Initially, I wanted to limit myself to the topic of hit articles, but the farther into the forest, the thicker the partisans. As a result, we went over the issues of finding topics, working on texts, developing writing skills, relationships with customers, and a book rewritten three times. And also about how companies commit suicide on Habré, education problems, Mosigra and broken keyboards.
I am sure that IT bloggers, marketers, developers and PR specialists will find a lot of interesting things for themselves.
For me, as someone who has been working with content for two decades, the chance to have a deep conversation with experienced colleagues is a rare stroke of luck. Of course, we all communicate with each other, but we rarely talk about professional topics. In addition, Sergey has a unique experience in content marketing, which he willingly shares.
If you suddenly do not know who Sergey Abdulmanov is (), keep a brief note: business evangelist, marketing director at Mosigra, co-owner of a PR agency, author of three books and one of the top bloggers on Habré.
We talked while Sergei was getting to Sapsan - the next day he was scheduled to perform at the TechTrain festival.
- You are known on Habré as one of the main people in Mosigra and as a top author ...
- At Mosigra, I did what I was interested in. Plus I have my own PR agency where we run several PR projects. Maybe someday I can talk about it. However, about Beeline already .
Why in the past tense? And how do you combine the agency and Mosigra?
– This week I completely left the operational processes at Mosigra and now I advise on strategy. And it started with the fact that in May I began to arrange letters in my mailbox on what I want to do next and what I don’t want to do. This is a story about proper delegation. It has always been difficult for me. And if we managed to share duties with Mosigra and leave what is interesting to me, then with the agency all this year we have been painfully preparing to minimize my participation.
Well, for example, I used to prepare for meetings myself, and now you come, and you have already collected all the introductory notes on your form by other people, all the details and so on. It was necessary to shift everything that was needed to the project managers. There is some drop in quality: I would do something faster and more accurately. But in general, when someone does the work for you, which can be called a routine, this is very correct.
About training
– A modern person must study all the time, how do you study?
“Before talking to you, I got into a taxi and loaded four books to read at Sapsan. In general, education has now made significant progress. For those who started studying in the late 90s, early 99s, this is a real magical story! Previously, you did not have full access to knowledge. I went to university in XNUMX, and it was a big pitchfork, because you actually rewrote what the lecturer said. This is not at all like the way education is arranged now.
The history of education is the history of the four layers of what you are told. The fourth layer is technological history. What we used to call a recipe: do this and you will get that. 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 it, why you are doing it, and an overview of what will happen as a result.
When we worked with Beeline, there was a wonderful story there - they told how engineers teach engineers. They have a university in Moscow. For him, people were regularly pulled out of the regions so that they could share their experience. That was five years ago, and I'm not sure if it still works that way. And there was a problem - usually an engineer comes and says: "so, sit down, take out notebooks, and I'll show you how it all is set up." Everyone is freaking out, and no one understands why this person should be listened to.
And the university began to teach these people how to perform correctly. They say: "explain why this is."
He comes out and says: “guys, in short, I got new equipment from the vendor, which will now come to you, we managed to work with it for a year, and now I will tell you what pitfalls there are. If we had known this a year ago, we would have had less gray hair. In general, whether you want to write it down or not, if you think that you will do everything yourself. And from that moment on, they begin to record it. And now he is not a dude who dictates to people what to do, but an assistant and colleague who faced the same problems, and a very useful source of information.
Second layer. After you have explained why this is necessary and what the result will be, you need to attach a bike. This is a form that insures against mistakes and explains the value of this task.
The third layer: you find a process that a person knows, and on the basis of 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. There are four steps, and now there is access to all four.
You can get the fourth level anytime and anywhere, but the most important are the first and second - an explanation of why and a 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 get into the process.
It has become easy to study now because, firstly, the courses have changed. There was such a fetish in business - MBA. Now he is no longer so quoted. He has a very blurry image. Second, here's an example: Stanford has an executive director program that's shorter, more intense, and two heads taller. Particularly in practical terms.
Separately, there is a wonderful Coursera, but there the problem is the video.
A friend of mine was engaged in translating Coursera courses and asked the translator to make captions, which he then read so as not to watch the video. It squeezed time for him, and the community received the translated course.
But if you take molecular genetics, then the video will be very important. Not because something is drawn there, but because the level of simplification of the material is sufficient, i.e. it has to 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 can't pass without a video, such as an introduction to classical music, but in 80% of cases it is not necessary. Although generation Z is no longer even looking on Google, but on YouTube. Which is also normal. You also need to learn how to make videos cool, like texts. And somewhere behind this is the future.
About working with texts and customers
How much time a day do you manage to allocate for texts?
– 2-3 hours a day I usually write something. But not the fact that all this is commercial. I'm running my own channel, trying to write the next book.
How much can you write in 2-3 hours?
- How will it go. Very much depends 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 sources, do not leaf through 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. I usually talk to a bunch of people to get something out of this.
– Where do you feel more comfortable working with texts, at home or in the office?
- I'm walking down the street now and in my hands I have a tablet with a folding keyboard. I will go with him in 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 so I have a desktop at home, I chose a keyboard for a very long time. For 10 years I had a keyboard for 270 rubles (Cherry, “film”). Now I have a "mechan", but there is also a problem with it. It's made for gamers, and I want to send my heartfelt hello to Logitech support, these wonderful people who do not honor their own warranty obligations. The keyboard is beautiful and comfortable, but worked for 2-3 months. Then I took it to the official service, where they said that the failure was the fault of the manufacturer. But Logitech doesn't care about the unconditional warranty, and the repair was paid. They sorted out the ticket for three weeks: like, send a video, send a serial, and there everything was in the original appeal.
I have tried dozens of keyboards, this one is by far the most comfortable. And every time I look at her, I understand that tomorrow she will break. I have a second one and a third one. other manufacturers.
How do you choose topics?
- Since I choose the topics, it will be difficult to repeat. In general, I take what interests me and what is happening around. I'd rather tell you how I select topics for clients.
We are currently auditing another large bank. There is a history of topic formation: there is an understanding of what they want to convey, there is a brand image, there are tasks that a corporate blog must solve, there is a current conditional positioning, and what they want to achieve.
In principle, conditional positioning is the same everywhere: at first it’s a swamp, but we want to be a technology company. We are conservative, but we want to look young. Then you try to find real facts that help show it. Sometimes it's 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 here.
The first is what is usually and familiar to people inside the company. They don't talk about it, because they live with it for years, and they don't think it's something to talk about. And it is usually the most interesting.
The second thing is related to the fact that people are very afraid to tell the truth. You will be successful in writing if you tell it like it is.
Half of the clients of my agency still do not fully understand why it is necessary to talk about the disadvantages of what they were going for, for example. Or about the fuck-ups that happened. And if you don't talk about it, no one will trust you. It will be a press release of some sort.
Every time I have to explain, justify. In recent years, this position has been defended. In this regard, Beeline has always been cool, with which we have been working for four years, in particular, on Habr. They did not hesitate to talk about the most terrible things, because they had a good PR team. It was they who rolled out a dead dove to bloggers: different bloggers descend into a slightly flooded basement, and a dead dove floats up on them. It was wonderful. They showed everything without hesitation. And it gave a lot. But now it's not like that anymore.
I repeat: you need to understand what to say. Tell truthfully and as it is, without embarrassment and without fear that you have jambs somewhere. By the way you describe your jambs, the reliability of the material is determined. It is difficult to believe in success without seeing what problems were on the way to it.
The third thing is to understand what is interesting to people in general. What a person in the company can tell when looking at the story. A classic hardcore mistake is trying to tell IT people about technology. This is always a very narrow segment, and until a person comes across this technology directly, he will not be particularly interested in reading this. Those. as if interesting, but there will be no practical application. Therefore, it is always necessary to talk about the meaning of this story. We must always expand it to the point of view of business, if we write about IT, for example. Something that happens in the real world and how it affects IT processes, and how these processes change something later. And usually they say this: “here we took the technology, screwed it to it, and that’s it.” If you look at the old Yandex blog, edited (not only her posts, namely what the developers wrote), it goes in approximately the same way - from the position of a business view of 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 downvoted. How to get rid of these gloomy thoughts?
- We have a different story much more often: a person, for example, the head of a department, published in several media outlets, spoke the official language everywhere, and now he is afraid to write in unofficial Habré.
Maybe the line employee is afraid that he will be downvoted, although over the years I have not seen a single downvoted post on Habré that we would have had a hand in. No, I saw one. About XNUMX posts. which we have edited. In general, you need to be able to correctly tell the right things, and if you feel that some kind of garbage, then you need to remove it from publication. Approximately every fourth prepared post we remove from publication, because it does not correspond to what the material on Habré should be.
The most important part of the story for the client, which no one understands, but which is the most expensive, is choosing the right abstract topics. Those. what to write about in general and in what direction to dig.
The second important point that is underestimated is the war of edits to ensure that PR does not iron the text to the state of complete licking.
What criteria would you single out for a class post?
- On Habré there is about Beeline, it is highlighted there. In general: a good current topic, interesting to people, a normal view of the system, not purely about technology, but why it is important and what it is connected with, good simple language. These are basic things, and the rest is details: what kind of material, what topic, etc. Well, I wrote about this a lot in the book "Business Evangelist".
What are the most common mistakes writers make? What should not be done on Habré?
- One official word for you on Khan's Habré. As soon as there is a suspicion that a marketer had a hand in the text, then that's it. You can put a cross on the post, it will not take off. On Habré, the success of a post is when they start to spread it across social networks and telegram channels. If you see a post up to 10 thousand, you can be sure that it was only inside Habr. And if the post is 20-30 thousand or more, then it was stolen, and external traffic came to Habr.
- Has it been in your personal practice that you write and write, and then delete everything and do it again?
- Yes it was. But more often it happens that you start writing, put off the material for 2-3 weeks, then come back to it and think whether it is worth finishing it or not. I have four unfinished materials from last year, because I feel that something is missing in them, but I can’t justify what. I look at them once a month 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 your own." While writing it, our ideas about business were changing. It was very funny. We wanted to rewrite again, but decided that we needed to fix it.
At that moment, we were moving from a small business to a medium 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 were not catching up. Yes, when you write a book, you have the opportunity to test individual pieces on people.
– Do you test posts on someone?
- No. I don't even throw away the proofreader. Not so long ago, the opportunity to report errors appeared on Habré, 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 long did it take before you learned how to write cool posts?
- My story is a bit special, because I started working in a publication at almost the age of 14. 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. It’s scary now to remember, but it was incredibly fun. Our program was like that of the Izvestia School, and we studied partly from them. By the way, at that time it was a super level in Russia. I'm 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 straight, all current correspondents. We worked on the radio, I'm still entitled to a kilometer of film a year. The crust, by the way, was useful to me once in my life, when in Portugal the museum staff asked me if I was a member of the press. They say then instead of ten euros you will pay one. 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 me to fill out a short questionnaire.
- By the way, on trips I take clothes that are given at various conferences. There are logos of various universities. It is very easy to prove that you are a teacher with her. There are also discounts for teachers. You just show that this is the symbol of our university, and that's it.
I recalled a funny case: Joker had a black T-shirt with the inscription "JAVA" in the speaker's package. And in Iceland, in a bar, a girl got to the bottom of me, saying what kind of rock band this is. I say Russian. She replied that she sees that this letter “Zh” is Russian, and you say you are Russian and play in a group. It was funny. By the way, yes, Iceland is a country where girls meet you themselves, because on the island the opportunities for cross-pollination are very limited. And I , and once again I note that this was not a trip to the bars, but a deep study of the genetic base.
– How much time do you think it takes for a simple techie to develop writing skills, to feel the audience?
“You know, I feel like a kid right now in some ways. I can not say that I learned and stopped at something. There is always room to grow. I know what I'm good at and where I need to pull myself up.
To write good material, you need to put the abstracts in one place and build the logic of the presentation. It takes a very long time to learn the language, but the logic of presentation can be learned very quickly. When I taught people how to write in courses in Tceh, one guy wrote a good material about his work within three weeks, which went very well on Habré. By the way, he was not released from the sandbox twice, because the language was just a disaster there. Clumsily and with spelling errors. This is the minimum known to me. If objectively, then six months, probably the median.
- Have you ever had cases when Akella missed - you roll out the post, and there is something wrong?
- There were two cases. One is minus, and the second is not enough plus. And two cases where I didn't understand why the post was successful. Those. I couldn't have foreseen this. And this is critical.
When a post gets 100 views and you don't know why and who cares, it's just as scary as when no one reads it. So you don't know something about the audience.
This is a business story. When you have an 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 kind of enchanting jamb, because you are not finalizing some part of the market. And then accidentally hit him. And you've had lost profits all these years.
For one company did a post. They had equipment testing there. And the jamb 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 out in the comments, and then they simply started to downvote. It was impossible to foresee this, because the speaker himself did not know this story. After that, we introduced an additional procedure “if I were a competitor, what would I get to the bottom of”? And this problem is closed.
There were cases when people mistyped my post. And here it was necessary to quickly redo it, until it was completely merged.
There was a case when a client changed the title at night. There was a post at 9am and everything was great. Then the client got scared of something and changed the title radically. This is a regular case, we immediately warned him that after that the views can immediately be divided into four. But they decided that it was necessary. As a result, they scored their 10 thousand views, but it's like nothing.
How hard is it for you to work with clients? In my practice, a quarter fell into the “difficult” category.
- Now, not about Habr, but in general. My project manager is crazy about companies with state participation. Because there are such agreements 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 she will decide everything. Here the story is such that there is no one on the market who works like we do. All creep under the client, but the result is bad, as a rule. The client is not a specialist in these sites, if we are talking about Habr, he turns to expertise. And then he begins to make changes to this expertise, believing that he knows the audience and the site better, what is possible and what is not possible on it, and it turns out sadly. And if this moment is not fixed, and even at the level of the contract, then everything will be sad. We turned down three clients for sure. Usually we make a pilot, work for a couple of months, and if we understand that everything is bad, then we finish.
- How actively do you work with comments, because smart men always run into Habré and start poking around in the details?
- These are PR basic things. First, it is necessary to anticipate possible objections and remove them in the material. And if you have any shoals, it's better if you tell about them yourself than they dig them up. This is not being caught up by about 70% of people in companies who are trying to write something about the brand.
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, people should never be taught. And you should never draw conclusions for people. You always lay out the facts and say that I think so, this is an evaluative opinion, the facts are such and such and such, further like themselves.
I have no problems with comments, but there are clients who are run over because of their certain jambs. Well, then a whole methodology of how to work with it. In short, you should try not to get into situations where you can run over. To indicate in advance the disadvantages and have a solution to the problem, but in case of inadequate, there is a whole methodology for how to do this. If you open the book "Business Evangelist", almost a third of it is devoted to working with comments.
- There is an opinion that Habré has a rather toxic audience.
- Just thinking. And instead of “thank you”, it’s customary to plus, which scares many at first, because they are waiting for a flood with these thanks. But, by the way, have you noticed that over the past five years, the level of negativity among the audience has dropped a lot? Posts are simply not read instead of being merged.
- While I was an employee of the Habr content studio, I can say that before the beginning of this year, moderation was quite tough. For various violations and trolling they sawed out very quickly. Here is a plate with numbers I dragged around various presentations and trainings:
- No, I'm talking about those people who reasonably pointed out mistakes. They began to simply pass by the posts. Before you write, and a wave of criticism immediately starts on you, you need to explain to everyone what you meant. Now it's not like that. On the other hand, it is possible that this lowers the entry threshold for new authors.
Thank you for an interesting and informative discussion!
PS You may also be interested in these materials:
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Source: habr.com