How to operate a community? Start from these 3 perspectives!

How can we maintain group chats without being nervous about saying the wrong thing? How can we scientifically evaluate the effectiveness of community operations ? How to avoid being caught off guard by various emergencies? How to free yourself from the endless cycle of answering questions?

Master the scoring mindset and open the door to advanced community operations.

I will introduce you to the scoring thinking from the following three perspectives:

1. How to score user behavior and standardize community management?
2. How to evaluate operational effectiveness and optimize operational strategies?
3. How to score event expectations and prevent and control community risks?

In previous articles, I have described the problems that 95% of community operations often face:

Let’s recall a scenario where you manage a lively group of 500 people, all of whom are your “customers” rather than just users. There are people who come to you to ask questions all the time. Some people start to curse at each other, and some people post advertisements and red envelopes in the group, asking for bargaining and speeding up... Until late at night when everyone falls asleep, your nerves that have been tense all day finally relax a little. You don't know when this endless day will end. You silently repeat three times that everything will be fine, and pray to sleep a little longer tomorrow morning...

Compared with the result of a community dying after it is established, the painful and desperate maintenance has become the norm for community operations. Part of the reason for this problem is the lack of good time management planning and group management rules and regulations. On the other hand, due to the increase in the number of group members, too many uncertain factors make it impossible to form a standardized logic to manage the community.

What is scoring thinking?

In the anti-cheating strategy, the strategy subject will be scored, and whether to process a certain article will be decided based on the scoring results. The advantage of this is that once the standards are quickly established, the costs of both manual and machine review and decision-making will be greatly reduced, making things more process-oriented and standardized. Every operation has its own set of evaluation criteria in mind after a period of time. As experience grows, this set of standards will become more and more "balanced". But for most people, this kind of scoring criteria seems difficult to grasp and mysterious.

Scoring thinking is more friendly to beginners than four-quadrant thinking. The concepts of the four quadrants are "fuzzy", "macro", and "rely on subjective judgment", and the scoring strategy is more objective and subtle. Even when you report to your superiors, your boss will see such a beautiful, neat and detailed standard, which will not only avoid misunderstandings but also give you a better rating.

1. How to score user behavior and standardize community management?

After studying more than ten groups with a total of nearly 5,000 people, we adopted the following scoring mechanism and evaluation strategy for behavior grading.

The interpretation is as follows:

(1) This chart uses a 5-point scale, with 0 being the most peaceful and 5 being the most intense.

• 0-1 points: mostly seen in normal chats, exchanges of knowledge and experience, consultation and discussion within the group. This type of dialogue is not only conducive to the positive development of the atmosphere within the group, but is also the cornerstone of the long-term stability of the community and a powerful tool for maintaining relationships.
• 2-3 points: This is more common in behaviors that are risky or interfere with others, such as red envelopes for takeout, spontaneous commercial activities (buying and selling second-hand items), discussions on current affairs (high-voltage lines), etc. If such problems are not guided, they tend to go to extremes.
• 4-5 points: It is common to see verbal abuse, quarrels, and posting of illegal advertisements (WeChat business, pornographic films, fraud, etc.). Such behavior will not only seriously damage the user experience in the group, but will also seriously cause a crisis of trust and doubts about the administrator.

Once the bottom line is broken, it is irreversible.

(2) After observing the sample for about two weeks, we found that the total amount of user behavior basically follows the 1:2:7 principle. That is, for every 100 user behaviors, only 30 require operators to "pay attention to". 70% or more of user behaviors are harmless and promote the community atmosphere, and do not need to be processed.

(3) The biggest advantage of classifying and grading the content is that things that were originally in the mind and existed in experience can be expressed in a direct and standardized form.

(4) The most important point is that the standards are not only for you to see and use, but also for your boss to see. Many times, aligning standards with your boss, unifying your judgment logic, and giving your boss confidence can often become a powerful weapon for you to capture the city.

Through the above means, not only can the precious time of operation colleagues be saved, freeing them from endless "customer service" work and improving efficiency, but also the content and atmosphere can be more focused and high-quality.

2. How to evaluate operational effectiveness and optimize operational strategies?

Post-review of community activities is an essential part, but in actual review, due to the lack of judgment criteria, or simply comparing one or several activities, and the existence of many unmonitored variables in the community. On the one hand, the review results are not accurate, and on the other hand, the guiding effect on the development of subsequent activities is limited. Many people on the team like to play League of Legends, so they used the hexagonal chart commonly used in post-match analysis to make scoring judgments.

Hexagonal chart of a team in a season

Summary of the ratings of two operational activities

It was fine-tuned according to its own situation and became seven corners. Through the graph, you can know the advantages and disadvantages of each aspect at a glance, and then make targeted optimization.

The blue line in the figure represents the first community operation activity, which had a very high cost and unsatisfactory results. By establishing a scoring model, scoring each behavior and drawing a polygonal graph, we found that among the seven behaviors or results, "copy optimization and PUSH strength" were controllable, predictable, and adjustable indicators that the team at that time could quickly improve. It was a project that could be done to the extreme as much as possible in the initial stage.

Through this graph, you will find that the independent behaviors are inextricably linked, and the final result also proves that the growth of one party will also drive the growth of other parties, which can be said to kill two birds with one stone.

It should be noted that the behavior-driven scoring method used here is that the behavior score and behavior result score of an individual or team are evaluated. In other words, what is evaluated is the level of each behavior of this person or team in a game or activity, and what kind of benefits this behavior brings.

This is contrary to the result-oriented logical review that is prevalent today.

For example: If the conversion rate is not reached, we need to improve it next time. There are three ways to improve conversion rates. They seem innovative and even worthy of encouragement, but in fact, they don’t even lay a solid foundation. This kind of result attribution is similar to playing the blame game: it’s all Xiao Ming’s fault for being reckless and always giving away kills and getting caught. But in fact, the reason for the loss was that no one provided vision, which resulted in our side being completely dark and the other side being completely bright. Xiao Ming just happened to take the blame, and this is the essence of the problem.

Of course, the above picture is only drawn based on my actual business and may not be suitable for every business of every person. You need to make a choice based on your own situation.

Starting from the behavior rather than the result can, on the one hand, save a lot of detours in analysis; on the other hand, it can enable us to look at our own shortcomings more objectively, rather than saying dejectedly: operations is really a job that depends on luck.

3. How to score event expectations and prevent and control community risks?

Prediction and prevention can save at least 70% of worthless communication and avoid more than 80% of social conflicts. Many people don’t know where to start when it comes to making predictions because they are blinded by superficial conflicts and are too busy running around to think further about the essence of the conflict. Every user who enters the community naturally has the desire to obtain benefits, and the operator cleverly uses this desire to achieve the goal. Although the two are friends, there is a natural game between them. Even brothers have to settle accounts, and feelings will not last long.

Similar to how many diseases stem from the disruption of the body's environmental homeostasis, the occurrence of risks stems from the imbalance of the system between operations and users. When participating in community activities, users will unconsciously compare their own benefits and costs with the official efforts and returns. Once they think they are "at a disadvantage", they will react relatively violently (quarrel, question, quit the group, expose...). Therefore, finding a balance is the key to solving the problem.

Rating chart for an activity

Observing the table above, we divide each indicator into 1 to 10 points and correspond to the operation side and the user side.

For example: "Material benefits" scored 8 points on the operation side, which means that our return score for this activity is 8 points, which is a relatively high level. At the same time, the user side scored 6 points, which is a medium level. The "material monetary cost" accounts for only 4 points on the operation side and 7 points on the user side, so the user cost is relatively high.

After completing the table on the left and mapping it to the right, you can get the area ratio of the upper and lower color blocks. In the above figure, the area ratio on the user side is much larger than that on the operation side, indicating that the risk on the user side is relatively large and timely adjustments and risk responses are needed.

50% is an interesting value. When both the operation side and the user side are concentrated at around 50%, the areas of the two are basically the same, reaching a dynamic balance. The two sides maintain such an equal relationship. On the one hand, users will not think they are at a disadvantage, and at the same time, operations will not be under too much pressure, which can minimize the risk level.

In actual applications, operators need to do two things to ensure the smooth operation of the model:

1. Take your assessment seriously and don't fool yourself. Many people will intentionally or unintentionally beautify their work when evaluating, and deliberately conceal costs and increase profits. But truth will come to light sooner or later. The problem is there. Covering it up is only temporary; it will explode sooner or later. As a mature operation, problems should be discovered and resolved in a timely manner.
2. Find the "balance point" that suits your own community. Different communities have different compositions and different calculation criteria. It is very unrealistic to expect to be invincible with one move.

For example, I once saw an activity that was sent to both a product enthusiast group and a professional exchange group. The operations did not seem to care about the difference between the two. The two sides were surprisingly consistent in terms of activity content, answering questions, and even maintaining stability and comfort during the activities.

But the perspectives of professional exchange groups are higher and their tolerance is lower. They believe that they are being "cheated" and "destroyed". However, since the same stability maintenance measures had obvious balancing effects on the enthusiast group, the operations team believed that the professional group was "fleecing the fans" and "making trouble", which eventually led to one-third of the professional group's users leaving the group and joining other groups, causing huge and irreversible losses to the product.

Operations has always been the position closest to users, but it is also often criticized as "unprofessional" and "unquantifiable". We hope that operators can arm themselves with one modular tool after another, improve their professionalism through data, and make every decision better through more reasonable auxiliary judgments. The advanced level is just a starting point. There are more ways to play and more professional fields waiting for you to explore.

The above are common applications of scoring thinking in the community. Everyone is welcome to communicate and discuss.

source: Operation method (ID: yunyingfangfa)