Re:Ask HN: What are your companies Engineering Blogging Guid...
by nunez on Friday April 07, 2017 @10:02AM
(#14059672)
Depends on what your company is trying to achieve with the blog.
Are they trying to use it as a inbound sales funnel? Are they using it for recruiting talent? If so, what talent pool are they trying to draw from? Is your product highly technical?
If this blog is meant to be a sales funnel ("this product is amazing; look at how invested our engineers are!"), then the content will need to be specific enough to demonstrate your product's engineering quality while being buzzwordy enough to identify with your audience. Ex: If you work for a company that builds insulin pumps and are trying to blog about the software powering those pumps from a sales context, you might talk about testing strategies your team employs on the RTOS powering the pump but not about how you mocked a subset of the CPU's instruction set to fully unit test it. That content might be more appropriate for recruiting embedded engineers ("that's a cool tech stack! how can I apply") --- it's all about capturing your audience.
An important thing to keep in mind is that your blog should be consistent with its messaging. If you're creating a highly-technical engineering blog, keep it highly-technical. If you're writing an engineering blog meant for sales, keep it focussed on sales. Readers are flighty, and one way to get them to unsub really quickly is to write content that isn't relevant to them.
Are they trying to use it as a inbound sales funnel? Are they using it for recruiting talent? If so, what talent pool are they trying to draw from? Is your product highly technical?
If this blog is meant to be a sales funnel ("this product is amazing; look at how invested our engineers are!"), then the content will need to be specific enough to demonstrate your product's engineering quality while being buzzwordy enough to identify with your audience. Ex: If you work for a company that builds insulin pumps and are trying to blog about the software powering those pumps from a sales context, you might talk about testing strategies your team employs on the RTOS powering the pump but not about how you mocked a subset of the CPU's instruction set to fully unit test it. That content might be more appropriate for recruiting embedded engineers ("that's a cool tech stack! how can I apply") --- it's all about capturing your audience.
An important thing to keep in mind is that your blog should be consistent with its messaging. If you're creating a highly-technical engineering blog, keep it highly-technical. If you're writing an engineering blog meant for sales, keep it focussed on sales. Readers are flighty, and one way to get them to unsub really quickly is to write content that isn't relevant to them.
Good luck!