“I did everything - it was a funny story”: a podcast about content marketing and a career in IT media
This is a podcast with content makers. The guest of the 13th edition is Alexey spasibo_kep Korneev, an independent editor and text director, with a story about his career in content marketing.
Alexey Korneev, independent editor and text director
alinatestova : Let's start with your background in editing. Tell me, please, what was your first job and how did you come to content marketing?
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Alexey: My whole life is built in such a way that there are two of us, me and my elder brother [Mikhail Korneev]. He always pulls me somewhere, because it is always interesting what the older ones do. I am quite a humanist, and when I entered the institute, I realized that what I teach is not needed by anyone except a few dozen people who are engaged in this all my life. You quite quickly realize that this is some kind of garbage.
Since I am a humanist, I could only write something - to spit that. And my older brother is a programmer. As it was fashionable in the early 2000s, they founded a studio and made websites. These were business cards of several pages, but everything was done from scratch: then there were no CMS, everyone wrote their own, did SEO. I got a first job there as a junior SEO optimizer.
I noticed that our clients have bad texts on sites. You just look at the site and do not understand what they are doing and why. And this is so interesting. For example, there was some kind of travel agency with hotels in Greece, but for some reason there was some kind of garbage on the site. We began to rewrite it.
Then I accidentally got into the football edition. Then here, in the Kursk area, there was Gazeta.ru. They just posted an ad on the Internet and say: "We are looking for dudes who are willing to learn from us, but all for free." Come in the evenings after the institute, we will tell you how to write news about football. I thought: "Cool", brought them three notes from LJ. The next day, the editor approached and asked: “Can you stay?” I say: “Yes, what are we doing?” They asked if I knew something about futsal. I said, "Well, I know something."
Since then, I was “fooled”, but rather quickly I realized that in sports journalism it has its own specifics: you have to become a publishing editor in order to travel to all sorts of cool championships, otherwise you will go on bandy. When you walk on it for a long time, you start to get everything in this life. And it so happened that the older brother sold the studio and got carried away by startups. They began to do what was then called GreenfieldProject.
Alina: You are drawn into this sphere.
Alexey: Well, yes.
Alina: Passing hockey with the ball.
Alexey: When you can do little in this life, the content helps very well. It turns out the farther, the more people need it. I am sure that everyone can write. What you were given at school and what you read is enough. I do not have a profile education. In addition to the 50 pages of Amzin's “Internet News Journalism”, I did not read anything, to be honest.
Alina: Nevertheless, everything in a career is going well.
Alexey: Well, ten years later you have an advantage. Most people are simply afraid of this white sheet, and you come and say: "Well, let me do it."
Alina: Tell me, please, have you had an editorial job at Digital October during your career? For those who do not know or do not remember, Digital October hosted TechCrunch events (based on the eponymous media) in Moscow. What did you do in DO?
Alexey: I did everything. It was a funny story. Thanks to the previous projects and my brother, I met Yulia Lesnikova, now she has the surname Schukina.
She went to Red October and did a Knowledge Stream project. These were video bridges with dudes from around the world. For example, there is a great scientist, he will never come to Russia, because nobody needs it. He is ready to leave the house by video link and tell about his research. Suppose he created the first robot or something very cool.
On the second day I came, they called me and said: “The whole editorial office has left us, now you will do all this”. I was quickly transferred to the former editor of the case. It was the editors of Kommersant, and we had to do the rest of the content: newsletters, announcements, social networks.
Alina: Essentially, the entire information "wrapper."
Alexey: People come to you and say: “We need this,” and you somehow don’t have the option to refuse. But it was a cool experience, there was a big field for experiments, especially the heads were good. The curators of the project gave more freedom for creativity.
You just put some task, and if everything goes well, nobody cares how it was done. There were no approvals ... At TechCrunch, it was cool because we did not have the opportunity to assemble a permanent editor, and you yourself find some people who will help to make it cool. We had a great guy from RIA Novosti, he spoke English. We gave him an English-speaking Twitter account and said: "You just walk for two days and write down everything you see." It was cool because he was retweeted.
We also did a cool thing on Flickr. Usually photos are laid out on the second day after the event. We organized the process in such a way that every two hours the photographer brought a new flash drive, the girls quickly selected what was not slag, and laid it out. And you really see how the work goes on all the news feeds.
We did the same with project descriptions. When they begin to train a few days before the event, it is already clear what they will tell. Of course, their pitch will change, they are prepared so that they come out and say: "We are the coolest." And they go out in the beginning and say: "Well, we have a synchrophasotron, which is ....".
But you already understand what they are doing, and you can write a small press release about this project. It was not some kind of monetary relationship, you just think: now they will take the stage, people will hear something, but they will not be able to find information about them. Let's release it in the form of news. And you just harvest thirty news in a few days and publish it.
Then it's very cool to see how they diverge. You see that your work is not in vain. The coolest [was] when, according to rumors, Mike Butcher liked this [TechCrunch Editor] . But I personally did not testify, they told me. That's cool.
Here I would advise everyone to drag experience from other projects.
This is a dynamic industry, like the same sport, where everything really changes, and people get used to consume information on the principle of "here and now." They took the stage, here is a press release for you, in 30 minutes they will have their beautiful photos, we will start it on the social network and so on.
The coolest thing is when you come to the audience ... When we did the DEMO, it was the next conference after TechCrunch. Also the American conference that Petya Tatishchev brought here. We have already taught the audience that went to the Digital October site, because we very quickly and efficiently release some abstracts of keynote speeches.
Then just Sergei Belousov made a cool report about the clouds. I do not remember what he said. It was some sort of thing: "This is very cool, look at how this has turned the world over the past five years." But he said it so interesting that everyone liked it. Somewhere an hour passed between how he left the stage and we released this text.
I remember how forty minutes were sent to me by friends who said: “Well, when will you post it? That was awesome. ” I want to relive it again, it is really great. There was a cool team. But then it turned out that everyone went to other projects.
Alina: But, nevertheless, the experience remains. You continue to carry it to the masses and to I T.
Alexey: A lot of other guys do it too. The same Yulia Schukina, Katya Barabanova [ former producer of media projects at Digital October ] - she has now transferred to Rostelecom, and they are doing courses and teaching all their employees.
People are laying, for example, a cable in Surgut, and for them they are now making a course based on Digital October. They make, for example, a course about what data science is. At such a level, so that you understand how this is around you, everything in life happens and works.
Most likely, you will not face this - you will not be told tomorrow: “Now you are managing this project in a corporation, show what you have learned.” But you understand that these are not some kind of words with which 2% of people operate, but really what becomes a part of life.
Alina: You mentioned briefly about the fact that there was #tceh in your life.
Tell me, please, #tceh is essentially coworking. If the simplest concepts operate. At first glance, coworking is a fairly simple story. But it is not clear how to furnish it with content, stories, benefits. What added value did you create for residents and “passing by”? And what role did you play in this?
Alexey: First of all, #tceh is a soft system for facilitating startups. When we got there, my older brother and partners began to make this story. When we opened, there was some saytik that was updated a year ago. As is usually done: "We will redo it very soon, but now let's run."
And the guys just had an idea that it was not just coworking, but, as Sergei Shchukin [the former marketing director of #tceh ] said, is a place of power. There are educational events, you can meet a lot of cool dudes, they will definitely help you, and everything will be fine. Your startup will surely survive and never-never evil uncles will take it away from you.
When it all opened, it was all sponsored by the IIDF. And the guys from FRIA were the first to go there. They called it the "orange zone", there lay such an orange carpet.
Alina: They had something blue, and #tceh had something orange.
Alexey: Yes, yes. And now the guys told them that this is a soft system of facilitation. There was also such an aquarium, where everyone went by, and we had a small stand where you could insert a piece of paper with some garbage. And we began to write any kind of stupidity: just some jokes about startups. You just sit, and you have one of the background tasks - to come up with a joke about a startup once a day. Ridiculous or unfunny - it does not matter.
So there were stickers. It was the idea of Renat [ Garipov - the general director of #tceh ]. At one point, we realized that we had a lot of paperwork, and some of them were funny - this could be traced by the reaction of people. They walk, smile and take pictures. Here Ilya Korolev [ from FRII ] photographed our sticker and posted it on Facebook [as the cover page]. This is an achievement. And we began to do these things, then just distribute them everywhere. It was such a way of dealing with people. It was necessary to convey that #tceh is not some sort of a semi-state FRIA, but a place where it is interesting and interesting where you will be understood.
The second point is that it seems to be the biggest thing we have done for people both inside and outside. To attract, it was necessary to somehow legitimize the #tceh brand. And then the series "Silicon Valley". It so happened that Katya Barabanova from Digital October moved as a PR manager to Amediateku. We wrote to her with the idiotic idea of showing the show to startups.
We had an idea that all these dudes from the series really look like someone, they were written from someone. And in Russia there are the same startups, real and alive. They are also people, you need to pull them to watch this show. And every week we invited people who founded cool companies: Qiwi, Kaspersky Lab, from Mail.Ru and Yandex did not work, but many were there. They just came, and you could catch them, talk to them and get advice.
I especially remember when we called> Maxim Nogotkov. It so happened that he arrived earlier. We had a hall on the first floor, and the hall - on the seventh, in my opinion. We tell him that the hall is not ready yet, and offered to go up to coworking. And we go into the elevator - and there the guys - our residents - stand in amazement. And one such: "And you really Maxim?".
He is: "Well, yes."
Alina: Elevator pitch .
Alexey: Yes, yes.
And the last event from this cycle - we made two seasons - was arrived by Mark Zavadsky, he was then [ director of the Russian division ] Alibaba.
He, too, arrived early, and he was supercharged - they then started a competition for startups with Skolkovo. So, he arrived early and sat on the sofa, where there was a walk-through area. Around this stands a crowd of people that spontaneously formed. It is not clear what is happening there, but it is clear that they are distributing something - as in the Soviet period.
So, it is necessary to stand in a queue, there is something. The guys could find out something, ask a question. Basically, they [at the competition] had hardware, and we had few such projects. But in general, this is just a good contact, because a person represents one of the coolest companies in the world. And here you go, and he sits on the couch. Not that he has nothing to do, but he came and understands that it is part of his work to communicate with everyone. It was wildly awesome.
It seems to me that we have given this value. And in the second season we connected the regions, and already people in the regions knew what #tceh is. We had Makhachkala: the guys are doing their own incubator there. We said: "If you have your own platform, take our content, gather people and go to live, write us questions." For example, Natalya Kasperskaya comes, and you sit in Makhachkala and usually you don’t have the opportunity to ask her a question directly. You can, of course, find her mail or knock on Facebook, but the probability is low. And then the magic: you came to your entrepreneurial party, and there is a direct connection with Moscow.
This gave a lot of benefit, because one of our tasks was to attract new projects for IIDF. It worked great because FRIA has its own regional program, and #tceh and FRIA were co-branded. We should not have said that we are something separate, but always to write, that we are “vassal” and all these things. It was useful both for them and for us.
The guys once even gathered in Novosibirsk. We started at 19:30, and there it seemed to be four hours more. Most likely you will not go in some crowd to watch something. This is not a session in the cinema, where you have a ticket, and you go with popcorn. At the first session (just with Nogotkov) and the second people gathered. Then he naturally got blown away, because sitting in the middle of the night at Akademgorodok and watching ... Moreover, we laid it out on YouTube, you could just drop by in the morning and watch everything in the record. We had, in my opinion, ten cities. It was cool, and Novosibirsk was twice the most extreme in time.
Alina: Extreme.
Aleksey: We dreamed about Vladivostok, we even wrote to them. They said, “Cool, cool. Just explain to us, please, how we should gather people for this. ”
Alina: Night Vigil (laughs).
Alexey: Yes, there are six in the morning on Fridays, and we are watching a live broadcast from Moscow.
It is clear that most people also have the main work, which is not always associated with a startup. You are not such a fighter who lies on the sand and thinks: “Well, I'll work for two hours today, and the rest of the time I will ride the surf and watch motivating videos on YouTube”. It does not happen, so, unfortunately, we could not connect them, but tried.
Alina: This is not only events, you just casually mentioned this, but also a huge amount of content: articles, newsletters, educational content that accompanies the events and after them comes out. So the editorial work at #tceh was gigantic, in my opinion.
Alexey: Well, it was hell, yes. But again [teamwork], it was good. Even if you are alone in your position in the organization, you either have a team, and then somehow you rush, or you alone will be bullshit. In #tceh was Seryozha Schukin, marketing director, he supported and moderated many things. He had a strategic idea - where we are going, why we are doing something - and if something fell within the scope of his strategy, he could fight for it.
That is, in many respects I removed these approvals from you, go, prove, the budget ... No, I have to - they decided what I needed. He will deal with this, and you come on, generate content. That was great.
Alina: The beginning is already good.
Alexey: Yes. It looks like that at five in the evening Seryoga comes running and says: “We need to find the Acid Creation, write a post on Facebook”. We all smoked, but cigarettes. And I think: "Something is not right." It turned out that the dude took such a nickname and published an anonymous column on vc.ru about why everything is bad with startups in Russia. In the sense that everybody thinks like this: “I’m torturing a business for 150 billion just by saying that I’ll do this. I will not do it, but just tell everyone. " And all are: “Yes! You are our new king and Mark Zuckerberg. ”
He wrote something, and it just got into Seryogino a strategic vision that #tceh is just the place where these people who have the desire are forged, not into cars, but into someone who is able create this business. Or after a while to accumulate experience.
And so, we launched on the Facebook mailing of the type “We are looking for an Acid Creation”. It turned out to be a man whose name is Nikita Shirobokov. We began to cooperate.
Then, when I left #tceh, it turned out that I went out and met him. We began to smoke, and I said to him: “Do you want to be an editor?” And then he had the idea of his startup, but something did not go. Either he got married, and he needed money, or something else, and he said: “Okay.” He organized everything very cool there, I could not do it. He recruited interns who, on enthusiasm, could herachit up to four nights. I have never been able to motivate people until four at night to do something adequate. Except thump - never.
He arranged it all, and they began to make more newsletters, articles. We just came to this point that the "educator" did not go in the forehead. If we just made a landing page and drove traffic to it, then all these [indicators] - the conversion, how many people made the decision - it was all very long, expensive and not super-efficient. And they organized a bunch of articles that people were landed on, and then they do it by retargeting and getting into the newsletter.
From me in #tceh more remained stickers. Until now, if I come in, I or my first designer, Denis, has invented the most part. And those events. The site has changed (just Nikita rewrote it), and I wrote irregularly at that time. Basically, if we had time to write the newsletter, Nikita placed more emphasis on the benefits, and Seryoga and I - on the fan.
Alina: I remember.
Alexey: What do people write? Well, if we write some boring stuff like this: “Be an entrepreneur, do it right, here are three tools for you”. Somehow it's not that.
Our idea was that we would never find Chuck Norris. But the second letter came to us such an answer. The dude says: "If you need it, my friends are one of the agencies that work with him." And we realized that we had nothing to say to him.
Since then, we wrote about entrepreneurs, but basically it was all wrapped up in some useful content and announcements of events, because in the first year we were gaining a base for distribution. The most effective method to do this when you have a platform is to say that tomorrow we are talking about marketing about it, the day after tomorrow about UX, after the next day about how to become a programmer in five days. And on Thursday someone will come to us.
Even if they did not come to all events, the main thing is that they got into your mailing list. And then the main thing is to make sure that they do not unsubscribe from you as long as possible.
Alina: Tell me, please, if you continue your story: you are now interacting with technology projects, you are developing a community of Python-developers with colleagues, you are doing a podcast . Since we are sitting here and also recording a podcast: it always seemed to me that a podcast about development is quite a complicated story, because it is rather hard to verbally convey information about programming. It is more convenient to read or watch something. How do you solve this problem? Did you even have such a problem?
Alexey: No, everything is easier there. Again, this is all my brother.
Alina: We will call this issue "This is all my brother."
Aleksey: Half of the things that I did are somehow related to what the Bear is doing, and I come in and start to turn things around too. They, in my opinion, in 2012 began to make mitaps. Mishka at one moment himself began to switch from PHP to more advanced languages and chose Python. He liked it so much that he realized that he needed to talk about it somehow.
There were already articles on Habré then, but when you develop virtualization ... Moreover, he envied either JS nicknames or Rubists - I don’t remember who, but there were dudes in Moscow who did the mitap. People were going to them, it was cool, they could still go to the pub after that.
There was some kind of drive, movement, you see that it is not the only one. They began to help him, Valya Dombrovsky - just the organizer - and others. They formed a community. The guys are great, because they always took notes on their events and posted on YouTube. This may be visually not the best recording, the sound may be a claim, but for 2012 the fact is important.
And they have a YouTube channel for 8,000 people at the time of launching the podcast. At the same time, they rather quickly realized that people came to them and said: “How can I learn the Python language?” So what do you say to them? Go, there is a lot of information on the Internet, learn. But they themselves also hire these people later and see what the discrepancy between what is written on the Internet and what is required from junior-developers. They launched their courses.
It so happened that they had a self-compiled site, and at some point I suggested to redo it. Then we remade and advertising. They have a good mailing list, a lot of subscribers to YouTube, but it was not very clear how to convert it. And most importantly, how to verify that these are not some hardcore programmers who themselves will tell you ten more times where you have put some tabs wrong.
The guys have very cool speakers who tell it at the level of evangelists. They do not speak about such things that here we put if ... else. This is all you can read and watch.
We decided that they should try to write articles, but usually when you ask a programmer to write an article, he says: “Yes, everything will be, knock in a week”. You knock in a week, he says: “Exactly, now. Give me three days, please. ” Three days pass, snow falls, then the ships float through the puddles, and he also writes an article.
Therefore, we decided to do podcasts and decrypt in articles. Just guys gathered, they themselves were interested. Here's another thing is that they had a high willingness to do it. It was just that there was no dude who would say that we take this, do this or that ...
I simply suggested choosing three topics, talking about them and posting on YouTube. People liked it. And most importantly - it began to give a good result in terms of courses. The simplest mechanic is the promotional code. One issue cost three thousand rubles. This is an acquaintance you take the equipment, you save on something, you do something yourself.
I thought so: how many issues we will have, how much is a ticket. [Understood that] we will go to zero if someone buys one ticket. People bought fifteen tickets with one promo code. The guys then reduced the discount, limited, but it began to work.
We also noticed that the most, so to speak, Nuba issues like “How to start coding in Python” are the most popular. They had such a report, and he had 44,000 views a year on the channel. And the report about how to combine “Erlang in PHP SQL” - for some reason, 329 views.
Then it was just automated. My topics quickly ran out, I sketched ten topics. They had nothing to do with programming, these are ten questions about any field: how to get a job, where to start, how to finish, how not to quit.
Alina: Nevertheless, there was some kind of vacuum on these topics.
Aleksey: Yes, but people started asking for hardcore. “What do you say about data science trends in Python this year?” Well, what can I tell them? Nothing. Just the guys have such a wonderful Zlata Obukhovskaya - a member of all these communities, a team leader and a person with experience. For many years in development, she worked at Yandex, Rambler and Mail.Ru.
She went through all these "circles of hell", the man has a look of awesome. She knows everyone and can tell the one who needs: “Come,” and he will come. It is not necessary for this all sorts of "Hello, we are doing such and such a thing, we have such an audience ...". Simply: “Come, have a chat.”
Zlata is just preparing topics that are interesting to the community. At the same time, she herself is interested in it, she is learning something in editorial. Looks at feedback. They have topics about open source and girls in IT. I wonder what topic the shoot is. You can bet and find out.
The most interesting thing is that there are different sections: people who watch YouTube, who download the audio file from the podcast service and who go to the site and listen from there.
Alina: So you have different sections of the audience in essence.
Alexey: Dudes from YouTube - more about such [controversial] topics. Those who download to a smartphone or listen to a podcast service are more hardcore. It can be seen that they listen to more IT podcasts. And people who go to the site - I do not know why they do it. But it turned out that they are quite a lot. We just made a site on Tilda.It turned out that it is difficult to maintain it when there are many releases, because this hierarchy must be built from scratch, it is such a constructor. But wildly cool to go there.
Of course, after podcasts, people don’t instantly throw themselves like this: “Oh, ten percent discount! I’ll leave everything and go to the course. ” They remember, and then, if you conduct surveys of those who came to the courses, they say: "I sat there, sat and remembered."
And they have a course - Learn Python. You hear it ten times. And when you're tormented, you need to learn something in Python, leave your career in the travel industry, buy a course. They had such a girl, she said: “I’ve gotten tired of selling some tours. In general, I realized that I was an introvert. Go all over the forest, I want to program. "
You do not have a question, that you have to go to some kind of Yandex or Google and ask something. You already know the address of the site on which they will help you. And the coolest thing is that you know people. You have already compiled a profile of these podcasts.
There is Misha - he's on the site is so cool. But it turns out that this is just a person who hasn’t been able to explain something ten times. You understand from the way he tells you that this is really a person who will achieve that you understand.
The main thing is that these guys have real success stories. When dudes really then become someone. Yura Orlov, he was a doctor. He did a lot of diagnostics and saw that new systems were being introduced. He realized that he would be interested in making a service that would help doctors. Now there are neural networks that help you create a third opinion, diagnose something from the images, recognize, build some predictions.
He understood that in order to do such a product, it is necessary to understand something in machine learning. He has the expertise of a doctor, and what programmers do, he did not understand. The dude really talked with his wife, plowed for two years. They have saved something, somewhere sank for money. But he went through the courses first, then he went and got a job. Now it is a confident middle.
People love success stories when you publish to vc.ru where you write four cases. Suppose some Westerners: Alice lived in Nevada, she always dreamed of something. But Yura, he was beaten up in people, and then abruptly changed everything. As a result, readers look and say: “This Yura is cool, but why am I worse?” And thanks to the content they go to the course website.
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This, in my opinion, is a clear story. I will not hide, and here I once spied something. In many ways, it seems to me that I just saw it and simply reproduced it in the guys. There are such dudes - LoftBlog. There was such a moment after #tceh, I worked with Seryozha Abdulmanov. He had his own PR-agency besides what he was doing in Mosigre. The bottom line was that they signed a contract with the Ministry of Digital Development. Those who are our IT managers.
They had to make a public in VKontakte for teenagers. And they said to me: “Now you write about IT for teenagers”. Well, I agreed. There was a time when we realized that in order to attract an audience, it would be most logical to go to the neighboring publics who also say something about IT and offer cross-promotion. We give you good content and take yours.
And there he was, he is now, LoftBlog from Peter. They did about it in 2014. They had webinars - not those where they tell you how to live correctly, but simply told. They changed coaches, answered people's questions. I just looked at their content and thought how cool they are doing. They do not cut mad budgets into some kind of advertising, they don’t hang banners with conditional vc.ru or something else that will cost you hundreds of thousands.
They are simply such: “We are ready to tell you how we think something should be done. And we know this because we have such and such experience. ” If you're interested, click play at such an hour. If you're not interested, go by and that's it.
It seems to me that one of the main things is that you should regularly watch what happens in others. This may be your field of activity, not yours. See how sports media is done.
If you are preaching something - try to implement it at home. You still can not copy it in the forehead. You will not be the second Dudyom. It's like rock music.
Most people come to the fact that they want to play the guitar, because they have seen some Slash do it from Guns N'Roses. They realize that they will never play like him, but they can simply be inspired by it and start doing something of their own. There are a lot of people who were inspired by their music and became successful. Well, either they just earn their living, or they can play a guitar in a company, which also brings some benefit.
Not the fact that you have a lot from this. But you looked at how others did it, and tried to apply it in yourself, and this fact is the coolest. You have less time to sit and think: “What should we do so ingenious to tear YouTube off?”
You get more time to try different ideas.
Alina: The path of the editor is like the path of a musician. On this note, we will complete the issue.
- listen to telegram or web version
- subscribe to podcast in iTunes or on Habré
Alexey Korneev, independent editor and text director
alinatestova : Let's start with your background in editing. Tell me, please, what was your first job and how did you come to content marketing?
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Alexey: My whole life is built in such a way that there are two of us, me and my elder brother [Mikhail Korneev]. He always pulls me somewhere, because it is always interesting what the older ones do. I am quite a humanist, and when I entered the institute, I realized that what I teach is not needed by anyone except a few dozen people who are engaged in this all my life. You quite quickly realize that this is some kind of garbage.
Since I am a humanist, I could only write something - to spit that. And my older brother is a programmer. As it was fashionable in the early 2000s, they founded a studio and made websites. These were business cards of several pages, but everything was done from scratch: then there were no CMS, everyone wrote their own, did SEO. I got a first job there as a junior SEO optimizer.
I noticed that our clients have bad texts on sites. You just look at the site and do not understand what they are doing and why. And this is so interesting. For example, there was some kind of travel agency with hotels in Greece, but for some reason there was some kind of garbage on the site. We began to rewrite it.
Then I accidentally got into the football edition. Then here, in the Kursk area, there was Gazeta.ru. They just posted an ad on the Internet and say: "We are looking for dudes who are willing to learn from us, but all for free." Come in the evenings after the institute, we will tell you how to write news about football. I thought: "Cool", brought them three notes from LJ. The next day, the editor approached and asked: “Can you stay?” I say: “Yes, what are we doing?” They asked if I knew something about futsal. I said, "Well, I know something."
They said: “We need an announcement in two hours about how the Russian team will play mini-football at some European championship.” This was my first material, the end of 2007.
When I got home, I went to the Internet and 50 times reloaded this page. It was two in the morning, but your material is on the front page, in the most important place.
Since then, I was “fooled”, but rather quickly I realized that in sports journalism it has its own specifics: you have to become a publishing editor in order to travel to all sorts of cool championships, otherwise you will go on bandy. When you walk on it for a long time, you start to get everything in this life. And it so happened that the older brother sold the studio and got carried away by startups. They began to do what was then called GreenfieldProject.
Now is #tceh with FRIA. I just came to see what he was doing, but I didn’t understand anything: the guys ran some IT projects, when people over the weekend had to think of something, and then find some investors. I came to see, and it turned out that they had no one to write about these projects. I said, "Well, let me cover it."
And now, nine years I have been writing about these IT projects. I did not want to, but life was like that.
Alina: You are drawn into this sphere.
Alexey: Well, yes.
Alina: Passing hockey with the ball.
Alexey: When you can do little in this life, the content helps very well. It turns out the farther, the more people need it. I am sure that everyone can write. What you were given at school and what you read is enough. I do not have a profile education. In addition to the 50 pages of Amzin's “Internet News Journalism”, I did not read anything, to be honest.
Alina: Nevertheless, everything in a career is going well.
Alexey: Well, ten years later you have an advantage. Most people are simply afraid of this white sheet, and you come and say: "Well, let me do it."
Alina: Tell me, please, have you had an editorial job at Digital October during your career? For those who do not know or do not remember, Digital October hosted TechCrunch events (based on the eponymous media) in Moscow. What did you do in DO?
Alexey: I did everything. It was a funny story. Thanks to the previous projects and my brother, I met Yulia Lesnikova, now she has the surname Schukina.
She went to Red October and did a Knowledge Stream project. These were video bridges with dudes from around the world. For example, there is a great scientist, he will never come to Russia, because nobody needs it. He is ready to leave the house by video link and tell about his research. Suppose he created the first robot or something very cool.
On the second day I came, they called me and said: “The whole editorial office has left us, now you will do all this”. I was quickly transferred to the former editor of the case. It was the editors of Kommersant, and we had to do the rest of the content: newsletters, announcements, social networks.
Alina: Essentially, the entire information "wrapper."
Alexey: People come to you and say: “We need this,” and you somehow don’t have the option to refuse. But it was a cool experience, there was a big field for experiments, especially the heads were good. The curators of the project gave more freedom for creativity.
You just put some task, and if everything goes well, nobody cares how it was done. There were no approvals ... At TechCrunch, it was cool because we did not have the opportunity to assemble a permanent editor, and you yourself find some people who will help to make it cool. We had a great guy from RIA Novosti, he spoke English. We gave him an English-speaking Twitter account and said: "You just walk for two days and write down everything you see." It was cool because he was retweeted.
We also did a cool thing on Flickr. Usually photos are laid out on the second day after the event. We organized the process in such a way that every two hours the photographer brought a new flash drive, the girls quickly selected what was not slag, and laid it out. And you really see how the work goes on all the news feeds.
We did the same with project descriptions. When they begin to train a few days before the event, it is already clear what they will tell. Of course, their pitch will change, they are prepared so that they come out and say: "We are the coolest." And they go out in the beginning and say: "Well, we have a synchrophasotron, which is ....".
But you already understand what they are doing, and you can write a small press release about this project. It was not some kind of monetary relationship, you just think: now they will take the stage, people will hear something, but they will not be able to find information about them. Let's release it in the form of news. And you just harvest thirty news in a few days and publish it.
Then it's very cool to see how they diverge. You see that your work is not in vain. The coolest [was] when, according to rumors, Mike Butcher liked this [TechCrunch Editor] . But I personally did not testify, they told me. That's cool.
Here I would advise everyone to drag experience from other projects.
I took these approaches from sports journalism, because they demanded of us: when two teams play, you have two minutes to lay out the text. That is, they finished playing, and if you were late and the third minute had already gone, everyone went to another site.
Then it was still fashionable to read all these reports: how Ivanov hit the ball, and Petrov locked his head in the lower left corner. All this, apparently, was really interesting. You just take it, transpose it and think: why do not they do it in IT news?
This is a dynamic industry, like the same sport, where everything really changes, and people get used to consume information on the principle of "here and now." They took the stage, here is a press release for you, in 30 minutes they will have their beautiful photos, we will start it on the social network and so on.
The coolest thing is when you come to the audience ... When we did the DEMO, it was the next conference after TechCrunch. Also the American conference that Petya Tatishchev brought here. We have already taught the audience that went to the Digital October site, because we very quickly and efficiently release some abstracts of keynote speeches.
Then just Sergei Belousov made a cool report about the clouds. I do not remember what he said. It was some sort of thing: "This is very cool, look at how this has turned the world over the past five years." But he said it so interesting that everyone liked it. Somewhere an hour passed between how he left the stage and we released this text.
I remember how forty minutes were sent to me by friends who said: “Well, when will you post it? That was awesome. ” I want to relive it again, it is really great. There was a cool team. But then it turned out that everyone went to other projects.
Alina: But, nevertheless, the experience remains. You continue to carry it to the masses and to I T.
Alexey: A lot of other guys do it too. The same Yulia Schukina, Katya Barabanova [ former producer of media projects at Digital October ] - she has now transferred to Rostelecom, and they are doing courses and teaching all their employees.
People are laying, for example, a cable in Surgut, and for them they are now making a course based on Digital October. They make, for example, a course about what data science is. At such a level, so that you understand how this is around you, everything in life happens and works.
Most likely, you will not face this - you will not be told tomorrow: “Now you are managing this project in a corporation, show what you have learned.” But you understand that these are not some kind of words with which 2% of people operate, but really what becomes a part of life.
Alina: You mentioned briefly about the fact that there was #tceh in your life.
Tell me, please, #tceh is essentially coworking. If the simplest concepts operate. At first glance, coworking is a fairly simple story. But it is not clear how to furnish it with content, stories, benefits. What added value did you create for residents and “passing by”? And what role did you play in this?
Alexey: First of all, #tceh is a soft system for facilitating startups. When we got there, my older brother and partners began to make this story. When we opened, there was some saytik that was updated a year ago. As is usually done: "We will redo it very soon, but now let's run."
And the guys just had an idea that it was not just coworking, but, as Sergei Shchukin [the former marketing director of #tceh ] said, is a place of power. There are educational events, you can meet a lot of cool dudes, they will definitely help you, and everything will be fine. Your startup will surely survive and never-never evil uncles will take it away from you.
When it all opened, it was all sponsored by the IIDF. And the guys from FRIA were the first to go there. They called it the "orange zone", there lay such an orange carpet.
Alina: They had something blue, and #tceh had something orange.
Alexey: Yes, yes. And now the guys told them that this is a soft system of facilitation. There was also such an aquarium, where everyone went by, and we had a small stand where you could insert a piece of paper with some garbage. And we began to write any kind of stupidity: just some jokes about startups. You just sit, and you have one of the background tasks - to come up with a joke about a startup once a day. Ridiculous or unfunny - it does not matter.
So there were stickers. It was the idea of Renat [ Garipov - the general director of #tceh ]. At one point, we realized that we had a lot of paperwork, and some of them were funny - this could be traced by the reaction of people. They walk, smile and take pictures. Here Ilya Korolev [ from FRII ] photographed our sticker and posted it on Facebook [as the cover page]. This is an achievement. And we began to do these things, then just distribute them everywhere. It was such a way of dealing with people. It was necessary to convey that #tceh is not some sort of a semi-state FRIA, but a place where it is interesting and interesting where you will be understood.
The second point is that it seems to be the biggest thing we have done for people both inside and outside. To attract, it was necessary to somehow legitimize the #tceh brand. And then the series "Silicon Valley". It so happened that Katya Barabanova from Digital October moved as a PR manager to Amediateku. We wrote to her with the idiotic idea of showing the show to startups.
We had an idea that all these dudes from the series really look like someone, they were written from someone. And in Russia there are the same startups, real and alive. They are also people, you need to pull them to watch this show. And every week we invited people who founded cool companies: Qiwi, Kaspersky Lab, from Mail.Ru and Yandex did not work, but many were there. They just came, and you could catch them, talk to them and get advice.
It was a free event, and we formed a mailing list for this. We also distributed our stickers, it went very well. The main thing is that it shaped people’s understanding of what we do. Not so much that you distribute some kind of brochure, but the feeling that dudes don't do bullshit and do not try to deceive you. It was cool.
I especially remember when we called> Maxim Nogotkov. It so happened that he arrived earlier. We had a hall on the first floor, and the hall - on the seventh, in my opinion. We tell him that the hall is not ready yet, and offered to go up to coworking. And we go into the elevator - and there the guys - our residents - stand in amazement. And one such: "And you really Maxim?".
He is: "Well, yes."
Alina: Elevator pitch .
Alexey: Yes, yes.
And the last event from this cycle - we made two seasons - was arrived by Mark Zavadsky, he was then [ director of the Russian division ] Alibaba.
He, too, arrived early, and he was supercharged - they then started a competition for startups with Skolkovo. So, he arrived early and sat on the sofa, where there was a walk-through area. Around this stands a crowd of people that spontaneously formed. It is not clear what is happening there, but it is clear that they are distributing something - as in the Soviet period.
So, it is necessary to stand in a queue, there is something. The guys could find out something, ask a question. Basically, they [at the competition] had hardware, and we had few such projects. But in general, this is just a good contact, because a person represents one of the coolest companies in the world. And here you go, and he sits on the couch. Not that he has nothing to do, but he came and understands that it is part of his work to communicate with everyone. It was wildly awesome.
It seems to me that we have given this value. And in the second season we connected the regions, and already people in the regions knew what #tceh is. We had Makhachkala: the guys are doing their own incubator there. We said: "If you have your own platform, take our content, gather people and go to live, write us questions." For example, Natalya Kasperskaya comes, and you sit in Makhachkala and usually you don’t have the opportunity to ask her a question directly. You can, of course, find her mail or knock on Facebook, but the probability is low. And then the magic: you came to your entrepreneurial party, and there is a direct connection with Moscow.
This gave a lot of benefit, because one of our tasks was to attract new projects for IIDF. It worked great because FRIA has its own regional program, and #tceh and FRIA were co-branded. We should not have said that we are something separate, but always to write, that we are “vassal” and all these things. It was useful both for them and for us.
The guys once even gathered in Novosibirsk. We started at 19:30, and there it seemed to be four hours more. Most likely you will not go in some crowd to watch something. This is not a session in the cinema, where you have a ticket, and you go with popcorn. At the first session (just with Nogotkov) and the second people gathered. Then he naturally got blown away, because sitting in the middle of the night at Akademgorodok and watching ... Moreover, we laid it out on YouTube, you could just drop by in the morning and watch everything in the record. We had, in my opinion, ten cities. It was cool, and Novosibirsk was twice the most extreme in time.
Alina: Extreme.
Aleksey: We dreamed about Vladivostok, we even wrote to them. They said, “Cool, cool. Just explain to us, please, how we should gather people for this. ”
Alina: Night Vigil (laughs).
Alexey: Yes, there are six in the morning on Fridays, and we are watching a live broadcast from Moscow.
It is clear that most people also have the main work, which is not always associated with a startup. You are not such a fighter who lies on the sand and thinks: “Well, I'll work for two hours today, and the rest of the time I will ride the surf and watch motivating videos on YouTube”. It does not happen, so, unfortunately, we could not connect them, but tried.
Alina: This is not only events, you just casually mentioned this, but also a huge amount of content: articles, newsletters, educational content that accompanies the events and after them comes out. So the editorial work at #tceh was gigantic, in my opinion.
Alexey: Well, it was hell, yes. But again [teamwork], it was good. Even if you are alone in your position in the organization, you either have a team, and then somehow you rush, or you alone will be bullshit. In #tceh was Seryozha Schukin, marketing director, he supported and moderated many things. He had a strategic idea - where we are going, why we are doing something - and if something fell within the scope of his strategy, he could fight for it.
That is, in many respects I removed these approvals from you, go, prove, the budget ... No, I have to - they decided what I needed. He will deal with this, and you come on, generate content. That was great.
There were a lot of educators, not a lot of articles. It was then that we had a funny story about the Acid Creation.
Alina: The beginning is already good.
Alexey: Yes. It looks like that at five in the evening Seryoga comes running and says: “We need to find the Acid Creation, write a post on Facebook”. We all smoked, but cigarettes. And I think: "Something is not right." It turned out that the dude took such a nickname and published an anonymous column on vc.ru about why everything is bad with startups in Russia. In the sense that everybody thinks like this: “I’m torturing a business for 150 billion just by saying that I’ll do this. I will not do it, but just tell everyone. " And all are: “Yes! You are our new king and Mark Zuckerberg. ”
He wrote something, and it just got into Seryogino a strategic vision that #tceh is just the place where these people who have the desire are forged, not into cars, but into someone who is able create this business. Or after a while to accumulate experience.
And so, we launched on the Facebook mailing of the type “We are looking for an Acid Creation”. It turned out to be a man whose name is Nikita Shirobokov. We began to cooperate.
Then, when I left #tceh, it turned out that I went out and met him. We began to smoke, and I said to him: “Do you want to be an editor?” And then he had the idea of his startup, but something did not go. Either he got married, and he needed money, or something else, and he said: “Okay.” He organized everything very cool there, I could not do it. He recruited interns who, on enthusiasm, could herachit up to four nights. I have never been able to motivate people until four at night to do something adequate. Except thump - never.
He arranged it all, and they began to make more newsletters, articles. We just came to this point that the "educator" did not go in the forehead. If we just made a landing page and drove traffic to it, then all these [indicators] - the conversion, how many people made the decision - it was all very long, expensive and not super-efficient. And they organized a bunch of articles that people were landed on, and then they do it by retargeting and getting into the newsletter.
From me in #tceh more remained stickers. Until now, if I come in, I or my first designer, Denis, has invented the most part. And those events. The site has changed (just Nikita rewrote it), and I wrote irregularly at that time. Basically, if we had time to write the newsletter, Nikita placed more emphasis on the benefits, and Seryoga and I - on the fan.
Our first two letters were addressed to Chuck Norris.
Alina: I remember.
Alexey: What do people write? Well, if we write some boring stuff like this: “Be an entrepreneur, do it right, here are three tools for you”. Somehow it's not that.
Our idea was that we would never find Chuck Norris. But the second letter came to us such an answer. The dude says: "If you need it, my friends are one of the agencies that work with him." And we realized that we had nothing to say to him.
Since then, we wrote about entrepreneurs, but basically it was all wrapped up in some useful content and announcements of events, because in the first year we were gaining a base for distribution. The most effective method to do this when you have a platform is to say that tomorrow we are talking about marketing about it, the day after tomorrow about UX, after the next day about how to become a programmer in five days. And on Thursday someone will come to us.
Even if they did not come to all events, the main thing is that they got into your mailing list. And then the main thing is to make sure that they do not unsubscribe from you as long as possible.
Alina: Tell me, please, if you continue your story: you are now interacting with technology projects, you are developing a community of Python-developers with colleagues, you are doing a podcast . Since we are sitting here and also recording a podcast: it always seemed to me that a podcast about development is quite a complicated story, because it is rather hard to verbally convey information about programming. It is more convenient to read or watch something. How do you solve this problem? Did you even have such a problem?
Alexey: No, everything is easier there. Again, this is all my brother.
Alina: We will call this issue "This is all my brother."
Aleksey: Half of the things that I did are somehow related to what the Bear is doing, and I come in and start to turn things around too. They, in my opinion, in 2012 began to make mitaps. Mishka at one moment himself began to switch from PHP to more advanced languages and chose Python. He liked it so much that he realized that he needed to talk about it somehow.
There were already articles on Habré then, but when you develop virtualization ... Moreover, he envied either JS nicknames or Rubists - I don’t remember who, but there were dudes in Moscow who did the mitap. People were going to them, it was cool, they could still go to the pub after that.
There was some kind of drive, movement, you see that it is not the only one. They began to help him, Valya Dombrovsky - just the organizer - and others. They formed a community. The guys are great, because they always took notes on their events and posted on YouTube. This may be visually not the best recording, the sound may be a claim, but for 2012 the fact is important.
And they have a YouTube channel for 8,000 people at the time of launching the podcast. At the same time, they rather quickly realized that people came to them and said: “How can I learn the Python language?” So what do you say to them? Go, there is a lot of information on the Internet, learn. But they themselves also hire these people later and see what the discrepancy between what is written on the Internet and what is required from junior-developers. They launched their courses.
It so happened that they had a self-compiled site, and at some point I suggested to redo it. Then we remade and advertising. They have a good mailing list, a lot of subscribers to YouTube, but it was not very clear how to convert it. And most importantly, how to verify that these are not some hardcore programmers who themselves will tell you ten more times where you have put some tabs wrong.
The guys have very cool speakers who tell it at the level of evangelists. They do not speak about such things that here we put if ... else. This is all you can read and watch.
They are talking about basic things: why we do it, why when you do it - it's garbage, how to choose between these methods, and so on. Any sharp topics, they are very cool voice "holivarit." When they all sit down and say: "No, here is your Visual - garbage, my Sublime can do this." They can argue about it, and that's fine.
We decided that they should try to write articles, but usually when you ask a programmer to write an article, he says: “Yes, everything will be, knock in a week”. You knock in a week, he says: “Exactly, now. Give me three days, please. ” Three days pass, snow falls, then the ships float through the puddles, and he also writes an article.
Therefore, we decided to do podcasts and decrypt in articles. Just guys gathered, they themselves were interested. Here's another thing is that they had a high willingness to do it. It was just that there was no dude who would say that we take this, do this or that ...
I simply suggested choosing three topics, talking about them and posting on YouTube. People liked it. And most importantly - it began to give a good result in terms of courses. The simplest mechanic is the promotional code. One issue cost three thousand rubles. This is an acquaintance you take the equipment, you save on something, you do something yourself.
I thought so: how many issues we will have, how much is a ticket. [Understood that] we will go to zero if someone buys one ticket. People bought fifteen tickets with one promo code. The guys then reduced the discount, limited, but it began to work.
They just did not have something for beginners. That is, on YouTube, you post mostly recordings from meetings, where people come to who have something to tell. They go on stage and say how they are doing some kind of library. You sit like this and think: "Damn, cool." But where to start, what not to do - it was not enough.
We also noticed that the most, so to speak, Nuba issues like “How to start coding in Python” are the most popular. They had such a report, and he had 44,000 views a year on the channel. And the report about how to combine “Erlang in PHP SQL” - for some reason, 329 views.
Then it was just automated. My topics quickly ran out, I sketched ten topics. They had nothing to do with programming, these are ten questions about any field: how to get a job, where to start, how to finish, how not to quit.
Alina: Nevertheless, there was some kind of vacuum on these topics.
Aleksey: Yes, but people started asking for hardcore. “What do you say about data science trends in Python this year?” Well, what can I tell them? Nothing. Just the guys have such a wonderful Zlata Obukhovskaya - a member of all these communities, a team leader and a person with experience. For many years in development, she worked at Yandex, Rambler and Mail.Ru.
She went through all these "circles of hell", the man has a look of awesome. She knows everyone and can tell the one who needs: “Come,” and he will come. It is not necessary for this all sorts of "Hello, we are doing such and such a thing, we have such an audience ...". Simply: “Come, have a chat.”
Zlata is just preparing topics that are interesting to the community. At the same time, she herself is interested in it, she is learning something in editorial. Looks at feedback. They have topics about open source and girls in IT. I wonder what topic the shoot is. You can bet and find out.
The most interesting thing is that there are different sections: people who watch YouTube, who download the audio file from the podcast service and who go to the site and listen from there.
Alina: So you have different sections of the audience in essence.
Alexey: Dudes from YouTube - more about such [controversial] topics. Those who download to a smartphone or listen to a podcast service are more hardcore. It can be seen that they listen to more IT podcasts. And people who go to the site - I do not know why they do it. But it turned out that they are quite a lot. We just made a site on Tilda.It turned out that it is difficult to maintain it when there are many releases, because this hierarchy must be built from scratch, it is such a constructor. But wildly cool to go there.
Of course, after podcasts, people don’t instantly throw themselves like this: “Oh, ten percent discount! I’ll leave everything and go to the course. ” They remember, and then, if you conduct surveys of those who came to the courses, they say: "I sat there, sat and remembered."
Content does not sell instantly. That is, he begins to sell, but you quickly burn out those who are ready to buy right now. But it works for a long time in the sense that a person listens to a podcast - these are dudes, they say something normal, they don’t seem to fool me.
And they have a course - Learn Python. You hear it ten times. And when you're tormented, you need to learn something in Python, leave your career in the travel industry, buy a course. They had such a girl, she said: “I’ve gotten tired of selling some tours. In general, I realized that I was an introvert. Go all over the forest, I want to program. "
You do not have a question, that you have to go to some kind of Yandex or Google and ask something. You already know the address of the site on which they will help you. And the coolest thing is that you know people. You have already compiled a profile of these podcasts.
There is Misha - he's on the site is so cool. But it turns out that this is just a person who hasn’t been able to explain something ten times. You understand from the way he tells you that this is really a person who will achieve that you understand.
The main thing is that these guys have real success stories. When dudes really then become someone. Yura Orlov, he was a doctor. He did a lot of diagnostics and saw that new systems were being introduced. He realized that he would be interested in making a service that would help doctors. Now there are neural networks that help you create a third opinion, diagnose something from the images, recognize, build some predictions.
He understood that in order to do such a product, it is necessary to understand something in machine learning. He has the expertise of a doctor, and what programmers do, he did not understand. The dude really talked with his wife, plowed for two years. They have saved something, somewhere sank for money. But he went through the courses first, then he went and got a job. Now it is a confident middle.
People love success stories when you publish to vc.ru where you write four cases. Suppose some Westerners: Alice lived in Nevada, she always dreamed of something. But Yura, he was beaten up in people, and then abruptly changed everything. As a result, readers look and say: “This Yura is cool, but why am I worse?” And thanks to the content they go to the course website.
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This, in my opinion, is a clear story. I will not hide, and here I once spied something. In many ways, it seems to me that I just saw it and simply reproduced it in the guys. There are such dudes - LoftBlog. There was such a moment after #tceh, I worked with Seryozha Abdulmanov. He had his own PR-agency besides what he was doing in Mosigre. The bottom line was that they signed a contract with the Ministry of Digital Development. Those who are our IT managers.
They had to make a public in VKontakte for teenagers. And they said to me: “Now you write about IT for teenagers”. Well, I agreed. There was a time when we realized that in order to attract an audience, it would be most logical to go to the neighboring publics who also say something about IT and offer cross-promotion. We give you good content and take yours.
And there he was, he is now, LoftBlog from Peter. They did about it in 2014. They had webinars - not those where they tell you how to live correctly, but simply told. They changed coaches, answered people's questions. I just looked at their content and thought how cool they are doing. They do not cut mad budgets into some kind of advertising, they don’t hang banners with conditional vc.ru or something else that will cost you hundreds of thousands.
They are simply such: “We are ready to tell you how we think something should be done. And we know this because we have such and such experience. ” If you're interested, click play at such an hour. If you're not interested, go by and that's it.
It seems to me that one of the main things is that you should regularly watch what happens in others. This may be your field of activity, not yours. See how sports media is done.
If you are preaching something - try to implement it at home. You still can not copy it in the forehead. You will not be the second Dudyom. It's like rock music.
Most people come to the fact that they want to play the guitar, because they have seen some Slash do it from Guns N'Roses. They realize that they will never play like him, but they can simply be inspired by it and start doing something of their own. There are a lot of people who were inspired by their music and became successful. Well, either they just earn their living, or they can play a guitar in a company, which also brings some benefit.
Not the fact that you have a lot from this. But you looked at how others did it, and tried to apply it in yourself, and this fact is the coolest. You have less time to sit and think: “What should we do so ingenious to tear YouTube off?”
You get more time to try different ideas.
Alina: The path of the editor is like the path of a musician. On this note, we will complete the issue.
Our microformat on content marketing:
What do you have in an office like that?
Archetypes: Why
PS In the profile of glphmedia there are links to all releases of our podcast.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/447072/
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