How we built the best corporate blog for HR branding
Today, we want to give you a brief story of how we managed to achieve something few people believed was possible (but is now a common practice). In 2016, Pixonic, a primarily midcore mobile game developer, hired us to help build their HR brand. We’re not going to go into too much detail of every PR step we took, although the podcast and a number of events held in different parts of the world deserve an honorable mention. Instead, we’ll focus on what the title says.
One of our goals was to increase awareness among highly qualified specialists and attract them to the company. Even though the company had large and complex products in release and development, a lot of backend developers, analysts, system administrators, and more were scared off by the phrase “mobile games,” thinking there could be nothing interesting there.
To tackle this issue, we focused on Habr, the most popular platform in the CIS for technical and IT specialists, because we knew it was frequented by many of the potential candidates. Habr has a highly educated and demanding, invite-based community and only allows users who have a positive rating to vote on content that’s going to go on the front page.
We were aware that it would be challenging to achieve recognition from this community. Back then, it was deemed next to impossible for mobile game developers, especially for a corporate blog. Yet, we made it happen. Naturally, we had to conduct a deep analysis of Pixonic’s strengths, select key individuals, and draw upon our expertise in content creation, but this is a topic for another article.
To sum it up, we had: a demanding, highly qualified community with prejudice against mobile game developers and the ability to downvote any content they didn’t like.
What we got in the end: the attention of our target audience, millions of views, tens of thousands of subscribers, thousands of likes, and an award from Habr for the best blog about game development.
Turns out, anything is possible.
Our first step was to avoid immediately focusing on mobile game development, as some companies did. Instead, we wrote our first post about internal monitoring and system administration, highlighting the complexity and depth of the project and getting the readers hooked from the first sentence. Here’s an excerpt: “It’s required to monitor more than 46,000 metrics around the clock on more than 500 servers in 6 data centers and 4 countries, and the DAU of War Robots consistently exceeds 1,500,000 people.”
We then talked about the tools, metrics, and workflows used in the company for this purpose, and our first post got featured in the “best of the day” selection, gaining more than 25,000 views and about 150 bookmarks in favorites.
We continued to publish materials with guides and tutorials for system administrators, mixed with new topics. Our aim was not to advertise the company, but to give our readers something really useful based on our own expertise.
Gradually, we began to talk about game optimization, network code, shared experiments with VR, technical issues of combating cheaters, level design, and even monetization. We didn’t shy away from discussing our mistakes, and one of our most popular blog articles was about our work-related mess-ups — how innocent players were temporarily banned, how the company launched a DDoS attack on its own servers, and how a mistake in one letter led to player dissatisfaction. Rather than being seen as unprofessional, which many developers were worried about before the post was published, this openness was well-received and generated a ton of support and comments from readers who had similar experiences. After all, everybody makes mistakes.
To produce content regularly, we assembled a team of over two dozen authors within the company, with 90% of them writing materials for the first time (with the help of our editor, of course). Many thanked us for this experience even years later and regretted that they hadn’t started writing earlier because it helped them a lot in their careers and professional growth.
As a result of our efforts, candidates who already knew the internal processes and the company’s stack started approaching Pixonic. During the first interviews, they mentioned that they learned about the mobile developer from the materials in the blog. It’s important to note that not only the topic of the article but also its style and language strongly influence whether like-minded specialists would be interested in working for the company.
In 2018, the blog won an award in the category of the best blog about game development on Habr, and was featured for all newly registered users. Today, it continues to thrive in a community that once dismissed mobile game development as uninteresting.
