Tech Blog takeover @ Tech Develops #LogOffBlogOn
Tech Develops is an amazing day here at ASOS Tech. It occurs on the last Friday of every month and is an opportunity for every ASOSer to develop themselves however they see fit. On this occasion we held a ‘Tech Blog Takeover’, to encourage and support people to get involved with the ASOS Tech Blog.
So, what happened?
We had a number of sessions that ran throughout the day, all entirely dedicated to the ASOS Tech Blog — a chance for every ASOSer in Tech to come and learn about blogging.
Why a ‘takeover’?
The ASOS Tech Blog is still relatively new so one of the reasons behind the takeover was to showcase and share with people what we have created in a short space of time. We also wanted to offer ASOSers the time and space to learn and gain inspiration, and to consider what they might like to contribute to the blog.
Here’s what we learned from some of the sessions:
Just Eat tech blog (feat. special guest #1)
The day started with a special guest from Just Eat. For those who don’t know, the Just Eat tech blog is five years old, so, naturally we wanted to hear all about it. We had one of the blog founders come in and talk to us — he’s still at the company today and remains heavily involved in the day-to-day running of the blog.
He covered a lot in his hour slot! Among other things, he walked us though the main drivers for setting the blog up, the benefits, the publishing process, popular topics to date as well as what hasn’t worked so well, and how Just Eat celebrate success for writers. He finished on some key takeaways, outlined below:
- Quality over content — It’s more important to have one quality post of value than it is to have any number of posts for the sake of it.
- Not reach but attraction — It’s far more valuable to reach your target audience than, for example, a twelve year old on the other side of the country who happened to stumble upon the post.
- Always respond to comments — Responding to comments is a great way to build an engaged following. It’s a unique opportunity to talk to people about things we are doing via a two-way conversation.
This session kicked off our Tech Develops takeover with a real energy. We had a full house, lots of questions and everyone seemed to leave with some good ideas on how to improve our own blog.
Testing, BA & engineering ideation sessions
Next up, we put on a number of sessions for different disciplines across ASOS Tech. We know that sometimes the hardest part of writing a blog post is coming up with ideas. These sessions were set up with the purpose of aiding people who wanted to write for the blog but didn’t know what to write about.
We split into groups and asked each group to identify the different ‘personas’ of people who would be interested in the blog and the reasons why. A persona is a fictional character/user profile that is used to represent a user type that might interact with a product in a certain way. In this example the product/service is the ASOS Tech Blog.
Once we identified these personas (such as people within ASOS, external engineers and tech enthusiasts, or people interested in joining ASOS), each group came up with ideas about what that persona might want to write or read about and presented these back to the rest of the attendees.
The real value of a session like this is generating and taking away interesting or novel topic ideas, and then putting them in to practice. The call to action was to turn one of the topics we had discussed into a blog post. Watch this space for a number of testing/BA/engineering themed blog posts over the next few weeks and months.
Five tips for creating brilliant blogs that will change how you write forever
We had a great turn out of people who wanted to, as the title says, ‘change how they write forever’. This session was run by our comms and engagement manager for Tech and focused on five key tips and tricks for grabbing your readers’ attention and making your messages stick. Here they are, summarised below:
- Find your story. Write about what you care about and tell it in a personal way that means it could only have come from you. Your passion and unique perspective is what will make your blog worth reading.
- Knowledge is a curse. Your reader doesn’t have the same context as you. If something isn’t clear to them, they guess the meaning or skip over it. Step into your readers’ shoes — what do you want them to think, feel and do after reading your blog?
- Get to the point already. Forget how you wrote at school (intro, argument, conclusion). Start with the most important point first, then the second most and so on. Oh, and find a killer hook to grab your reader’s attention. Why should they choose to read your blog over the thousands of others out there?
- Talk like a real human being. Write like you speak and avoid the traps of jargon and formal ‘business speak’. It might sound big and clever to use fancy words, but it distances you from your reader. Use small sentences and simple words. Cherish your tone of voice — it helps bring out your personality.
- Get writing. Find the wrong words first. Just get stuff down on paper, even if it’s a bulleted list or post-its. Get others to read it with zero context to see if the curse of knowledge has struck you.
For a bit of further reading from a real expert on writing, check out Kurt Vonnegut’s excellent two page essay on How To Write With Style.
An intro to the Technology in Government blog
To wrap up the blog-tastic day, we welcomed two guests from Government Digital Service (GDS) to talk about their Technology in Government tech blog — how it was set up, popular topics, as well as some top tips to maintain reader engagement.
While being slightly different to the Just Eat and ASOS tech blogs, there was still a lot of valuable insight and information to be gained. GDS are government funded, so therefore it’s all about transparency. Whatever they do it needs to be open and accessible to everyone. They offered some key takeaways around things that we hadn’t yet considered, such as:
- Document Style Guides. Guides for our bloggers to follow around how to write concise and engaging articles. Image size, document length and layout are but a few things to consider.
- Comments/Moderation Guidelines. A simple set of guidelines around leaving comments, encouraging a safe environment for people to learn and engage in discussion(s).
- Open Source Rules. GDS have found that their Open Source seems to be extremely popular, generating the most views and reads.
All good things come to an end… for now
The GDS session was the final session of the day. Overall, the Tech Blog takeover was an amazing day to be part of. Blogging is all about sharing knowledge and experience and it was great to do this via face-to-face sessions — hopefully this has inspired some budding writers to give it a go! It was also such a valuable learning experience hearing from our external speakers, how they got their tech blogs off the ground and how they continue to drive them forward today. If you’re reading this and run your own tech blog, we’d love to hear about it — please get in touch with us and get sharing.
If you have any suggestions on how to get people blogging, then let us know!
About the writers
This article was a joint effort from a number of people…
Gareth Waterhouse has been at ASOS for over eight years. He says it’s been amazing to see the company grow and he’s enjoying helping other people reach their goals.
Rosie Tredwell is a Cultural Change Advisor, passionate about making ASOS Tech a place where people love to work. A lover of travel, food (mostly peanut butter) and sausage dogs.
Simon Jobling is one of our Agile Delivery Managers in the Web team. He is keen to contribute interesting and insightful content about ways of working at ASOS on the Tech Blog, so watch this space for more.
