How can community operations improve community activity?

In this article, the author divides community operations into "points", "lines" and "surfaces" to provide operational ideas for operators at different advanced stages of community operations.

Recently, I talked with several friends from different industries and found that their companies are all recruiting community operations people.

This caught my attention, and I later searched major recruitment platforms and found that many companies were operating recruitment communities. However, some are recruiting community operations specialists, some are recruiting community operations managers, some are recruiting community operations directors, and some are recruiting for all kinds of community operations positions.

So, I thought: since there is a huge market demand for community operations positions of different positions, what kind of people can be qualified for the positions of community operations specialist, community operations manager and community operations director respectively?

After thinking about it for a few days, I came to a preliminary conclusion. Although different community operation positions require different work skills, thinking methods, and work concepts, I believe that their core difference lies in the different levels of thinking.

As an old saying goes: The differences between people are actually the differences in their thinking levels.

Here, I divide the thinking levels of community operation into three levels: point, line, and surface. I will talk about them one by one.

a little"

If your daily community operation responsibilities are to be responsible for one or several specific indicators, such as: activity, daily maintenance, collection of user experience feedback, purchase conversion, answering questions from users in the group, etc.

Then, there is no doubt that your thinking level on community operation is at the "point" level, and you may be doing the work of a community operation specialist.

For example, if you are working as a community operations specialist in a restaurant chain, the questions you think about on a daily basis might be:

1. How to increase community activity?
2. How to attract users to consume?

To solve these two problems, you may solve them separately or combine them into one.

If you solve the problems separately, in order to increase the activity of the community, you may do the following: send red envelopes to the group regularly every week, organize online activities, plan topics within the group, etc. to increase activity. In order to attract users to consume, you may organize promotional activities, plan popular dishes, etc. to attract users to consume.

If you are trying to solve the two problems together, your approach might be: send red envelopes to the group at irregular intervals every week, and the person who gets the smallest red envelope will receive a more expensive dish, while the others will receive a moderately priced dish. After the users who receive the free dishes arrive at the store to consume, the trained waiters will guide them to take photos and send them to the group. This not only creates multiple active activities, but also achieves the goal of attracting users to consume in various ways.

For example: you are a community operations specialist for an Internet company that provides automotive aftermarket services (serving auto repair shops and auto parts suppliers).

Then, the problem you need to solve may be:

1. When auto repair shops and auto parts dealers have questions, you need to answer their questions online;
2. Make conversions, convert auto repair shops and auto parts dealers to use your services.

At this time, you may be thinking:

• The key to your answer to their questions is: you need to thoroughly understand your services in advance;
• The key to conversion is to build their trust in your business, and then you will further carry out your work based on the two needs of "the need to answer questions and solve trust issues".

The above is my brief description of what the “point” thinking of community operation might do and a possible thinking process. You may be able to do a particularly good job in what you need to do at the “point” level of thinking. But no matter how well you do at the "point" level, doing community operations work at the "point" level of thinking for a long time is not something you should stick to for a long time.

You should train yourself as much as possible, think at the "line" level, and do community operations.

2. “Line”

If your community operations responsibilities are to think independently, build one or more conversion channels, lead the team to implement them, and be responsible for the final results.

Then, undoubtedly, your thinking level on community operations is at the "line" level, and you may be working as a community operations manager.

For example, if you are working as a community operations manager for a restaurant chain, the questions you might think about on a daily basis might be:

1. Where do the users in the community come from?
2. How many levels and how many groups should a community be divided into?
3. How to operate for each different group of people, what is the main strategy, and what is the conversion logic?
4. How to achieve final commercial realization;
5. How to break down indicators into tasks and have the team complete specific work;
6. …

These questions are connected into a transformation path, which shows that a flowchart that can guide the operation is planned for the ultimate goal:

Users enter the initial group -> User stratification and grouping -> Operate each group at each layer -> Achieve the ultimate desired business value -> Break down the indicators to be completed at each node into tasks and assign them to the team

Then, your next job is to solve the problem around the five key nodes in this flowchart.

The first node: user joins the group

At this point, you may be considering how to get more users into the group?

You may think of community fission, offline traffic online, omni-channel traffic conversion to community and so on.

The second node: user stratification and grouping operations

You should make a comprehensive judgment based on your current human resources, how user stratification can be more cost-effective, etc. After that, you may decide to operate according to three user groups: ordinary users, users who apply for savings cards, and users who participate in crowdfunding.

The third node: How to operate each group well?

You may have thought of using the method of “like-minded, structure, operation, output, and replication” to guide your operations (if you haven’t heard of it, you can search it on Baidu).

The fourth node: realizing commercial value

For your business, this commercial value may be to get users to consume more, or to get users to invest more money and time to bind their interests with your company.

The fifth node: break down the first four nodes of your thinking into tasks, delegate them to the team, and track and communicate them.

The above is my brief description of what the “line” thinking in community operation might do and a possible thinking process.

If you are doing such a thing and have such thoughts, then there is no doubt that you are great, and the depth of your thinking on community operations has reached the "line" level. Not only do you have the core skills to make a living, you also have process thinking, goal decomposition thinking, team leadership thinking, etc. in the work process.

You can transfer these to many other industries and jobs.

But I believe you will not be satisfied with this and will not give up on breaking through. As Buddha said: Man is born greedy. We all hope to make continuous breakthroughs and meet a better self.

At this time, if you want to break through the "line" level, then the next level of practice you need to enter is the "surface" thinking level.

3. Noodles

At this level, what you need is systems thinking.

What is systems thinking?

The book "The Beauty of Systems" says: A system is "a group of interconnected elements."

There are two key words in this sentence:

1. Elements
2. Connection relationship

Is it very abstract? You feel like you understand it but don’t quite understand it. It doesn’t matter. I will give you two examples and you will understand.

for example:

You are reading my article on a community platform, so you, the community platform, and I are the elements, and "between you and me, me and the community platform, you and the community platform" are the connecting relationships.

In the system consisting of you, me, and the community platform, you, me, and the community platform cannot actually determine our own behavior. However, putting you, me, the community platform, and the connection between us together constitutes the entire system, which may determine our own behavior. It is the system that determines the behavior of our individual elements.

In the connection between you, me and the community platform, my motivation to continue writing articles is not because I want to write, but because the community platform empowers me in the process of my continuous writing; you who are reading my articles think that my articles are very good and are willing to continue to follow me. It is you in the system who influence whether I persist in writing articles, and it is you who strengthen my motivation to continue writing articles.

For example:

If you were asked to manage a nature reserve, what would you do to maintain the ecological balance?

There are tigers, deer and grasslands in the reserve. You can't treat these things as one thing, a tiger and a deer can't be united as one.

If there are too many tigers, the number of deer will decrease significantly, which is something you don't want to see. But if there are too few tigers, the deer may reproduce in large numbers without their natural enemies, and the grassland will not be able to bear it. What can you do to ensure harmonious and sustainable development of protected areas?

At this time you have to think of the protected area as a "system" rather than a thing. It's no use understanding any one of these things clearly - you have to understand the relationship between them before you can solve the system problem.

To understand what the system is in more detail, I recommend two books.

Recommended books:

1. The Beauty of Systems by Denela Meadows
2. How to Think Systematically by Qiu Zhaoliang

If you want to learn systems thinking, these two classic books are must-reads, although they are not easy to understand.

But as Mr. Wu Bofan said: Reading is like fighting a war, and classics are the stronghold that cannot be avoided.

After briefly explaining what the system is, let’s talk about how a community operations director with a systems mindset would think about community operations.

4. How to use system thinking to think about community operations

If your current level of thinking and work content are at the "surface" level, then it is very likely that you are working as a community operations director or operations manager.

So, what would you do and think at this level? Let me start with a little bit of systems thinking.

for example:

You are working as the community operations director in an enterprise service company (providing SAAS system + agency operation services to fresh food stores). Your core job is to help merchants build groups and manage their users.

So, when you think about the entire community operation structure, you may think about:

1. You have to take into account that the entire system consists of three elements: users, merchants, and companies. Should users and merchants be divided into groups and operated in different levels?
2. You have to consider what the relationship between the company and merchant users, the relationship between merchants and users, and the relationship between the company and users should be like?
3. You have to consider how the company should make a profit in the process of providing services to merchants?
4. …

Then, after sorting out the entire system, you gave the answer: the essence of this matter is to promote the connection between merchants and users, and to provide services for merchants to retain users. Only in this way will merchants be willing to cooperate with you to direct traffic to the group.

So the question is, how should the company make a profit?

Charge service fee?

That's impossible. You can't charge for such non-standard services. The agency services that can charge service fees are all being targeted by "large corporate service companies". You can only find another way.

Then let's pay based on results, and divide the commission based on the final online sales. Based on my practical experience, most small and medium-sized businesses are willing to adopt this approach.

But you also have to consider that some consumers are unwilling to place orders online after joining the group, and will only place orders after arriving at the store. At this time, will there be problems with our profits?

So, after some thought, you came up with a solution: differentiate yourself from offline stores in product selection and pricing, which will encourage consumers to place orders online.

Through systematic thinking, you have thought through the operation of your community and know how to solve the connection problem among the three elements of users, merchants and companies, and how to meet the needs of the three parties.

This is the result you get after systematic thinking. If you think about a larger system, you may be thinking about the entire business line.

for example:

If you are working as a community operations director (or operations manager) at a 020 fresh food e-commerce company, then you might be thinking about:

1. What are the important factors in all the traffic across the company’s business lines?
2. What is the relationship between these elements?
3. What is the causal relationship between these factors and the community?
4. …

From these questions, you may sort out the following factors: omni-channel traffic, advertising, private domain traffic, refined community operations, circle of friends and personal friends marketing interaction, transaction repurchase and other factors.

From these elements you tease out the following chain of cause and effect:

1. The aggregation of omni-channel traffic and the placement of advertisements have led to an increase in private domain traffic;
2. The increase in private domain traffic has promoted the refined operation of the community;
3. The refined operation of the community brings more possibilities for transaction repurchase;
4. …

From these chains of causality, you tease out the following reinforcing loops:

1. The investment in advertising will lead to an increase in the number of users in the traffic pool; the increase in the number of users in the traffic pool will bring a large number of customer identity tags and customer databases; and a large amount of customer data will in turn improve the accuracy of advertising.
2. The increase in traffic in the traffic pool will bring the possibility of transaction repurchase; the process of transaction repurchase will bring the possibility of social fission, and social fission will in turn increase the traffic of the entire traffic pool.
3. …

After you have sorted out the elements in the operation system and the connection between the elements, you can now better build the entire community operation architecture. The entire community system can serve other elements outside the community, and can also actively find other elements to be responsible for the community system, and then allow community operation managers and specialists to better work on the community operation system.

This is the result of your systematic thinking.

Thinking more broadly, you might think about the products, operations, marketing, etc. of the entire business line.

For example: You are thinking about how to build the architecture of your company's SAAS product.

When thinking about this problem, you may consider these four elements: how to build the mid- and back-end architecture, how to make products for each business line, and how to connect non-core function plug-ins on the market. We also need to consider the connection between these four elements so that we can build the entire system more cost-effectively.

After sorting it out clearly, you will be more confident in advancing the product architecture design work.

This is the result of your systematic thinking.

You can also think bigger and consider the entire business operation.

Let me tell you about a project I encountered recently: In a certain village, there was a lot of vacant land and three tourism companies. The village planned to do a large-classroom training, which included several tourist projects. Some of these projects will be placed in the vacant land of three enterprises, and some will also be placed in the vacant land in the village.

Then, each company will bring its own users to its own venue to play, will also bring its own users to other companies' venues to experience, and will also bring its own users to vacant land in the village to play (PS: In order to make the explanation easy to understand, I have omitted several other roles here).

At this time, you are thinking: How should the cooperation mode of partners in the project be designed, and how should the profit distribution be done so that it is good for everyone?

Here, I will briefly talk about my thought process:

First, I list the partners: Partner 1, Partner 2, Partner 3, and our company.

Then, I listed each company's projects separately to form individual elements: Project 1, Project 2, Project 3, Project 4. And set charging standards for each project (charging standards for inter-enterprise projects).

All companies that use the projects must pay for the projects (including companies that use their own projects), and the total revenue from each project will be distributed among each project company and our company in proportion.

What does it mean?

It is the cost of everyone's investment in the project, which is the cost of infrastructure construction. Whichever enterprise uses the infrastructure needs to pay for the infrastructure, and then the money earned from the infrastructure will be distributed as profit with the enterprise that invested in the infrastructure.

In addition to profit sharing on the infrastructure, each cooperating enterprise can also make incremental money (for example: a cooperating enterprise's operation and promotion brings in a user, charges the user a fee of 100, and then pays 10 yuan for the infrastructure. The remaining 90 yuan in gross profit belongs to the cooperating enterprise, and it does not participate in commission sharing).

This is the result of my systematic thinking.

Finally, I hope that you are or will eventually be an operations practitioner with systematic thinking, facing all problems, overcoming all obstacles, and gaining a completely different life.

Related reading:

1. Demonized growth, fission and community!

2. Community operation: How to create a good community atmosphere?

3. Community operation: 6 thoughts on community operation!

4. Community operation: How to use the community to achieve a daily turnover of one million?

5. Community operation: Why are more and more communities dying?

6. Community operation: How to increase the conversion rate of fission communities by 10 times?

7. Community Operation丨The essence and gameplay of "private domain traffic" in 2019!

8. Community operation: replicable community marketing case!

9. Community operation: 9 minefields of community marketing!

10. Community operation: teach you how to easily build a high-conversion rate community!

11. Community operation: operation skills of community content!

12. Community operation and promotion: How to build a successful community?

Author: Feng Xianfei

Source: Xiao Fei Ge's Notes