An open letter to marketers and other PR people involved in content on Habré and other resources

In short, the time has come. Sit back

On the site I have long enough. Someone knows my face, someone has never seen me, and I also have my own club of haters thanks to my work as editor of XX and GT. Now I will not discuss the "editorial" content, there are many pitfalls, and I will say a few words about the management of corporate blogs and everything related to this topic. I hope for an adequate discussion.

Disclaimer : this is not a post of kheyta or sracha on the topic “companies are with Habra!”, But a well-grounded text on what to do, what not to do and how to continue to live with it. He has matured in my head for more than one month, considering that I have been making bread and butter for the fifth year writing posts. I hope that the text will find a response from the audience and the situation on the platform will improve a little.
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With this post, I want to reach out to numerous marketers who graze in my native “clearing” and immediately do not the most decent things, which, in the end, beat me as well. And I want to talk to the audience.

We all know the topic with "three links to text" and "indexed heading." Frankly, most marketers, who proudly write in the resume "expert in the field of Digital", are attacking this rake. But let's start with what this “digital” is.

Vicki tells me that Digital Marketing is a set of practices for promoting, advertising, and branding online. Now we can distinguish from the five main areas (plus or minus, of course):

• SMM (social networks, twitter and everything else).
• Contextual advertising / banners.
• Community management in the same social networks or cart.
• Godless SEO.
• Not less godless SEM (Search engine marketing).

Well, and other dubious practices.

Now 2018 is in the yard. Somewhere cherries are already blooming, and somewhere in the forest bears shit woke up. Regardless of geography and region, the rules are the same for all. SEO, SEM and click-through headlines remained in 2010-2013, when search giants killed this scum with new rules and algorithms. But for some reason, new generations of marketers are still liking this.

I have a logical question: what is wrong with you? Seriously. I have been writing since 2013. My first post was asleep and disappeared on the old account of a young idiot with the nickname keepcalm, which I deleted without conscience after 30+ publications and started all over again. But even me, a youngster of 22 years old then, in 2012-2013, had the brain to understand one fundamental truth:

PEOPLE COME TO THE INTERNET AND SPECIFICALLY FOR HBR TO HAVE FUN

What, the reader, became uncomfortable? You are not like that? Are you a pro who draws useful information from Habré and nothing more? I dare to disappoint you: if you come here for a direct link, and not through the issuance of Google \ Yandex \ Dakdakgo \ search engine to taste, then you come here to have fun.

This phrase should be repeated as a mantra to everyone who wants to build an image of their brand. You will not believe it, but the mail.ru Group or Yandex marketers are well aware of this mantra, which is why they work in these companies and get more per month than any of us. This principle has been very well exploited for several years already by comrade milfgard when he writes about MosIgre. But damn, I myself wanted to buy a couple of nastolks from them thanks to his texts! Not a single text of Miefgard promotes MosIgru directly: he only entertains the audience, and the audience responds with his loyalty.

IF YOU WANT SOMETHING TO GET FROM A PUBLIC, GIVE IT SOMETHING TO RECEIVE IT

Do you need a conversion? write an interesting post.

Do you need new employees? Write an interesting post.

Do you need sales? Write an interesting post.

Just, yes?

Only in the minds of a standard marketer and a standard client an interesting post for him and an interesting post for an audience are diametrically opposed things.

Aggressive "cramming nevpihuemy" in the text. Pairing The worst practices in the field of advertising. English language tracing paper. Incorrect assessment of Central Asia needs.

All this shit is reigning now and this leads to the fact that you and I have to wrinkle as if from a toothache.

Instead of creating a personal brand space on the Internet, most companies follow the path of instant conversion and many managers are to blame for this. They need to justify the cost of a blog, on my or any other author's fees, on their own content. And so they all run, as if blind towards the abyss, along the path of instant conversion.

“We are launching a blog and we need to show that this is done for a reason. We need transitions to the site. ” You can’t even imagine how many times I have read similar messages during working correspondence with the customer’s representatives. Instant conversion, the pursuit of short-term profit is the scourge of not only Habr, but the entire modern Internet.

Someone calls my work copywriting and this is not far from the truth, on the other hand, this can be characterized by the rare concept of “brand journalism”. One way or another, everything revolves around creating a positive image of the company, whatever one may say. Without a stable “white” image of a community-friendly structure, it is impossible to achieve acceptable results.

Marketing tools are hopelessly stuck in the past. “The old horse doesn’t spoil the furrow,” marketers say to themselves, who guess something by using their practices that are toxic to business again and again. “They taught me that, it means it is right,” yesterday’s students and students of digital marketing courses echo in unison, which are read for them by people who haven’t even sold a ballpoint pen on the Internet over the past year.

All this shobla is engaged in constant self-deception, trying to "swim out" on the back of practices that stopped working at least five years ago. What is branding online now? Have the masses? If we are talking about people other than spherical "moms on maternity leave"? We are talking about the entertainment industry.

It's so simple: write an interesting post, soft, which I would like to share with a friend at the next table, which would not cause rejection. It's really simple: just put your own ambitions in terms of conversion and instant sales in the ass and get ready to work 2, 3, 6 months at one high pace. To write, translate, search for interesting and useful topics for the audience, work on one platform.

Now marketers are burning thousands of dollars, arranging "carpet bombing" on all sites they can reach, instead of tritely putting their own website in order and starting a product development column. In general, I wonder how these people remember to wear pants in the morning, given the obviousness of this decision.

In fact, I am far from walking on the water Jesus. In my practice, there were texts and whole customers that you should not be proud of. I sold for 30 pieces of silver, wrote lousy texts with three links to the post, aggressive advertising and other bullshit. At the same time, I sleep soundly and do not suffer remorse, because I have always tried to convince my clients, to prove that they are doing outright ... garbage. Unfortunately, only one of a dozen, at best, will listen to the opinion of a hired copywriter. Because what I tell them goes against everything that they still knew about marketing and promotion. Here is such a contract with your own conscience, weir.

Like this? We will write a post without a single link in the text?

Why do we need to run a cycle of posts about the development on Habré? Let's promote our HR-event!

We have a very limited budget.

We think that you are wrong.

In general, the preparation of any content for companies is like getting into the looking glass. You pay substantial money for you to do your job, but in the end you do what your uncle in a crimson jacket likes. There are no people on the Russian market who could admit that someone can better understand advertising and marketing than they do. After all, this is a despicable profession - PR. In the minds of the masses of leaders, this is a profession for those who can just shout loudly.

All shit on the psychology of the masses, the individual, certain social groups. From above you can sprinkle the whole story ignoring the norms of the Russian language (which is much more difficult than it seems) and outright misunderstanding of what is in “these your texts”.

Influence of western colleagues

I will carry this cart in a separate section, because it just burns from it. Tell me honestly: do you know Russian? Well, they say, entirely? With all its nuances, tricks, pitfalls? Yes corny how it differs from English?

Personally, it seems to me that I will not comprehend Russian to the end of my life. No kidding. It is necessary to give years of life to learn a language, and as many more to learn how to use it adequately. And I am incredibly bombing from the English-language “best practice” that domestic marketers are trying to extrapolate into Russian-language content.

Infinite crushing into smaller paragraphs, lousy designs, monosyllabic sentences. I don’t know about you, but I see an ugly translation from English a mile away, even though I myself speak “world-wide” barely and with great effort. Russian itself resists foreign elements and practices developed for the languages ​​of English, German, French. You can read about what synthetic and analytical languages ​​are, you will understand what I mean. And in this paragraph there is not a single gram of "cotton" or "spirituality", just a statement of the fact that we speak a language which is completely different in structure, form and nature than half the world.

In the ass rhythm. In the ass syllable. In the ass dynamic, liquid dimension of phrases and sentences. In the ass complex structures, because they are so tiring for the "audience". (Are you tired? I don’t think.) There, our colleagues from the Chicago office gave this post, it means that we will have a ride too.

IT'S NOT GONNA GO

We should also talk about longridah. "700 words text." "Not more than two pages of 14 size." "5000 characters per article." Hello, guys! There have already been written 10 thousand characters and I am sure that the majority continues to read this post!

Now Longrid is the most popular content format in the west, marketers are simply afraid to admit it. In general, large and detailed texts have always been a success, because on the “cloth” you have time to discuss with the reader everything that I would like to discuss.

One of the most successful translations in my practice is the monstrous translation of the post of one Swiss, which I did non-stop for more than 14 hours without getting up from my chair. Many probably understood what post I'm talking about. Both the original and numerous translations of this post, including mine, have taken a worthy place both in the tops at the time of publication, and in history. Where does this fear of extensive texts come from? Why do marketers seek to cram a dozen of abstracts and five links to their product into something the size of a news article?

For me, this is a mystery, honestly.

P.S

Why did I write this post? And I do not know, ass is burning, probably. I clearly understand one thing: as if from the pages of Nietzsche's works, a supermarketologist will come to the field sooner or later, who will start making content for the public, and not for his employer. And his practices will be heard and adopted by numerous ambitious PR girls. And there will be a new kind of PR and a new paradigm of content promotion, where advertising will actually be native, branding will be effective, and posts will be interesting. And at this moment the heavens will open up and the second coming will begin. A revolution in content marketing will occur, it will become closer to journalism and creativity. And this revolution will change our network life for the better, drastically reduce the number of bullshit in the tapes and allow you to draw useful and interesting information without huddling, as if a leper, in two and a half resources, raking heaps of manure in search of text diamonds.

The only thing I sincerely want is to live to this moment.