Why You Wouldn't Want to Subscribe to Another IT Company's Blog
Your company may be somewhere between these extremes or gravitate towards one of the two poles. It is useful to understand this, firstly, to understand the pros and cons of the chosen approach. And secondly, because the “original soil people” like the “true Westerners” solve content marketing tasks with a sluggish C minus. Why this happens, we will figure out below.
Problems of soil scientists
Empty bins. “Native” is not frequent and regular. Let's be honest: during working hours, employees of cloud providers are not Indiana Jones, who can get into exciting adventures every day and describe them in a blog. Developing their own services and products is also a labor- and time-consuming process, which is difficult to talk about non-stop. It is very difficult to write about your own services, events or other corporate activities with a clear frequency. At the very least, because they may not be in the required quantity.
Content rent. Ardent apologists of the “soil theory” usually try to get out of the situation in one of two ways. Some force colleagues to be creative (that is, not encourage, but compel). I know of examples where employees were required to “submit” articles for a blog at a specified frequency, regardless of their desire, abilities, and writing talent.
Popular TV series. Other companies try to stretch the existing content. This is how meaningless “serial” articles appear, which are easily compressed into one material. For the same reasons, press releases begin to appear in the blog – they need to write about something, but there is nothing else to squeeze out of the business.
“To talk about small things as if they were great”. Another mistake of the soil people is to equate “their own” with “quality” by default. Authors (editors, managers, PR team) begin to be less critical of the content of the materials: it is native, suffered. As a result, the content becomes uninteresting to the audience. Who wants to know about the company's anniversary – if it is just a list of facts (“we got together, listened, there was a coffee break, T-shirts were handed out”), without regard for the audience, its expectations?
And the rest “flows like thoughts across the tree”. It is equally uninteresting to read how a developer selected a service or designed a part of a system if it is a stream of consciousness without beginning or end, which the author unleashes on the reader because “that's how he sees it.” For the team working on the blog, this is valuable material (“Ivan Ivanovich himself wrote it! And if you force him to rewrite it, he will be offended”). For an outside reader, it is simply hackneyed reasoning into the void. There is also a kind of corporate humor and other non-obvious “insider stuff” that is not very clear to the outside world.
Birch bark letters vs. “corporate calm”. The same uncritical attitude is projected onto the design of texts. As a result, grammatical and punctuation errors, paragraphs that stick together into a kilometer-long wall of text, and a superficial attitude to layout become “authorial”.
The other extreme is an increased degree of corporate design, when everything: the title, the picture, the introduction and the conclusion are replete with identity.
It is hard to read a carelessly typed and laid out text. And this “maximum corporate” text also causes mistrust: it seems that inside there is either self-promotion or a vague “we had some strategy, and we stuck to it” — but “the whole team clicked on the post.”
Problems of Westerners
The other extreme is to build a corporate blog on borrowed materials. On the one hand, it is convenient: you take a popular text in English and publish it with the “translation” label. You don’t need to analyze different sources, or formulate a topic. The author is responsible for the content and its adequacy, all questions should be addressed to him.
And here problems arise. Ideally, in order to use a translation of someone else's article in your corporate blog, it would be nice to get the consent of its author and copyright holder. But we will leave this topic to the lawyers and talk about the technical side of things.
You can't just take and…translate. So, the problem is technical — to find a competent translator who understands the topic, knows how to correctly work with terms and concepts and at the same time make readable material. Quite a task. The problem is situational — in the current conditions, when many software vendors are leaving the Russian market, using Western technotexts as is is becoming increasingly difficult. You can’t just take popular material from a developer’s blog, translate it and expect that the audience will “get it” — it is possible that the original article discusses IT services that are no longer relevant for the Russian market.
Although companies that choose this path usually do not strive to translate really complex technical articles – more often these are general discussions about programming, the developer profession, popular psychology (or something about space, techies like space!). It is not that difficult to collect such materials for a blog on Western platforms. Moreover, they can be well received by the audience: no prophet is a prophet in his own country, but the situation is different in the Valley.
Dormammu, I came to post something. So, there is a ton of content, everyone likes it, there is no need to critically analyze and rework it. What's the catch? That your corporate blog is no longer yours. It is turning into a patchwork of disparate texts, not connected by a common idea or theme. Such a blog is unlikely to be interesting to read consistently, you won't want to subscribe to it – it is too “everything about everything”.
Or even worse — there is a topic, but it is so far from the real business that the blog begins to live its own life. This is fan service, when new materials are prepared to please some “reader in a vacuum,” and not to cover specialized topics (remember that Western texts on specialized topics are: a) difficult to select in the conditions of the new technological reality and b) difficult to translate and adapt in general always).
Where are the leads, Lebowski? By the way, about the reader. Very often, managers working with a corporate blog put only quantitative indicators at the forefront: views, reads, likes, and so on. This is a normal method of evaluating work. But in combination with “ultra-Westernism,” it leads to cognitive distortions. For example, a cloud provider translated material about a flight to Mars — and the text “went over.” The head of the press service says: “Excellent! We need more minerals of top articles!”
After which the company takes on texts about the Moon, deep space, Voyager, the Death Star, distant galaxies and all that. Views grow, everyone is happy with the metrics. And what does the company get out of this? Almost nothing, because in pursuit of metric growth, it began to serve a completely non-core audience. These people are interested in space, this “warmed up” audience has nothing to do with clouds.
Why is this bad, actually? Not even because the call to “Rent our public cloud!” in an article about Perseids may look at least strange (although you can get out of it). But because with such an approach, even an interested audience is completely unclear how the company and its services differ from competitors, whether it is good to work there, how its technical support is organized, what it does in case of force majeure.
Why are we even discussing this topic: We at Glyph media have helped prepare hundreds of technology materials cloud providersintegrators and more.
Maxi-class your blog. But it smells of kerosene. In short, this is the case when they can't see the forest for the trees (“drive traffic”). That is, the goals and objectives that a blog should actually solve. Moreover, this approach not only “doesn't allow the company to sell something in posts” (sales are a sore subject from all sides, we'll write about it separately). It deprives the company of the opportunity to use the blog to solve crisis issues, build a dialogue with clients, and form a business reputation.
Readers understand perfectly well that texts and real business in this case are two incompatible things. Therefore, it is impossible to address a problem or discuss something on the merits in such a blog. Paradox: despite the vigorous activity and active presence in the media, there is no real company here.
Why can't we just have “something from both worlds”
The answer is super short: if the company tries to take the path of least resistance, it turns out to be a bad mix of press releases diluted with translations. At this point, the thoughtful reader starts to sniffle and suspect that they will soon start “foisting” here (but we’ll talk about that another time anyway).
What to do with all this then?
First, consider which of the two directions your corporate content is leaning towards. Regardless of the situation, you need to maintain your strengths and compensate for any weaknesses.
If you are closer to the soil people
Don't rape employeesmake it easier for them to work on content. Making it easier doesn't mean setting up a publishing schedule and slapping the person who misses deadlines. Ideally, assume that the expert is not obliged to write the material themselves (or at least bring it to the final form). Prepared a draft – good; told about the concept of the material at a Zoom meeting – also normal; gave a comment in a voice message – good.
The approach helps kill several birds with one stone. Firstly, in a situation where initiative is no longer punishable, it is much easier for people to generate ideas, suggest topics for texts and make a feasible contribution to their creation. And you can write more about “your native”. Secondly, collective work helps to avoid distortions in the author’s style and to treat the material itself more soberly. It is one thing when an expert has suffered through an opus alone, and quite another when he was helped from the idea to the final text. In the latter case, making adjustments, from content to design, is much easier physically and psychologically.
Be selective when choosing your topics. Again, this doesn't mean that you should reject all topics that don't seem epic enough. But if you understand that the material consists of a couple of thin press releases and a paragraph-long comment (and nothing more is expected), the game is not worth the candle.
Learn to put yourself in the reader's shoes. A magical thing. It works very simply: when preparing material, you stop thinking about what the text gives you (closing a KPI, a bonus, a media index, a tick in a table) and start thinking about why someone should read it. Listening to the composition “So what?” by VIA Metallica helps in the process as much as possible.
The skill here, again, is not in rejecting everything that does not relate to “expert wisdom.” It is in being able to adjust the optics to the benefit/interest of the reader when working with simple news hooks. For example, you can write that company X had an anniversary (“Stupid advertising, ugh”). Or you can tell how you grew from a rented utility room with one desk and an Agat PC in 1993 to a fashionable office for 200 people and managed not to close down thirty-three times along the way (“They started back in 1993 and didn't fall apart? And they even write about themselves with humor? Maybe I should send them my resume, it seems adequate…”).
Don't rely only on your own news feeds. Expand your horizons — you can use an outside article as a starting point. This doesn’t mean you need to furiously translate or rewrite, and that’s it. Use your superpower — you already have a pool of experts who are more or less familiar with content preparation. Ask them questions, interview them, ask for comments. Is there a lively discussion of a specialized news item in the corporate chat? Now you have a reason to prepare the material.
If you are closer to the Westerners
Don't chase metrics for the sake of metrics. You will have to accept the fact that specialized texts may get fewer views than popular science. It is generally unpleasant to get off the needle of reader approval (hussars, shut up!). What does this give: in the short term, materials begin to be read by those who really need your profile of activity. In the long term, the circle of interested readers can be expanded if you are not afraid to write about business honestly, modestly and without “water”.
Look for news items closer to your reality. This is where you can be truly selective. There is a lot of third-party content, so don't try to adapt topics that are more or less a kilometer away from you.
Learn to involve your colleagues in the process. An expert in your field, but a newbie in content – like that girl who is hard to find and easy to lose. You will have to reassure your colleagues that the texts for the blog will not eat up their brains and free time, and in general it is not scary. On the contrary, they help develop a personal brand and “level up” in the professional community. Start with small forms – one ready comment is better than sluggish sketches of a series of articles somewhere in the depths of the desktop.
