Hit IT blogs and 4 layers of training: an interview with Sergey Abdulmanov from Mosigra
Initially, I wanted to limit myself to the topic of hit articles, but the further into the forest, the thicker the partisans. As a result, we went over questions of finding topics, working on texts, developing writing skills, relations with customers, and a book three times rewritten. And also about how companies commit suicide on Habré, educational problems, Mosigru and breaking keyboards.
I am sure IT bloggers, marketers, dealers and PR specialists will find a lot of interesting things for themselves.
For me, as a person working with content for two decades, the chance to thoroughly talk with experienced colleagues is a rare success. Of course, we all communicate with each other, but rarely speak on professional topics. In addition, Sergey has accumulated unique experience in content marketing, which he willingly shares.
If you suddenly do not know who Sergey Abdulmanov is ( milfgard ), keep a brief reference: a business evangelist, a marketing director at Mosigra, a co-owner of a PR agency, the author of three books and one of the top bloggers on Habré.
We talked while Sergey got to Sapsan - the next day his performance at the TechTrain festival was planned.
- You are known on Habré as one of the main people in Mosigra and as a top author ...
- In Mosigra, I did what was interesting to me. Plus, I have my own Loft PR agency, where we conduct several PR projects. Maybe someday I can talk about it. However, about Beeline already told .
- Why in the past tense? And how do you combine the agency and Mosigra?
- This week I completely left operational processes in Mosigra and now I advise on strategy. It began with the fact that in May I began to lay out letters in my box on what I want to do next and what I do not want. This is a story about proper delegation. It has always been difficult for me. And if with Mosigra we managed to share responsibilities and leave what is interesting to me, then with the agency all this year we are painfully undergoing preparations to minimize my participation.
Well, for example, you used to prepare yourself for meetings, but now you are coming, and you have all the introductory materials in your form already collected by other people, all the details and so on. It was necessary to shift everything that was necessary on project managers. There is some drop in quality: I would do something faster and more accurately. But in general, when someone does a job for you that can be called a chore, this is very correct.
- A modern person must learn all the time, how do you study?
âBefore talking to you, I got in a taxi and downloaded four books to read in Sapsan.â In general, education has now progressed markedly. For those who began to study in the late 90's, the beginning of the zero, this is just a magical story! Previously, you did not have full access to knowledge. I went to university in the 99th, and it was a big pitchfork, because you actually rewrote what the lecturer said. This is not at all like how education is organized now.
Second layer. After you explained why this is necessary and what the result will be, you need to attach a bike. This is a form that insures against errors and explains the value of this assignment.
Third layer: you find a process that a person knows, and on the difference you explain how he can move from this process to a new one. After that you give the technological scheme as in the reference book. It turns out four steps, and now there is access to all four.
You can get the fourth level as you like, anywhere, but the most important are the first and second - an explanation of why and the bike. If the education is good, then it will adjust to your level and give you a third level for you, i.e. You will quickly delve into the process.
Studying now has become easy because, firstly, the courses have changed. Here was such a fetish in business - an MBA. Now he is not so quoted. His image is very blurry. Secondly, here is an example: Stanford has a program of executive directors that is shorter, more intense, and two heads taller. In particular, on the practical result.
Separately, there is a beautiful Coursera, but there the problem is the video.
My friend was engaged in translating Coursera courses and asked the translator to make captions, which he then read so as not to watch the video. This was squeezed by time, and the community received a translated course.
There are other courses where you simply cannot pass without a video, such as an introduction to classical music, but in 80% of cases it is not needed. Although the Z generation is no longer even looking on Google, but on YouTube. Which is also normal. Video must also be learned to make cool, as well as texts. And somewhere beyond that is the future.
âHow much time do you manage to devote to texts?â
- 2-3 hours a day, I usually write something. But not the fact that all this is commercial. Iâm leading my channel, trying to write the next book.
- How much do you manage to write in 2-3 hours?
- How's it going. Very dependent on the material. If this is a thing that I already know about, then the speed is from 8 to 10 thousand characters per hour. This is when I do not constantly run to the sources, do not flip paper, do not switch to tabs to clarify something, do not call up a person, etc. The longest process is not writing, but collecting material. Usually I talk with a bunch of people to get something out of this.
- Where is it more comfortable for you to work with texts, at home or in the office?
- I'm walking down the street and in my hands I have a tablet with a hinged keyboard. I will go with him to the Sapsan and I will probably have time to write something. But this is possible when you write on pre-prepared material and without pictures. And since I have a desktop at home, I took a keyboard for a very long time. For 10 years I had a keyboard for 270 rubles (Cherry, "film"). Now I have a "mehan", but it also has a problem. It is made for gamers, and I want to convey ardent greetings to the support of Logitech, these wonderful people who do not fulfill their warranty obligations. The keyboard is beautiful and comfortable, but it worked for 2-3 months. Then I carried it to the official service, where they said that the breakdown was the fault of the manufacturer. But Logitech did not care for an unconditional guarantee, and repair was paid. They sorted out the ticket for three weeks: like, send a video, send a serial, and there everything was in the initial appeal.
I tried with a dozen keyboards, this one is the most convenient so far. And every time I look at her, I understand that tomorrow she will break. I have a second and a third. Other manufacturers.
- How do you select topics?
- Since I select topics, it will be difficult to repeat. In general, I take what is interesting to me and what is happening around. Iâd better tell you how I select topics for clients.
We are now doing an audit to another large bank. There, the history of the formation of topics is this: there is an understanding of what they want to convey, there is an image of a brand, there are tasks that a corporate blog must solve, there is a current conditional positioning, and that which they want to come to.
In principle, conditional positioning is one and the same everywhere: first a swamp, but we want to be a technology company. We are conservative, but want to look young. Then you try to find real facts that help show this. Sometimes itâs a bad number. Fortunately, this situation has facts. And then you build a thematic plan from this.
As a rule, there are several universal topics about what and how to talk about: how some processes are arranged inside, why we made such decisions, what our working day looks like and what we think about technologies, market reviews (explanations of what is happening there and why ) And there are three important things.
The first is that for people within the company it is usually familiar. They donât talk about it, because they live with this age, and they donât think that this is something that can be told about. And it is usually the most interesting.
The second thing is that people are very afraid to tell the truth. You will write successfully if you tell how it is.
We have to explain and justify each time. Recent years have been able to defend this position. In this regard, Beeline was always cool, with which we worked for four years, in particular, on Habr. They did not hesitate to talk about the most terrible things, because they have a good PR team picked up. It was they who rolled out a dead dove to the bloggers: different bloggers descend into the slightly flooded basement, and a dead dove comes up to them. It was wonderful. They showed everything at all, not embarrassed. And it gave a lot of things. But now itâs not so.
I repeat: you need to understand what to tell. To tell truthfully and as is, without embarrassment and without fear that you have jambs somewhere. By the way you describe your schools, the reliability of the material is determined. It is difficult to believe in success, not seeing what problems were on the way to it.
The third thing - you need to understand what is interesting to people in general. What a person in a company can tell when looking at a story. The classic hardcore mistake is to try for IT people to talk about technology. This is a very narrow segment always, and until a person comes across this technology directly, he will not be particularly interested in reading it. Those. as if interesting, but there will be no practical application. Therefore, you always need to talk about the meaning of this story. It is always necessary to expand it to a business look, if we write about IT, for example. Something that happens in the real world and how it is reflected in IT processes, and how these processes change something later. And usually they say this: "here we took the technology, screwed it on and it worked out." If you look at the old Yandex blog, edited by Zalina (not only its posts, namely, what the developers wrote), it goes in approximately the same way - from the point of view of the business on technology.
- Developers are often embarrassed to talk about their work, they are afraid that something is wrong with them, that they are not so cool, they will be clamored. How to get rid of these gloomy thoughts?
- In our country, a different story more often happens: a person, for example, the head of a department, was published in several mass media, spoke everywhere in the official language, and now he is afraid to write in Habré unofficial.
Maybe the line employee is afraid that he will be mussed, although I have not seen a single moused post at Habré over the years, to which we had a hand. No, I saw one. At about one and a half thousand posts. Which we edited. In general, you need to be able to correctly tell the right things, and if you feel that some garbage, then you need to remove from publication. About every fourth prepared post we remove from publication, because it does not correspond to what material on "Habr" should be.
The most important part of the story for the client, which no one understands, but which is the most expensive, is the selection of the right topics with theses. Those. what to write about in general and which way to dig.
The second important point that is underestimated is the war of revisions to ensure that PR does not stroke the text to the point of complete lickiness.
- What would you highlight the criteria for a class post?
- On "HabrĂ©" there is a case about "Beeline", there it is allocated. In general: a good current topic, interesting to people, a normal look at the system, not purely about technology, why it is important and what it is connected with, a good simple language. These are basic things, and the rest is already details: what kind of material, what topic, etc. Well, I wrote a lot about this in the book âThe Evangelist of Businessâ.
- What mistakes do authors make most often? What should not be done at Habr?
- One official word also to you on Habrâs Khan. As soon as there is a suspicion that a marketer had a hand in the text, that's all. You can put an end to the post, it will not take off. On "HabrĂ©" the success of the post is when it begins to be pulled away on social networks and telegram channels. If you see a post up to 10 thousand, you can have no doubt that it passed only inside the Habr. And if the post was 20-30 thousand or more, then it was pulled apart, and external traffic came to Habr.
- Was it in your personal practice that you write, write, and then delete and do everything again?
- Yes it was. But more often it happens that you start to write, put off the material for 2-3 weeks, then return to it and think whether it is worth it to finish or not worth it. I have had four unfinished materials from last year, because I feel that something is missing from them, and that I canât justify it. Once a month I look at them and think whether it is worth doing something with them or not.
At that moment, we were moving from small business to medium-sized business and got all the possible problems that were associated with this. In the book, I wanted to change the structure. The more we tested on people, the more we understood where they did not catch up. Yes, when you write a book, you have the opportunity to test individual pieces in people.
- Do you test posts on someone?
- No. I donât even take off the corrector. Not so long ago on "Habr" there was an opportunity to report errors, and it became terribly convenient. One user wrote me edits on a post almost five years ago, which was read by 600 thousand people. That is, all this bunch of people did not see or was too lazy to send, but he found it.
- How quickly can a person train his writing skills? How much time has passed before you learned to write cool posts?
- My story is a little special, because I almost at the age of 14 started working in the publication. Then I worked in support and wrote quite a bit, and at 18 I was already the editor of a children's newspaper in Astrakhan. Itâs scary to remember now, but it was incredibly fun. We had a program like the School of Izvestia, and partly studied with them. By the way, at that time it was a super level in Russia. Iâm not saying that in Astrakhan everything was the same as there, but we took a lot of things from there, and the training system there was very good. And there was access to the best people: linguists, two psychologists, one was super direct, all current correspondents. We worked on the radio, I still put a kilometer of film per year. Korochka, by the way, came in handy in my life once, when in Portugal museum staff asked me if I was an employee of the press. Like then you will pay one instead of ten euros. Then they asked about the certificate, which I did not have with me, and took my word for it.
- I had a similar case in Amsterdam when we went to the museum for free, saving 11 euros. But then they checked the certificate and asked to fill out a short form.
- By the way, on trips I take the clothes that are given at all kinds of conferences. There are logos of various universities. Itâs very easy to prove that you are a teacher with her. There are also discounts for teachers. You just show that this is supposedly a symbol of our university, and thatâs it.
I recalled a funny incident: on Joker in the speaker's package there was a black T-shirt with the inscription âJAVAâ. And in Iceland, a girl got to me in a bar, saying that what kind of rock band is this. I say that Russian. She responds that she sees that this letter "F" is Russian, and you say Russian and play in a group. It was funny. By the way, yes, Iceland is a country where girls themselves get to know you, because on the island the possibilities for cross-pollination are very limited. And I wrote about this , and once again I note that this was not a trip to the bars, but a deep study of the genetic base.
- What do you think, how long does it take for a simple techie to develop a writing skill, to feel the audience?
- You know, now I feel like a child in some aspects. I canât say that I learned and stopped on something. There is always room to grow. I know what I am good at doing, and where I need to pull myself up.
To write good material, you need to put together theses in one place and build the presentation logic. It takes a long time to learn a language, but the logic of presentation can be learned very quickly. When I taught people to write courses in Tceh, one guy within three weeks wrote good material about his work, which Iâve visited very much at HabrĂ©. By the way, he wasnât released from the sandbox twice, because the language there was just a disaster. Sloppy and spelling mistakes. This is the minimum I know. If objectively - then six months, probably the median.
âHave you ever had a time when Akella missed - you roll out a post, and is there something wrong?â
- There were two cases. Some are minuscule, and the second is not enough oversized. And two cases when I did not understand why the post was successful. Those. I could not have foreseen this in advance. And this is critical.
For one company they made a post. They had equipment testing there. And the cant was that we did not know that the tests that they did were written by the vendor specifically for this equipment. The vendor bought a company that conducts tests, they wrote a methodology and got tests tailored to their hardware. The people found this out in the comments, and then they simply started to minus it. It was impossible to predict this, because the speaker himself did not know this story. After that, we introduced an additional procedure âif I were a competitor, what would I get to the bottomâ? And this problem has closed.
There were cases when my people made up the post incorrectly. And then it was necessary to quickly redo it, until it was completely drained.
There was a case when the client changed the title at night. At 9 am there was a publication, and everything was fine. Then the client was frightened of something and changed the title radically. This is a regular case, we immediately warned him that after that the views can be immediately divided into four. But they decided that it was necessary. As a result, they scored their 10 thousand views, but no matter what.
- How difficult is it for you to work with customers? In my practice, a quarter fell into the category of âdifficultâ.
- Now itâs not about Habr, but in general. My project manager is going crazy with companies with state participation. Because the approvals are such that ... 6 months for a post on Facebook is the norm.
My position is always this: if everything is too complicated, then we break the contract. Well, then the co-founder persuades me that the contract must be preserved, and it will solve everything. Here the story is such that there is no one on the market who works approximately like us. All creep under the client, but the result is bad, as a rule. The client is not an expert in these sites, if we are talking about Habr, he turns to expertise. And then he begins to make changes to this examination, believing that he knows the audience and the site better, what is possible and what is impossible on it, and it turns out sadly. And if this moment is not fixed, even at the contract level, then everything will be sad. We refused three clients for sure. Usually we make a pilot, work a couple of months, and if we understand that everything is bad, then we finish.
- How actively do you work with comments, do smart guys always run into the Habré and start poking around in the details?
- These are PR basic things. Firstly, it is necessary to anticipate possible objections and remove them in the material. And if you have any shoals, it is better if you tell them yourself than they will dig them up. About 70% of people in companies trying to write something about a brand do not catch up with this.
The second story, when you write material, you must remember that there is always someone who understands the topic better. Purely statistically there are several such people. Therefore, you never need to teach people. And you never need to draw conclusions for people. You always lay out the facts and say that I think so, this is an estimated opinion, the facts are such-and-such, such and such, more like yourself.
I have no problems with comments, but there are clients who run into because of certain of their jambs. Well, then a whole methodology on how to work with it. In short, we must try not to get into a situation where they can run into you. In advance to identify cons and have a solution to the problem, well, and in case of inadequacies, there is a whole methodology on how to do this. If you open the book Evangelist of Business, almost a third of them are devoted to working with comments.
- There is a formed opinion that the Habré has a fairly toxic audience.
- Just thinking. And instead of âthank you,â itâs customary to ply that many are very scared at first, because they are waiting for the flood with these thanks. But, by the way, did you notice that over the past five years, the level of negativeness in the audience has decreased very much? Posts simply do not read instead of merging them.
- As long as I was an employee of the Habr content studio, I can say that until the beginning of this year, moderation was quite strict. For various violations and trolling sawed out very quickly. Here is a sign with numbers I carried around various presentations and trainings:
- No, I'm talking about those people who reasonably pointed out errors. They began to pass by posts simply. Before you write, and immediately a wave of criticism begins on you, you need to explain to everyone what you meant. Not so now. On the other hand, it is possible that this lowers the entry threshold for new authors.
- Thank you for the interesting and informative conversation!
PS perhaps these materials will also be of interest to you:
- When art connects with craft: publishers of online media about technology, AI and life
- 13 most covered articles of the past year
I am sure IT bloggers, marketers, dealers and PR specialists will find a lot of interesting things for themselves.
For me, as a person working with content for two decades, the chance to thoroughly talk with experienced colleagues is a rare success. Of course, we all communicate with each other, but rarely speak on professional topics. In addition, Sergey has accumulated unique experience in content marketing, which he willingly shares.
If you suddenly do not know who Sergey Abdulmanov is ( milfgard ), keep a brief reference: a business evangelist, a marketing director at Mosigra, a co-owner of a PR agency, the author of three books and one of the top bloggers on Habré.
We talked while Sergey got to Sapsan - the next day his performance at the TechTrain festival was planned.
- You are known on Habré as one of the main people in Mosigra and as a top author ...
- In Mosigra, I did what was interesting to me. Plus, I have my own Loft PR agency, where we conduct several PR projects. Maybe someday I can talk about it. However, about Beeline already told .
- Why in the past tense? And how do you combine the agency and Mosigra?
- This week I completely left operational processes in Mosigra and now I advise on strategy. It began with the fact that in May I began to lay out letters in my box on what I want to do next and what I do not want. This is a story about proper delegation. It has always been difficult for me. And if with Mosigra we managed to share responsibilities and leave what is interesting to me, then with the agency all this year we are painfully undergoing preparations to minimize my participation.
Well, for example, you used to prepare yourself for meetings, but now you are coming, and you have all the introductory materials in your form already collected by other people, all the details and so on. It was necessary to shift everything that was necessary on project managers. There is some drop in quality: I would do something faster and more accurately. But in general, when someone does a job for you that can be called a chore, this is very correct.
About training
- A modern person must learn all the time, how do you study?
âBefore talking to you, I got in a taxi and downloaded four books to read in Sapsan.â In general, education has now progressed markedly. For those who began to study in the late 90's, the beginning of the zero, this is just a magical story! Previously, you did not have full access to knowledge. I went to university in the 99th, and it was a big pitchfork, because you actually rewrote what the lecturer said. This is not at all like how education is organized now.
The history of education is the story of the four layers of what they tell you. The fourth layer is technological history. What we used to call a recipe: do it and get it. Nobody needs it, but for some reason everyone thinks that it is the most important. The first layer is an explanation of why you are doing this, why you are doing this, and a review - what will be the result.When Beeline and I worked, there was a wonderful story - they told how engineers taught engineers. They have a university in Moscow. For him, people were regularly pulled out of the regions to share their experiences. That was five years ago, and I'm not sure that everything still works like this. And there was a problem - usually the engineer comes and says: âso, they sat down, took out notebooks, and I will show how all this is set up.â Everyone is getting hardened, and no one understands why this person should be listened to.
And at the university they began to teach these people how to perform properly. They say: "explain why this is."He goes out and says: âguys, in short, I got new equipment from the vendor here, which will come to you now, he and I had time to work out for a year, and now Iâll tell you what pitfalls are there. If we knew this a year ago, then we would have less gray hair. In general, if you want to write it down, if you think that you yourself will do everything. â And from that moment they begin to record it. And now he is not a dude who dictates to people what they need to do, but an assistant and colleague who is faced with the same problems and a very useful source of information.
Second layer. After you explained why this is necessary and what the result will be, you need to attach a bike. This is a form that insures against errors and explains the value of this assignment.
Third layer: you find a process that a person knows, and on the difference you explain how he can move from this process to a new one. After that you give the technological scheme as in the reference book. It turns out four steps, and now there is access to all four.
You can get the fourth level as you like, anywhere, but the most important are the first and second - an explanation of why and the bike. If the education is good, then it will adjust to your level and give you a third level for you, i.e. You will quickly delve into the process.
Studying now has become easy because, firstly, the courses have changed. Here was such a fetish in business - an MBA. Now he is not so quoted. His image is very blurry. Secondly, here is an example: Stanford has a program of executive directors that is shorter, more intense, and two heads taller. In particular, on the practical result.
Separately, there is a beautiful Coursera, but there the problem is the video.
My friend was engaged in translating Coursera courses and asked the translator to make captions, which he then read so as not to watch the video. This was squeezed by time, and the community received a translated course.
But if you take molecular genetics, then the video will be very important. Not because something is painted there, but because the level of material simplification is sufficient, i.e. it must be taken at a certain pace.I tried the manual and the video. The video turned out better. But this is a rare case.
There are other courses where you simply cannot pass without a video, such as an introduction to classical music, but in 80% of cases it is not needed. Although the Z generation is no longer even looking on Google, but on YouTube. Which is also normal. Video must also be learned to make cool, as well as texts. And somewhere beyond that is the future.
About working with texts and customers
âHow much time do you manage to devote to texts?â
- 2-3 hours a day, I usually write something. But not the fact that all this is commercial. Iâm leading my channel, trying to write the next book.
- How much do you manage to write in 2-3 hours?
- How's it going. Very dependent on the material. If this is a thing that I already know about, then the speed is from 8 to 10 thousand characters per hour. This is when I do not constantly run to the sources, do not flip paper, do not switch to tabs to clarify something, do not call up a person, etc. The longest process is not writing, but collecting material. Usually I talk with a bunch of people to get something out of this.
- Where is it more comfortable for you to work with texts, at home or in the office?
- I'm walking down the street and in my hands I have a tablet with a hinged keyboard. I will go with him to the Sapsan and I will probably have time to write something. But this is possible when you write on pre-prepared material and without pictures. And since I have a desktop at home, I took a keyboard for a very long time. For 10 years I had a keyboard for 270 rubles (Cherry, "film"). Now I have a "mehan", but it also has a problem. It is made for gamers, and I want to convey ardent greetings to the support of Logitech, these wonderful people who do not fulfill their warranty obligations. The keyboard is beautiful and comfortable, but it worked for 2-3 months. Then I carried it to the official service, where they said that the breakdown was the fault of the manufacturer. But Logitech did not care for an unconditional guarantee, and repair was paid. They sorted out the ticket for three weeks: like, send a video, send a serial, and there everything was in the initial appeal.
I tried with a dozen keyboards, this one is the most convenient so far. And every time I look at her, I understand that tomorrow she will break. I have a second and a third. Other manufacturers.
- How do you select topics?
- Since I select topics, it will be difficult to repeat. In general, I take what is interesting to me and what is happening around. Iâd better tell you how I select topics for clients.
We are now doing an audit to another large bank. There, the history of the formation of topics is this: there is an understanding of what they want to convey, there is an image of a brand, there are tasks that a corporate blog must solve, there is a current conditional positioning, and that which they want to come to.
In principle, conditional positioning is one and the same everywhere: first a swamp, but we want to be a technology company. We are conservative, but want to look young. Then you try to find real facts that help show this. Sometimes itâs a bad number. Fortunately, this situation has facts. And then you build a thematic plan from this.
As a rule, there are several universal topics about what and how to talk about: how some processes are arranged inside, why we made such decisions, what our working day looks like and what we think about technologies, market reviews (explanations of what is happening there and why ) And there are three important things.
The first is that for people within the company it is usually familiar. They donât talk about it, because they live with this age, and they donât think that this is something that can be told about. And it is usually the most interesting.
The second thing is that people are very afraid to tell the truth. You will write successfully if you tell how it is.
Half of the clients of my agency still do not fully understand why they need to talk about the downsides of what they were going for, for example. Or about the fakap that happened. And if you donât tell about it, nobody will trust you. This will be some kind of press release.
We have to explain and justify each time. Recent years have been able to defend this position. In this regard, Beeline was always cool, with which we worked for four years, in particular, on Habr. They did not hesitate to talk about the most terrible things, because they have a good PR team picked up. It was they who rolled out a dead dove to the bloggers: different bloggers descend into the slightly flooded basement, and a dead dove comes up to them. It was wonderful. They showed everything at all, not embarrassed. And it gave a lot of things. But now itâs not so.
I repeat: you need to understand what to tell. To tell truthfully and as is, without embarrassment and without fear that you have jambs somewhere. By the way you describe your schools, the reliability of the material is determined. It is difficult to believe in success, not seeing what problems were on the way to it.
The third thing - you need to understand what is interesting to people in general. What a person in a company can tell when looking at a story. The classic hardcore mistake is to try for IT people to talk about technology. This is a very narrow segment always, and until a person comes across this technology directly, he will not be particularly interested in reading it. Those. as if interesting, but there will be no practical application. Therefore, you always need to talk about the meaning of this story. It is always necessary to expand it to a business look, if we write about IT, for example. Something that happens in the real world and how it is reflected in IT processes, and how these processes change something later. And usually they say this: "here we took the technology, screwed it on and it worked out." If you look at the old Yandex blog, edited by Zalina (not only its posts, namely, what the developers wrote), it goes in approximately the same way - from the point of view of the business on technology.
- Developers are often embarrassed to talk about their work, they are afraid that something is wrong with them, that they are not so cool, they will be clamored. How to get rid of these gloomy thoughts?
- In our country, a different story more often happens: a person, for example, the head of a department, was published in several mass media, spoke everywhere in the official language, and now he is afraid to write in Habré unofficial.
Maybe the line employee is afraid that he will be mussed, although I have not seen a single moused post at Habré over the years, to which we had a hand. No, I saw one. At about one and a half thousand posts. Which we edited. In general, you need to be able to correctly tell the right things, and if you feel that some garbage, then you need to remove from publication. About every fourth prepared post we remove from publication, because it does not correspond to what material on "Habr" should be.
The most important part of the story for the client, which no one understands, but which is the most expensive, is the selection of the right topics with theses. Those. what to write about in general and which way to dig.
The second important point that is underestimated is the war of revisions to ensure that PR does not stroke the text to the point of complete lickiness.
- What would you highlight the criteria for a class post?
- On "HabrĂ©" there is a case about "Beeline", there it is allocated. In general: a good current topic, interesting to people, a normal look at the system, not purely about technology, why it is important and what it is connected with, a good simple language. These are basic things, and the rest is already details: what kind of material, what topic, etc. Well, I wrote a lot about this in the book âThe Evangelist of Businessâ.
- What mistakes do authors make most often? What should not be done at Habr?
- One official word also to you on Habrâs Khan. As soon as there is a suspicion that a marketer had a hand in the text, that's all. You can put an end to the post, it will not take off. On "HabrĂ©" the success of the post is when it begins to be pulled away on social networks and telegram channels. If you see a post up to 10 thousand, you can have no doubt that it passed only inside the Habr. And if the post was 20-30 thousand or more, then it was pulled apart, and external traffic came to Habr.
- Was it in your personal practice that you write, write, and then delete and do everything again?
- Yes it was. But more often it happens that you start to write, put off the material for 2-3 weeks, then return to it and think whether it is worth it to finish or not worth it. I have had four unfinished materials from last year, because I feel that something is missing from them, and that I canât justify it. Once a month I look at them and think whether it is worth doing something with them or not.
I'll tell you more, I rewrote the book from scratch twice. Which is "Business on their own." While writing it, our ideas about business have changed. It was very funny. They wanted to rewrite again, but decided that we needed to fixate.
At that moment, we were moving from small business to medium-sized business and got all the possible problems that were associated with this. In the book, I wanted to change the structure. The more we tested on people, the more we understood where they did not catch up. Yes, when you write a book, you have the opportunity to test individual pieces in people.
- Do you test posts on someone?
- No. I donât even take off the corrector. Not so long ago on "Habr" there was an opportunity to report errors, and it became terribly convenient. One user wrote me edits on a post almost five years ago, which was read by 600 thousand people. That is, all this bunch of people did not see or was too lazy to send, but he found it.
- How quickly can a person train his writing skills? How much time has passed before you learned to write cool posts?
- My story is a little special, because I almost at the age of 14 started working in the publication. Then I worked in support and wrote quite a bit, and at 18 I was already the editor of a children's newspaper in Astrakhan. Itâs scary to remember now, but it was incredibly fun. We had a program like the School of Izvestia, and partly studied with them. By the way, at that time it was a super level in Russia. Iâm not saying that in Astrakhan everything was the same as there, but we took a lot of things from there, and the training system there was very good. And there was access to the best people: linguists, two psychologists, one was super direct, all current correspondents. We worked on the radio, I still put a kilometer of film per year. Korochka, by the way, came in handy in my life once, when in Portugal museum staff asked me if I was an employee of the press. Like then you will pay one instead of ten euros. Then they asked about the certificate, which I did not have with me, and took my word for it.
- I had a similar case in Amsterdam when we went to the museum for free, saving 11 euros. But then they checked the certificate and asked to fill out a short form.
- By the way, on trips I take the clothes that are given at all kinds of conferences. There are logos of various universities. Itâs very easy to prove that you are a teacher with her. There are also discounts for teachers. You just show that this is supposedly a symbol of our university, and thatâs it.
I recalled a funny incident: on Joker in the speaker's package there was a black T-shirt with the inscription âJAVAâ. And in Iceland, a girl got to me in a bar, saying that what kind of rock band is this. I say that Russian. She responds that she sees that this letter "F" is Russian, and you say Russian and play in a group. It was funny. By the way, yes, Iceland is a country where girls themselves get to know you, because on the island the possibilities for cross-pollination are very limited. And I wrote about this , and once again I note that this was not a trip to the bars, but a deep study of the genetic base.
- What do you think, how long does it take for a simple techie to develop a writing skill, to feel the audience?
- You know, now I feel like a child in some aspects. I canât say that I learned and stopped on something. There is always room to grow. I know what I am good at doing, and where I need to pull myself up.
To write good material, you need to put together theses in one place and build the presentation logic. It takes a long time to learn a language, but the logic of presentation can be learned very quickly. When I taught people to write courses in Tceh, one guy within three weeks wrote good material about his work, which Iâve visited very much at HabrĂ©. By the way, he wasnât released from the sandbox twice, because the language there was just a disaster. Sloppy and spelling mistakes. This is the minimum I know. If objectively - then six months, probably the median.
âHave you ever had a time when Akella missed - you roll out a post, and is there something wrong?â
- There were two cases. Some are minuscule, and the second is not enough oversized. And two cases when I did not understand why the post was successful. Those. I could not have foreseen this in advance. And this is critical.
When a post gains 100 thousand views and you donât know why it is, and who it came to, itâs just as scary as when no one reads it. So you donât know something about the audience.This is a business story. When you have unexpected success, you analyze it much more actively than an unexpected failure. Because in the case of failure it is clear what to do, in the case of success you obviously have some enchanting jamb, because you are not finalizing any piece of the market. And then accidentally hit him. And you have lost all these years.
For one company they made a post. They had equipment testing there. And the cant was that we did not know that the tests that they did were written by the vendor specifically for this equipment. The vendor bought a company that conducts tests, they wrote a methodology and got tests tailored to their hardware. The people found this out in the comments, and then they simply started to minus it. It was impossible to predict this, because the speaker himself did not know this story. After that, we introduced an additional procedure âif I were a competitor, what would I get to the bottomâ? And this problem has closed.
There were cases when my people made up the post incorrectly. And then it was necessary to quickly redo it, until it was completely drained.
There was a case when the client changed the title at night. At 9 am there was a publication, and everything was fine. Then the client was frightened of something and changed the title radically. This is a regular case, we immediately warned him that after that the views can be immediately divided into four. But they decided that it was necessary. As a result, they scored their 10 thousand views, but no matter what.
- How difficult is it for you to work with customers? In my practice, a quarter fell into the category of âdifficultâ.
- Now itâs not about Habr, but in general. My project manager is going crazy with companies with state participation. Because the approvals are such that ... 6 months for a post on Facebook is the norm.
My position is always this: if everything is too complicated, then we break the contract. Well, then the co-founder persuades me that the contract must be preserved, and it will solve everything. Here the story is such that there is no one on the market who works approximately like us. All creep under the client, but the result is bad, as a rule. The client is not an expert in these sites, if we are talking about Habr, he turns to expertise. And then he begins to make changes to this examination, believing that he knows the audience and the site better, what is possible and what is impossible on it, and it turns out sadly. And if this moment is not fixed, even at the contract level, then everything will be sad. We refused three clients for sure. Usually we make a pilot, work a couple of months, and if we understand that everything is bad, then we finish.
- How actively do you work with comments, do smart guys always run into the Habré and start poking around in the details?
- These are PR basic things. Firstly, it is necessary to anticipate possible objections and remove them in the material. And if you have any shoals, it is better if you tell them yourself than they will dig them up. About 70% of people in companies trying to write something about a brand do not catch up with this.
The second story, when you write material, you must remember that there is always someone who understands the topic better. Purely statistically there are several such people. Therefore, you never need to teach people. And you never need to draw conclusions for people. You always lay out the facts and say that I think so, this is an estimated opinion, the facts are such-and-such, such and such, more like yourself.
I have no problems with comments, but there are clients who run into because of certain of their jambs. Well, then a whole methodology on how to work with it. In short, we must try not to get into a situation where they can run into you. In advance to identify cons and have a solution to the problem, well, and in case of inadequacies, there is a whole methodology on how to do this. If you open the book Evangelist of Business, almost a third of them are devoted to working with comments.
- There is a formed opinion that the Habré has a fairly toxic audience.
- Just thinking. And instead of âthank you,â itâs customary to ply that many are very scared at first, because they are waiting for the flood with these thanks. But, by the way, did you notice that over the past five years, the level of negativeness in the audience has decreased very much? Posts simply do not read instead of merging them.
- As long as I was an employee of the Habr content studio, I can say that until the beginning of this year, moderation was quite strict. For various violations and trolling sawed out very quickly. Here is a sign with numbers I carried around various presentations and trainings:
- No, I'm talking about those people who reasonably pointed out errors. They began to pass by posts simply. Before you write, and immediately a wave of criticism begins on you, you need to explain to everyone what you meant. Not so now. On the other hand, it is possible that this lowers the entry threshold for new authors.
- Thank you for the interesting and informative conversation!
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