Why do the groups you created eventually become dead groups?

If you create a community just for the sake of creating a community, the community will most likely not be active. Let’s see how the author creates a highly active community.

Recently someone told me: "One of your pictures has gone viral!" From Weibo to industry groups, and even breaking through the circle to celebrity-chasing groups in the past two days...

This is actually the content of my speech at the "CBNData xCBNData Data Festival" last week, "Activating the community and turning "consumers" into "brand fans". It is not original, and I really regret the typos.

The level of interest everyone showed in this passage, as well as its breaking circle effect, once again made me realize that “community” is really a good thing.

Whether it’s the fruit shop near home, a fanatical fan club, or the newbies and bigwigs in the industry, they all want to be inspired and gain something through the community. So how can we play the community well?

Everyone who knows me knows that I have a group that is quite famous in the industry, called the Economic Research Institute. How famous is it? Take a look at this picture…

One day I woke up in the morning and saw that everyone in my circle of friends was sharing this article. I looked closely and thought, oh my god, isn’t this me? Then look at the title of the article: How much money do people who are good at building communities make?

I slowly typed a question mark...

In fact, I am not a natural group worker. I consider myself a marketer. I spent several years in the United States working in consumer products and the Internet. Later, I returned to China and joined Yi'ersan, using a membership system to run a shared wardrobe.

I actually started operating the community in 2017, mainly communicating and sharing with everyone through Knowledge Planet. By studying the platform's gameplay and user data, my planet has had more than 4,000 people in two years, and was recently on the top list of star owners.

It was this incident, plus my experience of using a membership system to operate users at Yiersan, that gave me the idea of ​​starting my own business now - to redefine industry self-media by using private domains.

But our ideal does not stop there. We want to be the first hub in the industry. Membership is just a link for everyone to enter our private domain. We hope to provide more transformational services to corporate members. (The following tens of thousands of words are omitted)

The topic of my speech today is how to activate the community. This is subject to certain conditions. I think creating a group just for the sake of creating a group is actually a very stupid thing to do . People who have worked in a community know that groups are difficult to operate. Sometimes, if you are not careful, a single bad apple can spoil the whole bunch.

For example, if you form a consumer group, and someone jumps out and says, "Oh, that product is terrible, it's very bad," and then another person says, "Yeah, I think so too, it's rubbish," then your group is basically ruined. So we can’t form a group just for the sake of forming a group.

So before talking about how to activate the community, let’s first talk about why we should build a community, or what is my understanding of private domain?

In the first half of the year, I wrote an industry-leading article that defined private domain traffic, "The Essence and Methods of the 2019 Hot Jargon "Private Domain Traffic"". Now, a year has passed, and my views on private domain traffic have become more profound.

1. Private domain means privatization of data, traffic, and users

Brands often ask me, "Can your social media strategy be used in our company?" Based on my previous experience in consumer products, I can tell you responsibly that the same logic can be fully applied to the consumer products industry.

Let’s first think about why private domains are so popular this year?

I said in a previous article: It is essentially the old address book, the American email list.

I recently thought of a more vivid metaphor.

I believe most people have rented a house in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Do you still remember what you felt when you rented the house?

You have to pay rent every month, and the rent is increasing every year. Sometimes, the house you originally lived in is suddenly no longer available for you to live in. In the end, the house doesn't belong to you. So in this case, you would rather buy a house, as you will feel more at ease after owning it.

Private domain traffic is essentially very similar to buying a house.

In the past, you have been investing, buying direct traffic on Tmall, buying ads in the information flow, and buying volume to maintain your growth. But the traffic is increasing every year, and it doesn’t belong to you. One day you may not be able to get traffic from a familiar place. Don’t you feel insecure?

...I'm really anxious!

So in essence, we all say that the private domain is due to poverty, but in fact, people don’t want to just rent traffic anymore. I want to buy out the traffic and transfer the right of use to ownership to alleviate the anxiety about uncertainty.

I think this change in concept is very similar to a very popular concept overseas - DTC (Direct to Consumer).

What is DTC?

Many people think it means "eliminating the middlemen and reaching users directly." Instead of going through intermediary supermarkets or platforms, we build our own websites for distribution.

But in fact, many people do not realize that there is another important reason hidden behind it: the rise of foreign DTC is because foreign companies have discovered that they need to own their own traffic, users, and data, which are their private assets.

Don’t you think this is very much like a private domain?

In fact, private domains also hope to get rid of platforms and reach users directly, but domestic private domains cannot skip Tmall and Tencent. You still have to rely on these platforms, but you also want to have your own data, traffic, and users.

To put it bluntly, if I want to contact you today, I can do so directly, instead of having to buy a through train on Tmall. This is essentially the change in user traffic and privatization at home and abroad.

Today, both at home and abroad, a transformation is underway, which is the privatization of users, data, and traffic.

In addition, why did no one mention private domain in the past two years, but many people mentioned it in the past two years?

The previous Internet thinking was to make your own APP. Isn’t APP private domain traffic?

But gradually, I found that many APPs have poor retention and cannot retain users. The DAU is neither D, A nor U. But everyone opens WeChat every day, right? So I stopped making APPs and did everything on WeChat.

In addition, I think it has a lot to do with the trend of consumer product entrepreneurship. In the past, the focus of consumer product manufacturing was on the goods. Where is the goods and how much was sold? But now, when it comes to consumer product startups, people are more concerned about their users and where they are. Consumer product startups are paying more attention to accurate user portraits and retaining their users.

So which platforms can be called public domain?

Many platforms also claim that they are creating private domain traffic, but I think many of them are not private domain. For example, even if a public account has millions of fans, the opening rate may be less than 3%. On Weibo, you can have tens of millions of fans, but if you don’t buy fans, the exposure may be only one tenth...

These platforms can only be described as semi-public and semi-private.

If it truly belongs to the private domain, it must meet four conditions: independent ownership, free control, free and stable, and multiple uses and repeated access.

But one thing is that private domain traffic should not be based on the logic of traffic, but on the logic of user operation, and should be the users who truly exchange value with you.

I think the person who is doing relatively well in the industry right now is Xiao Wanzi from Perfect Diary. Through the creation of IP, combined with mini-programs and live broadcasts, fission and traffic diversion are carried out. The whole set of private domain strategies is very beautiful.

2. Private domain operation is like chasing a boyfriend

In fact, private domain operation is the difference between traffic operation and user operation.

What is the difference between traffic operation and user operation?

The original traffic operation was that I threw as much traffic as I could into your life and used it to brainwash you.

But user operation is a kind of service logic, that is, you are one of my users, I know what you like, and then I create it with you, you love me, I love you, and then we become good friends together. This is the logic of user operation.

User operations are immersed in every aspect of our lives.

For example, when I was pursuing my husband, I used the private domain operation method.

How is it done? It means that you find a boy first, think he is handsome, add him on WeChat, and really want him to talk to you, but you cannot speak first because that would make you look low.

But how can I catch him?

So I divided his friends into groups, and he was the only one in this group. I first researched his interests and hobbies and found out that he liked drama and basketball. OK. Then I will post a circle of friends, visible to the group and only to him——

For example, I could post something like: "10 years ago when I joined the drama club..."

Two days later, I posted another one: "The new NBA season has started again!"

Then, he came to chat with me (🙂

Life is like this... full of routines... (half joking)

But this logic is actually very similar to private domain operations: understand your users’ preferences and operate your personal settings the way they want…

So which industries are suitable for private domain?

There are some articles online that I don’t quite agree with. They say that high-frequency, high-profit products are only suitable for private domains.

I don’t think so. You see, the education industry is not a high-frequency industry, but it is the originator of private domain. I think the industries suitable for private domains have three characteristics: high trust demand, high LTV (lifetime value), and strong sense of topic.

The high LTV is because one exposure is not enough. You need a sales operator to operate them. Once converted, they can generate great value or high value in the long run.

Of course, the current senior salesperson will not say a word to you and will wait for you to come to me.

High trust requirements. If you have an educational product with a high average order value, you won’t be able to convert customers just by watching advertisements. You need others to trust you before they are willing to buy. Therefore, products with high trust requirements are also very suitable for private domains.

Finally, a strong sense of topic makes it more suitable for the private domain. For example, when it comes to beauty products, women can naturally start a conversation about them. For example, every time we talk about medical beauty products in the community, everyone stays up until midnight.

So, next, how do you manage your private domain as a whole?

There are three modes in the private domain. I have briefly mentioned them before. Let me give you an example:

The first type is a shopping assistant, which is very suitable for low-unit-price and one-to-many transactions. For example, Xiao Wanzi of Perfect Diary has a character set in western Zhejiang. He promotes and recommends new products, and with such low unit price you can make impulse purchases.

The second type is what I am doing now, which is many-to-many, that is, N-party resource integration. This is called the topic expert type. Topic-based and knowledge-based ones are very suitable for this type of content.

The third type is a private partner, which is suitable for high customer spending. For example, I know a community called Luxury Car Poison, which helps others sell luxury cars in private.

3. The underlying logic of private domain is refined operation

To determine the type of private domain operation, we need to consider private domain operation from three dimensions:

First is the user experience path . The AARRR path can be used in it. Today we are diverting traffic to the private domain, then planting grass, and after achieving the first conversion, we will recommend it to encourage repurchase, and then repurchase again.

Therefore, you must think clearly about whether your community is for attracting new customers or repeat purchases? These play styles are not the same.

For example, to attract new customers, if the average order value is relatively high, even higher than 1,000+, and they cannot be converted all at once, then you can first bring them into the old market, make a product for 99 yuan, let them try it, and finally make a product for 1,999 yuan.

The second dimension to think about is the user life cycle. We will observe each user and, at every stage, we will use operational strategies and methods to maintain their happy feeling of being "in love" with us and prevent them from leaving as much as possible.

Even if they are leaving, we should not blame them and try to keep in touch with them.

The third dimension is user stratification and grouping. When running a community, which communities are we operating?

We will divide the community into several layers. At the bottom are the 90% of silent people. What we need to pay attention to is that most consumer brands do not need to create a group with so many people. The remaining 10% need to be focused on.

Because among these 10% of people, perhaps 90% are brand communicators and loyal users. So you can give them the new products first, and then build a group to maintain them.

It used to be said that it is better to have 100,000 people who love you super much than to have 10 million people like you. In other words, there is that 1% of contributors who may be influencers in the industry, and we can form a group for them to do first-of-its-kind collaboration.

4. Highly active communities need to focus on ROI

Next, let’s talk about how to build a highly active community.

First, let’s ask a soul-searching question: “How many WeChat groups do you have? How many do you check regularly?”

Let me talk about mine first. I have a total of 1,144 WeChat groups, and I regularly follow less than 10 of them.

Their main characteristics are that they are very close, or there is a vested interest, or you have valuable information to obtain.

So I began to think, what is the significance of so many groups besides these 10 groups?

Everyone wants to join a big group, but everyone only wants to be active in a small group. ——From "The Small Group Effect"

This is a very important insight.

Every time I say in my circle of friends that I have created a group, everyone says yes, and then they join in and no one says anything. This is a natural human psychological insight. It seems that if I feel isolated, I will be very scared. Therefore, many large groups have become dead groups or advertising groups.

So, how can we create a group that is highly active and has commercial value?

First of all, you need to find out what your positioning is. There are five main dimensions to measure:

1. The target audience of the community and its value to you
2. The need for the community and your business goals
3. The cycle and form of community
4. Profit model of the community
5. The ecology and future of the community

Let’s talk about the first point first, the target audience of the community and its value to you.

We launched a lot of free groups back then, but they all became dead groups. Why? Because a group without any threshold is of no value.

Most people join a group because they want to find people who share the same values ​​as themselves. So this is why I am very proud to set a threshold of 699 yuan for my group, because everyone comes here because of this strong demand.

So for the consumer goods industry, setting a threshold depends on how many users in your user data have reached a certain value? Or how did he/she interact with you? It is more meaningful if you find such data and group them in the ROI model.

Or you can find a group of people with the same values, but also consider whether this group of people will despise each other?

For you, what can supporting this group of people bring you? So that’s the first thing to think about.

The second question is the community’s existing needs and your business goals.

What tasks can your group help them complete and what needs can it solve? What other business goals can the community help you achieve?

For example, here, community members know that through discussions with each other, they can obtain the current strategies in the industry.

Similarly, for us, we can learn from their discussions what strategies they are most concerned about in the industry, and then return to the inspiration for writing our articles.

Third, let’s talk about the service cycle and form of the community.

At this time, you have to decide how long the cycle of this group will be?

For example, a running group called Joy will only last for 21 days, because they know it takes 21 days for people to develop a habit, and people will cherish it when they know they are going to lose it.

For example, a group of pregnant mothers was established for 10 months and then the community was moved. Our flash operation group only lasts for 3 days. We will be notified before the event, connect with resources, and disband after the group activities are completed.

Where does this inspiration come from?

This comes from an interview I did with a public account. They analyzed the topic of CP in a week and found that many college students are concerned about how to find a partner within a week of dating? I also feel that this is too utilitarian. So how can we find a partner without being so utilitarian?

They were a couple for just one week, during which everyone pretended to be a couple, and the group was closed after one week. We found that in this way, the potential energy of the community can reach saturation within a week.

This is what we need to think clearly about: how long can the life cycle of a community be?

In addition, some rules need to be set. I will mention how to set them below.

The fourth is the profit model of the community, which can be summarized into four forms:

• The membership system is similar to a knowledge-based paid community.
• For selling self-operated products or services, this kind of community acts more like a channel. It does not require members to be very active, as long as they buy.
• Advertising space communities, such as the Jiang Cha Tea community, help brand owners or agents blend advertising space and enhance exposure.
• Middleman-type communities, for example, use chambers of commerce to bring together Party A and Party B, and then extract commissions in the middle.

Think about what kind of model your community is?

If I am an advertising-based community, then what will my community look like after a year? Will it become full of advertisements and everyone is sending red envelopes?

If this is the case, there is definitely no way to survive for long.

It’s like you are playing a God. I have set up the chess game, so are the C and B sides balanced? Are both sides happy?

So don’t think that just creating a group is the end of the story. Operating a group requires ROI.

5. A stable and active high-quality group

So how do you implement social activity?

I think there is a sentence that sums it up very well, which is this picture that has been circulated wildly in the past two days:

A stable, active, and high-quality group is actually composed of a flirtatious group owner who knows how to deal with things + an opinion leader who likes to show off + more than 10 industry newbies who like to ask questions + a few handsome men and beautiful women with high looks + idle people who like to spit + angry young people who like to complain about everything + a crowd of spectators who will say thank you after grabbing red envelopes.

Therefore, I think that to create an organization with valuable output and incentives, first of all, the group leaders must have both love and power, that is, you can give them love while also giving them many benefits.

Giving love can be summed up in three emotional values: a sense of belonging, a sense of honor, and a sense of ritual.

Communities are very popular in Japan. They are not WeChat groups, they are general communities, and the essence of them is that people want to find a sense of belonging. Because winter is very cold, everyone wants to huddle together and make others feel that you belong to him.

Giving power mainly focuses on: having information, having resources, and making money.

For example, there is a community called "Skills for Making Money", and many of their columns have very awesome names. They will specially organize some awesome dinner parties and name them "The Temptation of Dinner Parties".

In addition, we will send the good UGC speeches in the Knowledge Planet to the members of the community, so that everyone will feel "how awesome I am in this community" and feel a great sense of honor.

We also do similar things. For example, at our year-end party for members, we invited KOLs such as Jun Ping Da Mo Wang, Hello Bamboo, Zhang Xiaoyu, and Jian Lili to be guests and share their experiences, which gave everyone a sense of pride - "Look, I'm a Dao Fa member, and I can meet so-and-so."

So, you have to think clearly about what emotional value and functional value you can give them? It’s first-hand information, first-hand resources, and money to be made. Making money doesn’t just mean helping you distribute, in fact getting red envelopes is also a very happy thing.

Secondly, I think having an IP character often achieves twice the result with half the effort.

We all know that Perfect Diary’s private domain operations are very good. The main label of their personality is: a young lady who loves beauty and skin care, and the secondary label is the life of a 22+ girl, beauty and skin care, fashion wear, raising dogs and cooking.

How to plan IP?

In fact, you can do it by posting on your Moments, for example, posting a question: Do you think this dress is better or that one?

Or a circle of people asking for help, for example: what color lipstick should I buy.

There are also some greasy posts or chicken soup posts on WeChat Moments.

You can also set a timetable for character development, three rounds a day, and don't be too micro-business.

Another insight I discovered while playing Honor of Kings is gamification operation.

As long as you open Honor of Kings, you will receive some gold coins every day. When you finally become the king, you will be very happy.

The same goes for communities. You can’t let them think that joining the community is the end. So we established a sword points mechanism to encourage members to help others more, so that they can get swords and then exchange them for gifts.

These gifts may be tickets to our next conference, or you may be able to summon a dragon when you collect 10,000 swords, or P&G executives may communicate with you directly.

In addition, we will also set some perverted rules. For example, if you don’t speak for a few weeks, I will put you in a small dark room.

Next, it is necessary to incubate community KOLs. Because it is very tiring to operate a community on your own, you need to build some support.

For example, some KOLs already have a lot of industry information, but there are not many platforms for them to speak, so you can incubate these people into KOCs in your community.

So, what can you offer him?

Give him money or a sense of honor, such as "Daofa Beijing District Partner", and let him become this node. In fact, this is very similar to blockchain, with another node radiating from one node.

So in summary, newcomers should have a sense of ceremony after coming in, for example, ask them to do a reporting job, what they do and what they want to do in the future, and then ask them to send a red envelope of 300 yuan.

In addition, we will do a brand internal testing event every two weeks, and you must participate. Then we continue to carry out popular activities until one day he leaves, and we don’t have to force him to stay.

6. The future society is socialized

Finally, let me boldly talk about my understanding of the community.

In fact , countries, companies, organizations, and associations are all forms of communities.

A highly active and united community needs a spiritual leader who people can tell is a mascot at first sight. There must be key nodes, people willing to follow, and both rewards and punishments.

Just like in our company, whoever does well will be given a bonus, and whoever does not do well will be laid off. The same goes for the community. A good ecosystem requires rewards and punishments.

Finally, we should work towards a common goal and help each other.

I think to be a good community you must have a great goal. For example, our community, I call it the Economic Research Institute, because many of us are here to study women and to support women. We have such a great goal.

Finally, I would like to ask everyone: Which community do you belong to?

If the future is all about community, then which community currently has no leaders?

Author: Daojie Doris

Official account: Daojie doris (ID: doriskerundong)