the edge off, having fewer eyes with which to see the thing, but it still weighs him down with dread and revulsion.

Jon doesn’t know how long he’s stood there, staring unblinkingly at the fault line, before he senses a presence – something colossal and hungry and wrong, malevolence and foreboding given physical form – climbing inexorably toward him. He hears a faint rustling, the whisper of tiny avalanches of dirt scraped loose and sent sliding down the walls of the crevice. He knows exactly what to expect, and still he isn’t prepared when the first of the spider’s legs peeks up over the lip of the fissure.

How is it that after a lifetime to process a childhood trauma, it still throttles his heart and squeezes the air from his lungs at the mere thought of it? How is it that, despite being the most formidable thing in this world outside of Fear itself, he feels as small and helpless now as he did on the day he met his first of many monsters? Why is he just standing here, letting those hairy, spindly limbs hover and curl around him like an enormous clawed hand, waiting for a fate that is as unknowable as it is inevitable?

Focus, Jon thinks to himself. Listen to the quiet.

He slowly reaches into his jacket and breathes a sigh of relief as his fingers close around the notebook safeguarded there. It’s Martin’s, full of poems and sketches and stream-of-consciousness journal entries. Jon has had it with him for a long time now, but he’s never been able to bring himself to look inside it. Martin would occasionally share its contents with him – mostly completed poems, and only occasionally works in progress, as he was always self-conscious about his creative process – but Jon doesn’t want to accidentally see something that Martin would have preferred to keep to himself. Martin might not be beside him right now, but he still deserves to have his privacy respected.

Still, for Jon, just having it with him is a physical reminder of his anchor, and running his thumb over the cover grounds him in the present. He closes his eyes and looks inward.

The Archive gropes blindly for something solid amidst the noise, some elemental truth to serve as a starting point in the chaotic tangle choking this place. The edges of his mind brush against thread after thread and none of them are what he’s looking for. They stick to him, filling his head with cotton, making him sluggish and confused, obfuscating his sight. The Spider watches as he flails, becoming more and more snarled in the web.

“I closed my eyes and remembered in as much detail and with as much love as I could muster in my despair,” he whispers to himself, anchoring himself in the truth of the statement. He swallows a terrified whimper as something coarse and fuzzy brushes against his face, and he weaves a command into his next words: “Eventually, I opened my eyes again –”

The Archive obeys, hundreds of eyes materializing on his skin and blinking open in the space around him, grotesque satellites of varying sizes all seizing on single question, and suddenly he can See –

There.

A single thread, out of place among the rest, pulled taut and leading down into the deep gloom of the chasm. He spares a brief thought as to its origin point – Is its anchor here, now, or do its roots begin on the other side? – before silencing it. It’s not a question that needs answering right now. The Beholding objects; Jon reflexively shuts it down and takes an aggravated swipe at the nearest cluster of eyes he can reach, like swatting at a swarm of mosquitoes. He doesn’t think it actually does anything concrete, but when they disperse it brings him a small measure of satisfaction all the same.

He gives an experimental tug on the thread and – it feels right. That’s good, right? Well, he supposes it could be the Web trying to trick him into –

God, he’s like a dog with a bone. He could be trapped in a burning building and find part of his mind wandering off to idly ponder the melting point of steel –

…around 1370 °C for carbon steel; between 1400 and 1530°C for stainless steel, depending on the specific alloy and grade…

– which, yes, he has done. It’s a good way to dissociate from a crisis. Unfortunately, it’s also a good way to get killed, and the giant spider is still there, Jonathan, focus.

He holds fast to the thread – make a path for yourself, tune it to the frequency you need –

“Everything about being with him felt so natural that when he told me he loved me,” he tells himself, louder this time, “it only came as a surprise to realize that we hadn’t said it already.”

– and he follows it, stepping carefully around and between the spider’s legs. He has no idea why it isn’t attacking him – what if this is exactly what Annabelle – no. He shakes his head as if it will jostle the thought loose. Just be thankful for it and keep moving before the damn thing changes its mind.

Moments or hours or perhaps days later, he’s standing at the precipice of the fissure and looking down. Several eyes are riveted on the massive hairy form poised above him, but most are staring into the unknowable darkness with a gnawing, longing fascination. He stands frozen in place, torn between an overwhelming urge to flee and an overpowering need to Know what’s down there: something new, something fresh, something different – any reprieve at all from the excruciating monotony of this nightmare world.

The spider shifts above him. It’s now or never. He has nothing to lose, and if there’s any chance at all of changing this doomed future – of seeing Martin again…

“Sometimes you just have to leave,” he reminds himself, shutting his human eyes tight, one hand clutching the notebook and the other clenching into a fist until the fingernails cut into the palm. “Even if what’s on the other side scares you.”

He takes one last deep breath, thinks of Martin – safe hands, warm eyes, gentle touch – and he takes a leap of faith.

Jon can’t see anything. He can’t See, either. There is an incessant, high-pitched whine screaming in his ears and drowning out his thoughts. When he moves to put his hands over his ears, he realizes all at once that he can’t feel his body. He has no sense of up or down, no fingers to flex, no breath to hold, and – and he can’t See.

It’s… terrifying. It’s liberating. It hurts, but in the same way that his first gulp of fresh air hurt after three days asphyxiating in the Buried.

He doesn’t know how long he floats there in that near-senseless limbo, but between one moment and the next a blanket of fog drops over him and the shrill static is muffled. Through the haze, he can just barely make out a voice, coming from so far away – like he’s drowning, and someone is speaking to him from above the water’s surface. He drifts and listens in a daze as the voice cuts in and out.

“– just – thought I’d – by. Check in – how you’re –”

It’s a nice voice.

“– really need you –”

A safe voice.

“– Jon.”

Wait.

“– bad. I – how much longer we can –”

Wait, it’s – that’s Martin’s voice.

“We – I need you.”

It’s Martin. Martin!

Martin is here, he’s here – Jon doesn’t know where here is, but it doesn’t matter, because Martin is here, and – and Jon is so overwhelmed with euphoria that he isn’t actually processing what’s being said. Calm down, focus – focus on the words –

“And I – I know that you’re not –”

Oh.

“I know there’s no way to –”

Oh, no.

“But we need you, Jon.”

All at once, Jon knows where – when he is.

“Jon, please, just – please.”

No. No, no, no, no –

“If – if there’s anything left in you that can still see us, or –”

Martin, I’m here!

“– or some power that you’ve still got, or –”

I’m here, I’m here, I’m here –

“– or, or something, anything, please! Please.”

Martin’s voice breaks, and Jon’s heart fractures with it.

“I – I can’t –”

Jon can just barely make out the buzz of a phone and – oh.

“I’m – I’m actually with him now.”

Martin!

“You were right.” A pause, and a heavy sigh. “I – will they be safe?”

Peter Lukas. It’s Peter Lukas. Peter Lukas is still alive, Peter Lukas is hunting Martin, Peter Lukas wants to feed him to the Lonely, Peter Lukas is –

“Okay. Okay, I’ll do it.”

Martin, don’t –

“Yeah. Sure thing.”

Martin!

“I’m sorry.”

Jon tries to scream, to reach out, to do anything at all, but he doesn’t have a body and he doesn’t have a voice and he can’t See –

“Goodbye, Jon.”

Martin, look at me! Hear me, please - see me!

He tries to thread a command through the words, but the compulsion doesn't come through, and -

Jon hears the rustle of clothing as Martin stands to leave, followed by the soft click of the door as it closes behind him.

Fuck.

End Notes:

me: i could go into some long-winded exposition about the space-time continuum also me: OR, alternatively, i can handwave it and say It's The Power Of Love, Don't Even Worry About It

anyway, my gay little heart knows what it's about.

- Jon’s dialogue is taken from the statements in the following episodes: MAG 146; 054; 151; 139; 168; 101; 134; 010; 037; 008; 019; 167; 108; 103; 146; 048; 013; 146.

- Jon gets some original verbal dialogue starting next chapter. Thought I'd mention it just in case anyone is getting tired of the Archive-speak (though there will still be some of that). :P

- Psst, if you want to read a detour about Jon and Martin's talk about Annabelle and free will and Not Obsessing Over The Web, I wrote that here. (I'm linking it here because it actually originally started as part of this fic but I decided to make it its own thing because my ADHD brain ran with it and it was waaaaay too much of a tangent sdsdhshgh)

#tma #the magnus archives #tma fic #jonmartin #long post #spoilers through MAG 169 #tma spoilers

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warninggraphiccontent · 5 years

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29 November 2019

Manifesto destiny

What do this year's manifestos have to say about data, digital, open government and technology?

While we wouldn't expect them to get into the finer points of digital government and better uses of data in government - not in themselves the most doorstep-friendly of issues - there's a fair amount in there. Online harms, cybersecurity, citizens' digital rights, using data to better understand barriers to diversity (very Race Disparity Audit) and general references to technology across various sectors all make an appearance. There's not that much on open data or open government (beyond an eye-catching Lib Dem promise on a citizens' assembly on algorithms), or much detail on the Conservative promise to improve the use of data, data science and evidence in government (#classicdom). We've got a summary here, the Ada Lovelace Institute have one here, and Peter Wells has a thread on each here.

It's interesting to compare with the 2017 versions. The Conservatives apparently promised some new bodies on the use and ethics of data, and geospatial data - whatever happened to those? - while Labour promised to keep the Land Registry and all its data under public control (repeated this time around) and extend freedom of information to private providers of public services (ditto). No mention of Freedom of Information in the Lib Dem manifesto for the first time in a while.

There'll be some more on manifestos on this week's Inside Briefing podcast. We looked at, or rather listened to, prime ministerial tenure last week.

And in brief:

It was a real pleasure to chair Will from Full Fact, Liz from Digital Action, my old boss Martin from King's and the chair of the Electoral Commission, Sir John Holmes, on whether we can trust our electoral system in an age of rapidly evolving technology. All killer, no filler, as the kids say - well worth a watch or listen.

And if you liked that, you may like some of our other #IFGElection2019 events, including one next week on other aspects of our electoral system.

Another important event: on starting a career in public policy. Thinking about a career in public policy? Never thought about a career in public policy? Want to get started in thinktanks, or still wondering what a thinktank is? Come and have your questions answered on Monday 9 December.

To the Argentine Embassy for the launch of the Bennett Institute's new report on digital government in Argentina since 2015. Excellent discussion, excellent report, excellent empanadas.

No Data Bites next week - we're hoping to get started again in February. But as well as watching all the previous ones back, you can join us for some drinks on Wednesday - get in touch via Twitter if you'd like to join.

RIP Clive James.

It's easy to forget in the midst of the election campaign but it is nearly Christmas. Come and celebrate with my choir, the New Tottenham Singers, on Saturday 14 December.

Have a great weekend

Gavin

Today's links:

Graphic content

Let's talk about MRP

The key findings from our MRP (YouGov)

Election Centre (YouGov)

MRP election poll: Boris Johnson heads for big majority* (The Times)

Poll forecasts Commons majority for Boris Johnson* (FT)

How do pollsters predict UK general election results? (FT)

Manifestos

Where does the climate emergency first get mention in the party manifestos? (Tortoise)

A chart based analysis of the text in the Conservative and Labour manifestos (Daniel Tomlinson)

Manifesto word count (me for IfG)

#GE2019, etc

Top target seats in the 2019 general election – interactive (The Guardian)

Meet Parliament’s class of 2019* (The Economist, via Tom)

What happens if a prime minister loses their seat in a general election? (IfG)

A New Class Of Angry Partisan Facebook Pages Are Dominating The Online War In The British General Election (BuzzFeed)

Trust in civil servants/politicians (me for IfG)

Veracity Index (Ipsos MORI)

We're now three weeks without a Secretary of State for Wales (me for IfG)

Long term trend shows decreasing concern over economy, unemployment, rise of Brexit (Ipsos MORI)

Women in parliament (Alice for IfG)

Tax and spend

This is how marginal taxes work (Mona Chalabi)

Explaining progressive income tax (Matthew Armstrong)

Divided and connected: Regional inequalities in the North, the UK and the developed world – State of the North 2019 (IPPR)

Elections elsewhere

Hong Kong election results mapped* (New York Times)

A Staggering Number of Candidates Are Running for U.S. President* (Bloomberg)

Who is ahead in the Democratic primary race?* (The Economist)

Everything else

How Do You Find Good NFL Defenders? By Measuring What’s Not There. (FiveThirtyEight)

A kaleidoscope of river pollution (The ENDS Report)

Die letzten Mieter (Zeit Online)

Pope Francis, globe-trotting at an age when other popes have eased up, is trying to transform the church through his travels* (Washington Post)

Data and #dataviz

Survey of public sector information management 2018/19 (data.gov.nz)

Make your own UK General Election maps (Flourish)

Lowering the bar (Full Fact)

Reddit's Bar Chart Race moratorium is a good thing for #dataviz. Here's why. (Andy Cotgreave)

Meta data

Poll position

How YouGov's 2019 General Election model works (YouGov)

FAQs about YouGov's 2019 general election MRP model (YouGov)

MRP Estimates and the 2019 General Election (Anthony B. Masters)

Why you should take YouGov's MRP with a pinch of salt; Six thoughts on YouGov's MRP model of the 2019 election* (New Statesman)

Brexit didn’t cause all our divisions (UnHerd - although...)

Forensic polling analysis shows how Boris Johnson is on course to win—and how he can be stopped* (Prospect)

What to make of the polls? (Will Jennings)

The hidden predictor? Council control (Ian Warren)

Four Problems With 2016 Trump Polling That Could Play Out Again in 2020* (New York Times)

Election 2019: Can we trust our electoral system? (Institute for Government)

Manifestos

General Election 2019: manifesto tracker (Institute for Government)

Manifestos still matter even though their promises aren't being delivered (Institute for Government)

Tech/data in the 2019 manifestos (Peter Wells)

How will data and AI work for people and society after the UK General Election 2019? (Ada Lovelace Institute)

2019 Manifesto - 'Towards a Better Future' (techUK)

The Startup Manifesto (The Entrepreneurs Network/Coadec)

Future of the web

Contract for the Web (World Wide Web Foundation)

Tim Berners-Lee unveils global plan to save the web (The Guardian)

Read Sacha Baron Cohen's scathing attack on Facebook in full: 'greatest propaganda machine in history' (The Guardian)

Platforms don't exist (Ben Tarnoff)

Internet Harms: We need a Regulator, not a Censor (Martin Stanley for the Bennett Institute)

Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold for $$$$ to private equity firm, price caps axed (The Register)

Oil, data, data, oil

Oil is the New Data (Logic)

The Next Big Cheap: Calling data “the new oil” takes its exploitation for granted (Real Life)

Data, transparency, openness

Unlocking the value of London’s public sector data (Eddie Copeland)

What does transparency mean? (Understanding Patient Data)

Open government must be more than a commitment on paper* (Apolitical)

11 thoughts on Donald Trump, Transparency and Records (Ben Worthy)

Cabinet Office ignores court order to release secret fracking report (The Guardian)

Open Banking: Consumer consent frameworks around the globe (ODI/Equifax)

Thierry Breton to be in charge of leading new ‘EU data strategy’* (Politico)

Everything else

Better than ethics (Rachel Coldicutt, Doteveryone)

Help TheyWorkForYou make sense of Parliament (Crowdfunder)

Taiwan is making democracy work again. It's time we paid attention* (Wired)

Facebook’s only fact-checking service in the Netherlands just quit (The Verge)

OPSI Primer on AI for the Public Sector (OECD, via Marcus)

Opportunities

AWARD: 2020 Statistical Excellence in Journalism awards launched (Royal Statistical Society)

JOB: RESEARCHER/POSTDOCTORAL SCHOLAR, AI ON THE GROUND INITIATIVE (Data & Society)

JOB: Director of Standards & Interoperability (NHS England)

JOB: Senior Researcher: Court Monitoring and Open Justice (Spotlight on Corruption)

JOBS: 2020 US Election (FT)

JOBS (Luminate)

And finally...

Thanksgiving

The Ultimate Thanksgiving Dinner Menu (FiveThirtyEight)

9 charts to be thankful for this Thanksgiving (Vox)

Practice makes perfect: Carve this virtual turkey* (Washington Post)

Politics

How the UK are predicted to vote is... (@notstelfc, via Haydon)

Winning here. Hang on... (via Alasdair)

Medieval Catholicism nudged Europe towards democracy and development* (The Economist)

Irish parliament red-faced over printer too big to fit through doors (The Guardian, via Alice)

Fibonacci Day

Fibonacci Anonymous meetings this afternoon... (Moose Allain)

A poem (Brian Bilston)

Everything else

How Emojis Have Invaded the Courtroom (Slate)

The Big Data of Big Hair (The Pudding)

Same. (@kamal_hothi)

Day in the life of a data journalist. (David Ottewell, via Graham)

Warning: Reading the Wikipedia entry for the guy who invented the bar chart will give you multiple cases of serious whiplash (Tom Wilson, via Tim)

Hi, I'm Bill gates and today I will teach you how to count to ten (@OneDevloperArmy)

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laurelkrugerr · 4 years

Text

Power SEO Friendly Markup With HTML5, CSS3, And Javascript

The first session in our initial three-part series SEO Company for Developers: Live with Search Engine Land we began covering Technical SEO Company and communicating issues between practitioners and developers. For a well-rounded conversation we hosted speakers with perspectives from both the practitioner side of things, as well as practical effectiveness with SEO Company In-House as part of an enterprise team. Our guests were:

The video is great if you’re looking to hear new ideas for effecting change with your clients, with developers, or wanting to be more effective from within your organization. Learn about team building tactics with developers in the mix as well as struggles you may face when you’re not part of an organization.

The session continued in a second part focused on fundamental JavaScript SEO Company complete with code examples for React and Vue to give you a running start with those projects. Learn to solve some indexing problems with these popular JavaScript (framework) libraries and find tips you need for requirements to implement SEO Company into similarly scaffolded or boilerplate javascript projects.

youtube

Communicating requirements of Technical SEO to developers

Depending on your situation, communicating SEO Company to developers can range from feeling like you’re always walking on eggshells and being very careful not to tread on ego or territory, to another extreme where you experience sheer frustration that however much you stress the importance of a needed change it seems hopeless, like as if you’re shouting into the void.

How can you best navigate personality problems? It’s not always going to be possible. There are things you can do to boost your odds of success, or otherwise avoid common pitfalls, and getting this information out to you was the goal of our discussion with the first part of our first session.

Anthony and Katie shared tales of how, starting with a grim outlook, they were able to ultimately succeed in partnership with developers, or just succeed anyway. You can hear how both pulled all the stops to try and be persuasive using everything from homemade cupcakes to bottles of vodka. While these are often cited as helpful tactics, in practice these ideas didn’t work for them.

Major site changes

During a major site change more than one aspect of a technology stack can change over a short period of time. When you have a correlating loss of traffic, you might associate a drop with the incident and a particular aspect of the technology at that point. That’s when Technical SEO Company skills and knowing the problem can come to a crossroads where you need to convey your findings to developers who might disagree with you about which path to take.

I did a forensic audit and found technical issues. The lead dev was like: “How do we know it’s not something else?” The answer is, you really don’t know. You just have a gut instinct and a lot of experience to be able to try and guide it in that way. We made the changes and right before the busiest time of year we saw a 40 point swing to the upside with millions in additional revenues. The GM had said: “I’m in awe. You know, this is great.” At that point the lead dev decided to re-platform to React.

Anthony Muller

There’s always a chance developers have a bias towards a technology that they’re comfortable with, or excited to be using. As developers, we like to think of ourselves as not holding an unwarranted bias for a technology, but in reality we want to control our own programming environment. We aren’t always able to and when we can we might a preference, same as anybody else.

When there’s money on the line you have to counteract any favoritism which can require self-analysis. Problems will arise when ulterior motives give us an inclination to use inappropriate technology as a way to use what’s most familiar or gain experience with the latest JavaScript libraries.

Problems of a technology choice aren’t always developer-borne issues. In our third video, Martin Splitt spoke of developing a banking application with Angular. Angular, unfortunately, then became the anointed technology to use for everything. That was a mistake of leadership assuming a solid technology choice in one area of business is a safe bet everywhere else.

Things are never that easy.

The trouble with React is …

ReactJS is a terrific User-Interface (UI) builder for the frontend. Confusion arises when developers want to simplify the notion of a webpage down to that of a UI when it’s not only that. A webpage can be interactive with JavaScript in ways that do not require a UI. Using React in certain conditions will lead to over-engineering with a result that we have a history of Single Page App (SPA) websites that typically don’t rank well.

Whats more, the underlying technology stack powering React is not ideally suited for static websites even though it can certainly be used for them. For example, there’s Gatsby, a Static Site Generator (SSG) built on React and its conventions. Believe it or not plain old boring jQuery is still a far more appropriate choice for most static sites than Gatsby.

React is definitely an important innovation. When you need reactive page elements as part of site functionality, in other words, elements that change when universal or user specific data changes, that’s when React becomes an excellent choice! You get all the advantage of a paradigm shift from jQuery to a component-based reactive library for developing cutting-edge interactivity. For example: If you want roll your own chat, look into React.

Developers only need to avoid using React in cases where jQuery or vanilla JavaScript is what’s actually called for. Therein lies the problem, because they aren’t inclined to avoid using arguably the greatest client-side library innovation since jQuery. They all want to sharpen their knowledge of the latest greatest thing for employability. There are numerous open jobs for React programmers. We’re going to learn how to set it up correctly.

Server-side rendering

A partial solution to the problem, known as Server-Side Rendering (SSR), is probably best described as a ‘hack’ bolted in place after feedback that early renditions of these libraries were not search engine friendly. Russ describes how React still tends to promote scaffolding or boilerplate that defaults to Client-Side Rendering (CSR) by convention. He shows us how to set yourself up for SEO Company with React and Vue.

A note about Evergreen Chromium

Evergreen Chromium keeps Googlebot up to date with the latest Chrome version. Google can now fetch CSR content fairly easily, but it’s certainly no silver bullet. Developers may think it means SSR is unnecessary, but for Googlebot your critical content is not immediately available and it may not be available at all without taking careful measures to ensure that it is.

It’s certainly not ideal for SEO Company, either. Even when you might fare a little better now with Google than in the past, you need to consider social media crawlers. Bing switched to Evergreen Chromium, but Facebook and Twitter haven’t done so yet and who knows if they ever will?

How about operationalizing SEO?

Working from within an organization, and with a sizable development team, Katie found that filing issues through the ticketing process wasn’t working fast enough for Technical SEO Company changes. Additionally, there was no way for her to gauge the relative importance of her SEO Company requests versus whatever else the development team was working on.

After attending Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West’s keynote with Jessica Bowman (In-House SEO), Katie was inspired to try a different approach.

She was talking about operationalizing SEO Company and saying that anyone touching the website could be making multi-million dollar SEO Company decisions without realizing it. You’re always going to be outnumbered by people who are touching it. There’s never enough SEO Companys to have an SEO Company in the room for all these things. If you feel like you’re running around chasing fires all the time then you need to operationalize SEO Company.

Katie Meurin

Katie brought her developer teammates to more SMX session content where, once back at work, they began to ask her questions about how the changes they were thinking of might impact the website’s SEO Company. This was the very breakthrough she needed for going from being caught outside in a separate silo to working inside with the development team.

Since team building sessions fostered these more productive communications, Katie continued to organize Technical SEO Company trainings in-house and looks forward to a whole new build where SEO Company is a fundamental feature of the forthcoming new website.

The developers she worked with learned about using SEO Company tools and began using some of them directly in their workflow. They began testing development branch versions using command line SEO Company tools to make sure to realize good scores with Lighthouse and now Web Vitals. Any disagreements about SEO Company particulars would get resolved as it was typically just a matter of language that Katie’s team documentation helped clarify.

It was through these experiences that Katie was able to increase the priority of her Technical SEO Company with the development team whose members came to truly appreciate knowing the value of the business impact of what they were doing. This was a huge sea change shift going from not knowing whether her Technical SEO Company tickets were prioritized above a mystery plate of work tasks to developers caring about SEO Company every bit as much as they might frontend design details.

Server side rendering (SSR)

So, what happened to Anthony’s client when they switched to React before Googlebot’s Evergreen Chromium release? Just imagine when 80% of revenue was tied dollar-for-dollar to tanking rankings. Anthony tried everything to be persuasive, including bringing an outside developer in to recommend implementing SSR.

To satisfy SEO Company requirements, you’re going to need SSR strategies that ship code with fleshed-out and optimized content, or your rankings will not reflect the value of your website pages.

The lead developer was (rightly) disappointed to hear advice to implement SSR, negating all the practical advantage of using a reactive library in the first place. The unwarranted technology preference for React with a static site was suddenly a technology obstacle which began to haunt them as technical debt they didn’t want to pay down.

The lead developer insisted on delivering alternative explanations for what was happening and for an inexplicable reason fully resisted the recommendation to move to SSR. In the mean time, Google launched its Evergreen Chromium initiative and the new Googlebot indexing resulted in a 7% traffic lift which allowed the developer to further delay the inevitable.

It was not enough to recover lost revenues and it ultimately became increasingly clear React was a bad choice of technology for powering the static website. Anthony’s SSR recommendation was finally put in place and imagine what happened when search traffic quickly rose back up by 60%. Imagine the difference unearned revenue made for the time spent languishing with such a basic and obvious rendering issue.

JavaScript SEO for React and Vue

Developers need to be flexible enough with skills and attitude to implement SSR for SEO Company with these popular JavaScript library (frameworks). Russ provided us with an excellent introductory dive into how to go about it with React and Vue along with quick tips about how to include essential SEO Company to go along with it. We’ll be covering that with all the details in our next installment before moving on to scraping by scripting with Puppeteer.

More development tips for SEO Companys

About The Author

Detlef Johnson is the SEO Company for Developers Expert for Search Engine Land and SMX. He is also a member of the programming team for SMX events and writes the SEO for Developers series on Search Engine Land. Detlef is one of the original group of pioneering webmasters who established the professional SEO Company field more than 20 years ago. Since then he has worked for major search engine technology providers, managed programming and marketing agency teams for Chicago Tribune, and consulted for numerous entities including Fortune 500 companies. Detlef has a strong understanding of Technical SEO Company and a passion for Web programming.

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/power-seo-friendly-markup-with-html5-css3-and-javascript/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/08/power-seo-friendly-markup-with-html5.html

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riichardwilson · 4 years

Text

Power SEO Friendly Markup With HTML5, CSS3, And Javascript

youtube

Communicating requirements of Technical SEO to developers

Major site changes

Anthony Muller

Things are never that easy.

The trouble with React is …

Server-side rendering

A note about Evergreen Chromium

How about operationalizing SEO?

After attending Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West’s keynote with Jessica Bowman (In-House SEO), Katie was inspired to try a different approach.

Katie Meurin

Server side rendering (SSR)

To satisfy SEO Company requirements, you’re going to need SSR strategies that ship code with fleshed-out and optimized content, or your rankings will not reflect the value of your website pages.

JavaScript SEO for React and Vue

More development tips for SEO Companys

About The Author

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/power-seo-friendly-markup-with-html5-css3-and-javascript/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/627046188904054784

0 notes

scpie · 4 years

Text

Power SEO Friendly Markup With HTML5, CSS3, And Javascript

youtube

Communicating requirements of Technical SEO to developers

Major site changes

Anthony Muller

Things are never that easy.

The trouble with React is …

Server-side rendering

A note about Evergreen Chromium

How about operationalizing SEO?

After attending Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West’s keynote with Jessica Bowman (In-House SEO), Katie was inspired to try a different approach.

Katie Meurin

Server side rendering (SSR)

To satisfy SEO Company requirements, you’re going to need SSR strategies that ship code with fleshed-out and optimized content, or your rankings will not reflect the value of your website pages.

JavaScript SEO for React and Vue

More development tips for SEO Companys

About The Author

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/power-seo-friendly-markup-with-html5-css3-and-javascript/

0 notes

minnievirizarry · 7 years

Text

#SproutChat Recap: Managing Online Communities

Building, engaging and growing an online community helps businesses in the long run. Forming communities of your brand’s most tuned in and engaged fans are what ultimately help to inform products and procedures.

This week at #SproutChat we chatted with Sprout All Star, Meagan DeMenna, Community Manager of ClearVoice, about best practices for managing your online communities and the benefit they provide your brand.

Communities Come Together Around a Topic

Digital communities allow folks to gather around topics or issues they care about and connect. This can happen organically or could be a space created by a business to allow followers to congregate around their brand. Conversations and connections that happen in these online communities instill a real sense of value.

A1:Digital Community: Any community that communicates primarily (if not entirely) online #SproutChat

— Meagan DeMenna (@SocialMeagan) October 4, 2017

A1: A digital community is a place where people can voice their opinions and converse about a common topic. #SproutChat

— Maria Marchewka (@_MariaMarchewka) October 4, 2017

A1 Social, forums, comment sections, voice/in-game chat. The list goes on! It's where customers are in the virtual world. #SproutChat [TK]

— ModSquad (@modsquad) October 4, 2017

A1 A digital community is like the "water cooler" of the web. Likeminded people connect to discuss topics or brands of interest. #SproutChat

— Cristy (@lacristysalinas) October 4, 2017

A digital community is one that originates online. The power of community is when you meet IRL. I see this often in open source #SproutChat https://t.co/73w2lav7DL

— Jason Hibbets (@jhibbets) October 4, 2017

A1: It's a place where you find your people or your tribe. #SproutChat

— Aimee Beltran (@AimeeBeltran) October 4, 2017

Create Goals First

If you’re just starting to launch a community, think about the platform this will live on (website, forum, Slack, social) and where your community might take to. Additionally, be thoughtful of the purpose of your community. Will it be focused on technical support or advocacy? Mapping out these details ahead of time will and giving members a clearer sense of purpose to start will effectively encourage engagement.

A2: Define your goals, identify your audience and establish your guidelines #SproutChat

— Meagan DeMenna (@SocialMeagan) October 4, 2017

A2 cont: They can live on social media, Slack, established forums… anywhere online #SproutChat

— Meagan DeMenna (@SocialMeagan) October 4, 2017

A2: Social is a great place to start – something as simple as a hashtag can start a conversation/ bring ppl together. #sproutchat https://t.co/M1u80Jy84M

— JL Summerfield (@JLSummerfield) October 4, 2017

A2 A good first step is identifying your loyal and vocal fans. Amplify their voices. Let them attract others. #sproutchat

— Martin Lieberman (@martinlieberman) October 4, 2017

A2 Determine what features you want – analytics you need – what is the customer experience? #sproutchat

— Toby Metcalf (@Toby_Metcalf) October 4, 2017

A2: Determine your target audience i.e. interests, hobbies, passions. https://t.co/mLpRIl6WmG

— Rachel Felice (@RFelice_Navidad) October 4, 2017

Look for the people that are already talking about your brand/product/service. Bring them together & gain actionable feedback. #SproutChat

— Kate McGaughey (@kate_mcgaughey) October 4, 2017

Align Community With Business Goals

When planning your community think about how this will serve the brand overall. If you’re trying to set up a support focused community think of ways this can help deter support tickets and drive down costs associated there. Goals will look different for communities across the board, but think of identifying goals that align with overall business objectives.

A3: Align your community goals with your business goals. Example: inform product, connect & collaborate, build advocacy… #SproutChat

— Meagan DeMenna (@SocialMeagan) October 4, 2017

A3: Measure success around established goals. Know what measurements you're going to use BEFORE you launch a community #SproutChat

— Meagan DeMenna (@SocialMeagan) October 4, 2017

A3. I think you have an atmosphere to where you allow an open discussion without fear of backlash due to opinion #sproutchat

— Cheval John (@chevd80) October 4, 2017

A3: Whether online or offline, engagement aka conversation is the key to continuing success #SproutChat

— Cindy Stuntz (@cindy_stuntz) October 4, 2017

A3: I would say # of interactions is big and # of solutions provided can be a leading indicator. Maybe # of irl meetups? #SproutChat

— Daniel Hachey (@daniel_hachey) October 4, 2017

A3: Your community members should reflect it's level of success. Participation being the biggest indicator of success for most. #sproutchat

— SocialXpresso (@socialxpresso) October 4, 2017

Content Is Fuel

When setting up new communities, it’s important to make sure that you’re planning out content with your members in mind. Conversation may already be happening organically, but scheduled content can help encourage further conversation. Small things like this can help make sure that engagement is activated. Remember to have a two way relationship with community members and interact.

A4: Share blogs, ebooks, videos – not all to do with your brand, but engaging to your members #SproutChat

— Meagan DeMenna (@SocialMeagan) October 4, 2017

A4: Without scheduled content, your community will flounder. Always have planned content and always listen! #SproutChat

— Meagan DeMenna (@SocialMeagan) October 4, 2017

A4: They say a picture is worth 1000 words. The most thought provoking posts are worth 1000 responses. #SproutChat

— Russ Palmer (@RussPalmer) October 4, 2017

A4: Your content strategy should be about activating & engaging your dig. comm. in ways that traditional advertising never could #SproutChat

— Apple Box Studios (@AppleBoxStudios) October 4, 2017

A4 Along with content, it is important for your to respond to and engage with your members #sproutchat

— Toby Metcalf (@Toby_Metcalf) October 4, 2017

A4: Content can help create discussion and debate in your digital community. #SproutChat

— Digital Addicts (@digitaladdicts_) October 4, 2017

A4: Content should line up with the goals you set up for the community. and should be identified before launching the community.

— John Venen (@JohnVenen) October 4, 2017

A4: one of those "where do I start" questions! It's stories for them to share, it's potential ideas to get their feedback on, it's making them feel safe/interested to share their own stories, etc. #Sproutchat

— Kathleen Gormley (@KathGorm) October 4, 2017

Be sure to join us at #SproutChat next Wednesday, at 2 p.m. CT, to chat with Sprout All Star Elite, Marek Cornett of Koch Communications about integrating PR and Social Media strategies. Until then, be sure to join our Facebook community to keep the conversation going.

This post #SproutChat Recap: Managing Online Communities originally appeared on Sprout Social.

from SM Tips By Minnie https://sproutsocial.com/insights/sproutchat-online-communities/

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