Why write on Habr? Examples from practice

How to motivate employees to write posts on Habr? This question is asked by managers and PR managers of many companies. Creating articles, even purely technical ones, is a creative process that needs motivation. And it can be very different among corporate authors and independent professionals. What is the difference that can encourage a person to write a cool and useful post on Habrahabr, says Danil Dehkanov, CEO of digital-agency «FU2RE» .

FU2RE and Habr

Over the past 4 years, FU2RE employees have prepared about 400 posts for Habré for their clients. And I would like to share my personal experience on how to motivate company employees to become authors.

Why does a person want to become an author?
')

And yet, why?

The main thing is motivation. It is characterized by two interesting things. The first is that which has some value for a person, which determines his movement. The second is the positive emotions received from the movement towards the goal, from its anticipation.

Habr's phenomenon can be explained by Maslow's pyramid. The American psychologist Abraham Maslow has divided all human needs into several basic components. At the first level, he arranged the physiological needs: breathing, food, drinking, sexual desire, sleep, etc. Just above is security - physical, moral, family safety, etc. A little higher - involvement, that is, friendship, family, love, involvement in a group of people. And just at this level Habr begins to meet the needs of the person. Users who have read only accounts can already read posts and realize their motivation: be involved in the community of IT professionals.



The next level of the pyramid is respect. That is, professional achievement, trust and recognition of success, gaining authority. To help realize this need can the ability to comment on posts on Habré. A person comments, someone responds to his comment, a discussion ensues, and this is how engagement is formed.

Finally, the uppermost part of the pyramid is creativity, that is, the publication of posts. By placing his post, a person realizes his highest need, the need for self-expression, receiving, in most cases, the respect of other people.



Habrahabr gives enough open space for the realization of all these motives. Unlike many other similar projects, on Habré there is a rating system and karma. This is a kind of self-regulation mechanism. The user understands that he will not be evaluated by the editors or moderators, as is the case in other communities, but by community members like himself. And this self-regulation mechanism works well for improving the quality of the resource. Its presence in conjunction with the tools for implementing the needs described above largely explains why Habr is still very popular.

Debriefing

Let's analyze the needs and motivations of users.

The first level is involvement. The man read the post, and if he saw something in the text that allows him to realize his need for belonging to this community, then the goal is achieved. From reading the article a person gets pleasure.

The second level is respect. If a person left a comment and put him in karma plus, then this user realized the motivation to be respected. You can increase your rating / karma in three ways. For example, at the expense of their own, deeper knowledge than the author of any publication. In this case, the person in the comments indicates inaccuracies or omissions, or complements the material. If the comment is really valuable, then it is plus.

The second way to get pluses is to joke well or speak rhetorically.

The third way is self-realization. If a person publishes his post, he appeals to the entire habrasoobschestvu, which becomes the audience for his creative image. This also needs to be taken into account when assessing the motivation of the authors.

Motivation is internal and external. The external one is the one that does not actually depend on the user, but stimulates him to move in one direction or another. Intrinsic motivation is his own desire to develop, to write about something and comment on something.

Consider a situation where the end result for the author should be the publication of a post on Habré. First of all, you need to make sure that our own motivation overpowers all the other “demotivators” that exist inside and around you. That is, it is necessary to overcome the internal resistance - laziness and the search for excuses - as well as the resistance of the external environment.



If you want to publish a post, then your task is to remove all obstacles, ensuring that the post is written and published.

How to achieve this? There are several strategies.

The first is to become stronger, force yourself to move with greater force, with greater motivation, to put some “carrots” ahead of you.

The second way is to convince the swan and the pike to move in the same direction with you (forward, of course). What does it mean? If you have people in the company who impede your movement (publications on Habré), then you can convince, motivate and show the advantages, like in that cartoon: “Hey, birdie, fly with me, there are so many tasty things” .

The third way is to unscrew the pike and the swan altogether, refusing the participation of such people in the project, and pull everything by yourself. This is a difficult and sometimes unattainable option. Especially difficult to do so when you need to write a post with the comments of experts. Although often there are topics when you can do without the involvement of experts by preparing the post yourself.

The fourth way is to “throw a few bags from the wagon”. In other words, make your first step a little easier. After all, it is not necessary to immediately threaten complex topics. You can take some topic easier, make the first publication and look at the reaction of the habrasoobschestva. And then, depending on the mood and opinions of the audience, to adjust the next steps.

Little about the problems

Briefly tell you about the types of people who interfere with your work within the company. This classification is based on the experience of communicating with more than 20 companies that wanted to (or keep) their blogs in Habré. The problem is that they cannot do this for internal reasons.

One of the reasons is corporate “zombies”, which, figuratively speaking, feed on your energy. Their main task is to shift their work to you, and do nothing themselves. A distinctive feature is a meaningless look.

Next come the "scapegoats." They take the task that you give them, and shift it to another person. Shooters are not completely useless. They can be used to search the company for the specialist you need, who will be able to answer a particular question. They know very well where to turn the arrows.

There are still “trolls”, in big companies there are a lot of them. They are skeptical of almost all your calls and attempts to motivate them. But they can also be used. For example, to get the unique knowledge that they (most often) have. Trolls especially in the IT-environment. They reproduce perfectly precisely the "potential difference". This means that if you do not have the knowledge, but they do have it, then they immediately begin to actively fight with you. As part of this struggle, some interesting materials can be pulled out of them.

The fourth category is “careerists”. They use any reason to build their own careers. If they see that their goals and their goals are the same, they can even help you. But you need to be prepared for the fact that if everything works out for you, then they will assign merit to themselves. And if the results are negative, then careerists will easily merge you and say that you are to blame for everything.

These are 4 main types of employees that prevent the creation of publications for Habr. And it so happens that because of their opposition to publication, they never appear.

Psychological moments in motivation

How to understand the motives? Where does your motivation end and stranger begin? This is often quite difficult to determine.

Let's look at a slightly abstract example from biology. Imagine that the guy started a kitten, and after 5 months got into an accident. What could be the connection between these two events? One Czech doctor in 2002 conducted an interesting study and found out that the probability of a man getting into an accident is 2.5 times higher if he is infected with toxoplasmosis . Its pathogen is a parasite that makes its host ... bolder. For example, an infected mouse begins to ignore innate fears and ceases to be afraid of cats. Toxoplasma act in humans in a similar way. A Czech parasitologist proved that men who are infected with toxoplasmosis die in road accidents 2.5 times more often than those men whose blood is free from this parasite.



Imagine, this means that at some point you can make a decision not by yourself, but under the influence of a parasite that lives in your body. And this concerns not only the causative agents of toxoplasmosis. There may be many such parasites that influence our decisions and emotions. Including the "parasites" figurative. They can be employees, relatives, friends and acquaintances. They convince you of something that is right, but this is not. And a person as a deeply social being may not even realize that at the moment he is not making the decision himself, but the boss, his parents or his wife are doing this for him.

As long as you do not determine for yourself that it is your motive, your desire, then it will be very difficult for you to move towards the goal. You will put sticks in your wheels (procrastination is a great example of this), because you will subconsciously understand that this is not your motive, and you don’t feel like reaching the goal set by someone else.

How to solve this problem of self-motivation? Simple enough. Every time you take on a task, or, for example, you are going to a meeting that will last longer than a couple of hours, you should be aware of how this task or this meeting brings you closer to your goal. If you understand, that does not bring in any way, it is better to refuse. This is a fairly simple way, but many people forget about it, or are led by some other motivations, for example, social ones. Guys go, why don't I go? As a result, people no longer track their own motives and are included in someone else's game.

And again Habrahabr

Let's return to Habr. What can be the motives in writing posts? For example, your boss wants it - very rarely, but it happens. Or employees want this - they come up and say: “Why do not we have a blog on Habré yet?”. Sometimes the cause may be haters, competitors. They do not really want, they just make you go there, literally dragging your hair. After all, Habr is “a space in which there are a lot of IT people who speak on different topics,” or even throw stones at your garden. And you need to build communication with them.

Competitors can be a powerful external motivator for your company to reach Habrahabr. For example, when they have a blog on Habré, but you do not. They criticize you, and you can't even defend yourself. With the help of a corporate blog on Habré, you can solve many tasks: promote your services and products, supply visitors and potential customers with necessary information, look for new professional employees, throw stones at competitors ’garden (just kidding, don’t forget about it, don’t forget about karma).

What authors can have internal reasons to write on Habr?

First, it raises their rating in the eyes of experts. The resource is very well quoted among IT-professionals, and people understand that if a person writes on Habrahabr and his posts are accepted positively, it means that he has already passed the test of this audience. So, the author really understands what he is writing about.

Secondly, a person can improve his writing skills. This is also very important, because IT-specialists are mostly “sharpened” for development, programming, administration, and many other tasks that are very rarely associated with social connections and communication with other people. And if they are related, then specifically. If you write on Habr, then you have to tighten your writing skills to win the recognition of readers. In addition, Habr helps many people find in their work moments when they could have done differently, better, differently, and simply correctly. The person writing the post begins to look at himself and his work “from the outside,” which is difficult to achieve in other ways.

By the way, many experts use their publications on Habré in the resume as proof of their professional level. After all, today a diploma or certificate says little about the level of the owner. And Habr is an independent audience that carefully verifies the information presented by the author.



The last motivator is also quite important. You can send your girlfriend a link to the post, and although she most likely will not understand anything, but after reading and looking at the comments, she will appreciate the full extent of your greatness and steepness. According to Maslow's pyramid, impressing a woman is not such an insignificant moment in our life!

And marketing too

A few more words about internal motivation to write on Habrahabr for PR specialists. For example, this is a way to improve your KPI by reaching an audience. You can test the new site or structure your knowledge on specific topics. But note that most PR materials are superficial, since they are designed for a very wide audience. But when you are preparing a publication on Habr, you will have to dive deep into what you are writing about, to understand what's what.

Writing posts on Habr helps PR departments build work with a negative in the IT sphere. When you do your work in social networks, you are forced to communicate with a diverse audience. Odnoklassniki has its own specifics, VKontakte has another, Facebook has the third. On Habré, the audience is more or less homogeneous. If someone “goes beyond the limits” and starts asking stupid questions, then the public immediately returns it to its place.

In addition, you can use Habr as a tool to get feedback on a particular product. This can help save millions of rubles on an advertising campaign of the media, first getting feedback from the picky and competent audience of Habr. It may turn out that it is worthwhile to first refine the product before advertising it widely.

Important point: the published post is already some result. For example, you will never meet the requirement in KPI that you need to talk to 20 authors, write 20 letters. If you, for example, tell a person about your company, instead of writing long texts, you simply give a link to the post in which you describe what a wonderful kitchen you have, what kind of cookies you have in the office and how many types of cookies are in the kitchen. And this applies in general to all areas that are somehow related to IT. The more posts you have on Habré, the easier it will be for you to communicate with your IT audience.

A published post is also a definite point, a plateau on which you can gain a foothold and see where to go next. It may turn out that the audience is not very interested in reading your material. In this case, you can adjust your plans and approach.

What should be the perfect post?

In my experience, the ideal post is one that takes into account the motives of all participants of the habrasoobshchestva. For example, with the help of the post, the author realized himself creatively, the PR department was able to improve his rating in the IT sphere, receive visits to the site and positive responses. And most importantly - the reader got what he came to Habrahabr for. At a minimum, he felt involved in the people who wrote the text. At most, the reader commented on the post and also self-actualized. For example, he asked some question, and someone competently answered him.



And even better, if you inspired by your post another reader to write his post, referring to yours.

Soon a new seminar - do not miss!

We can talk about Habré and the principles of the site very much. We invite everyone to the free November seminar! Here you can learn how to solve company problems with the help of a corporate blog on Habré.

Sign up for a future seminar here . And you can find out how the previous seminar went here .