Ten thousand words of useful information: the inner skills and techniques of community operations!

This article comprehensively introduces community operations . Friends who have related work needs are advised to save it and read it carefully.

A person who can see through the essence of things in half a second and a person who cannot see through the essence of things in his entire life are destined to have completely different fates.

This sentence is a line from the movie "The Godfather".

Although it is just a line, it has already made clear the biggest difference between people.

Similarly, if a community is founded by people who can see through the essence of the community at a glance, and if it is founded by people who cannot see through the essence, the fate of the community is determined early on.

1. Community

Communities have existed since ancient times. People began to gather together from a scattered state, and this was the initial prototype of the community.

The first primitive man started by digging a hole in the ground and putting his food (seeds) in it. When he does this, others may laugh at him. But later, these seeds grew into a rice plant, and many seeds grew into a large field of rice. Life in nature is just like human beings. A large field of rice is more resistant to natural disasters. Even if one rice plant is blown down by the wind, a large field of rice becomes a landscape .

At the beginning, this person accidentally invented seeds and started a farming life. He settled down to take care of his crops. Other primitive humans followed suit and settled down. A village was formed, which is also a community, a community formed by common geographical and blood relations .

In 2014, Luoji Siwei recruited a total of 24,925 members in two batches within four months, with a total income of more than 9.6 million yuan, which became a major event on the Internet. Luoji Siwei and its community economy also became the focus of people's attention. It was also from 2014 that communities based on WeChat began to flourish.

I think the discussion on the nature of community can be transformed into these two questions: Why create a group and join a group?

Community Creator: Why do you want to create a community?

Community joiners: Why should I join a community?

"Records of the Grand Historian": The world is bustling with people, all seeking profit. The world is in turmoil, all for the pursuit of profit.

The essence of a community is of course to satisfy people’s interests. Rather than simply bringing people together. Simply gathering people together is not called a community, it should be called a "crowd", which is not much different from a herd of cattle or a flock of sheep.

The essence of a community is interest, and operating in a community is about solving the problem of maximizing the interests of each member. Benefits are not necessarily equivalent to money or material things, they may be other intangible things such as connections, honor, etc.

Many articles say that the essence of a community is connection. I think they must have confused the community with the Internet.

The essence of the Internet is connection, and compared with the concept of community, the Internet is just a tool. Replacing the essence of a tool with the essence of a community is in itself a substitution of one thing for another.

Why should I join a community?

Di Xinyue, Douban's vice president of technology, said that when users join a community, they will most likely have the following demands, which we can regard as another form of expression of interests.

The demands from a rational level are: answering questions, sharing knowledge, managing reserves and maintaining relationships;

The appeal from the emotional point of view is: show off, find resonance

The appeal from a cultural perspective is: commonly recognized long-term goals and values .

1. Question and answer requirements. When users have questions or need help, they won't hesitate to add a group if they know they can answer it. For example, if someone wants to travel to Nanjing, they will choose to join the "Eat, Drink and Have Fun in Nanjing" group to make inquiries. Questions and answers include the actual benefits that users want to obtain and solutions to certain current practical problems.
2. show off. It is similar to showing off on Weibo or Moments, but we feel more accomplished when showing off in front of people like us or those who know the subject well. In social situations, this is a very influential behavior.
3. Seek resonance. Users express something in order to gain recognition from others, find resonance, and keep each other warm. One of the most common emotional needs, users are willing to express their demands through interaction or even quarrel.
4. Share knowledge and information . Altruistic behaviors such as sharing knowledge and helping others may be for the purpose of accumulating popularity, gaining a sense of presence in the group, accumulating popularity and influence, and gaining honor. In practical applications, altruistic behavior will help companies build communities at multiple levels.
5. Manage and reserve potential relationships and maintain relationships. Users usually join communities in order to enter a group or meet certain specific users. Many users would rather remain silent than quit the community, which is also related to their desire to find certain relationships at any time, reserve potential relationship chains, and maintain relationships among a certain group of people.
6. Shared long-term goals and values.

In this article, I will use the thinking model of Tao Te Ching, " Tao Fa Shu Qi (Shi) ", to analyze and describe the community.

The Tao of community: I understand it as the essence, the core thing;

The law of the community: summary of the laws of the community and its methodology;

The art of community: practical strategies;

Community tools: Production tools improve production efficiency. Introduction to social tools;

The power of the community: power. Potential energy. Granted by the creator of the community.

This article does not discuss this in detail.

2. Law in the Community

See a thousand swords before you know the weapon, play a thousand songs before you understand the sound.

Since the rise of communities in 2014, we have been constantly experiencing "mass death and mass birth". What kind of rules are behind this?

In the community era, our focus is completely different. The key is to have a deep understanding of people's behavioral habits and the rules of community operation, and combine them with our own products and operations.

Method 1: You must be aware that the first thing to do when building a community is to build a brand

Brand awareness is crucial. The difference between experts and ordinary people lies in this awareness. There used to be a well-known question in the venture capital circle: If a company has one dollar left, what should it do with it?

In response to this, angel investor Xu Xiaoping said: Of course it is "P" (PR), that is to say. This area should be used for public relations and branding.

To many community creators, you may say that the community is just starting out and many basic skills have not been done well, so how can you build a brand?

Precisely because we have nothing, we should devote more energy to managing our own brand, because this can become a powerful weapon for us to face various difficulties in the early stage of our business. For us, brand is no longer as simple as marketing. It is the fundamental factor that determines the success or failure of business logic.

Well-known communities such as Xiaomi's "Fever Group", Uncle Qiuye's "Knowledge IP Base Camp", Piaohan Yikemao's "Piaohan Jianghu", Zhang Tianyi's "Funiutang", etc., have all implanted the awareness of "brand" into the community from the very beginning. If you are a little bit observant, you will find that most of the social networks or WeChat groups we join will become advertising groups or dead groups in about 2 weeks. This result is inevitable. This is because the creator of the community has no brand awareness in his mind at all, he just wants to attract people and create a wave of traffic. Killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, the traffic can only be used once.

The importance of brand is reflected in the following aspects:

(1) Recruitment

Startup companies can’t afford high salaries, and they only have two or three guns. Recruiting people is indeed a headache for many entrepreneurial teams. People think you are a shell company and won’t come!

Qiuye has now established three companies. The CEOs of the three companies were all discovered from the "IP Base Camp" he founded. Most of the team's executives and employees also came from the community. The reason is simple. Normally, everyone is in the same group and recognizes each other's opinions or abilities, so it is natural for them to work together.

When many college students first joined Funiutang, they told their families that Funiutang sold rice noodles. When their parents heard this, they were shocked! Go sell rice noodles? The atmosphere immediately went crazy. However, when these colleagues showed their parents the Baidu introduction of Funiutang and the videos of the "Day Day Up" column, it became much easier to gain their family's understanding.

(2) Facilitating business expansion

Of course it will be easier to get things done if you are well-known. At least they have already heard it when they met, so there is no need for business people to break the ice again. One of the benefits of a brand is that it builds trust between people.

(3) Corporate culture

The benefits of the entrepreneurial team are not very good, but the work intensity is high. Brand awareness is also an important source of team honor. As mentioned earlier, many of Zhang Tianyi’s colleagues are proud of Funiutang because everyone knows that they work at Funiutang.

For another example, employees of BAT always carry their ID cards with them wherever they go. In fact, this is a form of social show-off. At least they are proud of being able to work in a company like BAT. A while ago, there was a trend to remove the "B" from BAT and replace it with ATJ. This is not a good thing for Baidu. Remove the B from BAT. That would be tantamount to asking for Baidu's death.

(4) Sales

In order to save rent, Funiutang opened stores in very remote locations in the early days, but the business was not greatly affected. The founder Zhang Tianyi has made statistics and found that among Funiutang's customer base, 47% of them came specifically to try the restaurant. For well-known physical businesses, fame will attract people to them.

Method 2: Social Evaporative Cooling Effect

Putting social evaporation cooling in the second place in the mindset is because it is an objective but unavoidable law of social network development. Once we understand the social evaporative cooling effect, we will understand why a community will go from active to declining? If we can use the "six major driving forces" and the "three close and one opposite" principles to control the social evaporative cooling effect, we can extend the life cycle of the community. (The six driving forces and three approaches and one opposite will be mentioned later).

The social evaporative cooling effect was first proposed by Facebook engineers in 2012. It roughly means this:

When new members continue to pour into an open community, the most valuable members of the community will find that the decline in the average level of community members makes it meaningless for them to stay here, so they will choose to leave. The departure of these members further reduced the value of the community, and thus a vicious cycle began: more and more high-value members chose to leave, until one day the community completely collapsed and became a mediocre organization, a dead group or an advertising group.

At its root, Eliezer Yudowsky believes that openness leads to social evaporative cooling.

Solution: Add a lid.

The revelation to the community is to set up thresholds and charge admission. Screening of group members...

The specific operation will be described in detail at the "technique" level.

In addition, based on his research on social networks, Eliezer Yudowsky proposed two models of social network organization, which he called the " square model " and the " courtyard model ".

This concept is very similar to the third mind method that we are about to talk about. The square model + courtyard model also exists in our community, but we put it more bluntly: everyone wants to join the big group, but everyone is active in the small group.

Method 3: Small Group Effect and “Three Nears and One Counter”

In February 2015, Xu Zhibin, vice president of Weibo, conducted a small survey, asking users whether they prefer to join large groups or small groups. The groups here refer to WeChat groups. The results show that nearly half of the people (42%) want to join a large group with more than 500 people, 20% want to join a group with more than 50 people, and only 26% like to join a small group with less than 20 people.

After analyzing user behavior habits, Tencent's products found that although everyone wants to join large groups, the number of large groups is very small, and the actual proportion of large QQ groups with more than 500 people is very small. Most users are active in 4-6 small groups for a long time. Most of them are small groups of less than 20 people, consisting of relatives, friends, colleagues, classmates, and close friends.

Everyone wants to join a big group, but everyone is active in a small group . This echoes the "square model" + "courtyard model" mentioned above. For groups whose core need is instant communication, the more people there are, the louder the noise, and the greater the harassment to users. By observing user behavior, we can find that after joining a large group, the most common action taken by most users is to turn off message prompts, which is due to being disturbed too much by meaningless information. When this kind of disturbance continues to increase, most users choose to leave the group (evaporate).

Let’s find some examples around us to help us understand. Take the company group as an example. Open your own WeChat and see if it is the case.

There is basically no news in the company's group. Most of the time, people are just trying to flatter the boss and praise the company.

Department groups, team groups, or customer groups basically have the most messages, and leaders don’t like to chat privately anymore. I always @ you in the small group. In this group, messages are basically flying everywhere on weekdays.

What we love most are our own eating groups, basketball groups, stock groups, girlfriends groups, nail art groups and other small groups that we join based on our own interests and hobbies.

Whether it is a WeChat group or a social circle, they all show the characteristics of "large groups are loose and silent, small groups are close and active".

Let me tell you a historical story. When it comes to community operations, the ancients have already been doing this. Guan Zhong was prime minister of Qi. Duke Huan of Qi was the first of the Five Hegemons of the Spring and Autumn Period. The small community of Qi became powerful thanks to its chief operating officer, Guan Zhong. In addition to ideological unity, diplomatic means, etc., Guan Zhong invented an efficient model of community.

"Guan Zi. Xiao Kuang" and "Huainan Zi. Qi Su Xun" have records: "The four classes of people, namely scholars, farmers, merchants and artisans, are the pillars of the country." "Scholars, farmers, merchants and artisans are different in different villages. Therefore, farmers talk about strength, scholars talk about behavior, artisans talk about skill, and merchants talk about numbers." (The people of the country are divided into four categories: scholars, farmers, merchants and artisans, and they are gathered together according to their regions, and they try not to interact with each other. In this way, farmers and farmers will exchange physical work; scholars and scholars will exchange ideas; craftsmen will gather together to exchange skills; merchants will exchange business matters. In this way, everyone will make rapid progress without interfering with each other. The sons of farmers will naturally be better at farming, and the sons of artisans will be naturally skillful and not tempted by business.)

In addition, Guan Zhong also re-established administrative regions and grassroots organizations. This is a segmentation within a large community and a specific way of operating the community. At present, we also have many communities, and the entrepreneur community has over ten thousand members. However, WeChat groups still bring people together. Why not segment by industry? If I set up a Chinese entrepreneur community with 10,000 members, each would pay a membership fee of 10,000 yuan. It can be divided into 100 groups, each with 100 people. For example, we are entrepreneurs in the food industry. Among the 100 people, there should be 1 food industry expert and a beautiful administrator. In addition, there must be several people with active thinking in each group to promote the atmosphere of communication.

In my opinion, the consequence of Guan Zhong treating the country as a community was that he cultivated Duke Huan of Qi into the first overlord of the Spring and Autumn Period.

What would happen if we applied this model to modern times? A company with a valuation of 100 million will be directly created.

Do you still remember the example of Funiutang that I mentioned in the first part of the Heart Sutra? Building a community is about establishing a brand. Everyone thinks that Funiutang sells rice noodles, but the founder Zhang Tianyi believes that in addition to selling rice noodles, Funiutang is also a gateway and a platform for young people. With a user base of over 200,000, Bamashe (the name after the brand upgrade of Funiutang) has developed into the largest youth community in Beijing, with a brand value estimated at 100 million yuan.

Let’s analyze how the large group + small group model generates huge brand value. When investing in Funiutang, investors conducted a due diligence customer data investigation. More than 80% of Funiutang’s customers were born after 1985, and most of them are from Hunan in Beijing. These young people may not have worked for long and have not established new workplace or social connections.

For these people, the biggest pain point is that they don’t know what to do on Saturdays and Sundays. Although they have social needs, they have no social outlet. Zhang Tianyi divided the Baman Society into several interest groups. For example, if someone is interested in playing basketball, he or she can go to the basketball group. Similarly, based on the large group of Baman Society, running interest groups, mountain climbing groups, etc. were formed.

Most of Funiutang’s employees were born in the 1990s. Young people should stay with young people . Tianyi made an arrangement to have all employees join Bamanshe and no longer organize corporate team-building activities because employees all have their own interest groups. Then something even more interesting happened. Employees are the representatives of the company’s brand culture, and community interactions are carried out offline between employees and users.

During the self-organized activities, some community members were gradually attracted by the culture of Funiutang and decided to work at Funiutang. According to statistics, 40% of the employees were directly converted from users. Another direct and gratifying benefit is that it brings about 40% of online traffic to the store. No matter where the store is located, community members will take the initiative to consume there. The large group + small group operation model directly solves the two biggest structural problems in the catering industry: high rent and difficulty in recruiting.

Everyone wants to join a big group, but everyone is active in a small group. This shows us the trend and direction of subsequent community operations, which must be a combination of big groups + small groups.

Gather everyone into large groups and distribute everyone into small groups . A large group is supported by countless small groups, and countless small groups make the large group glorious. Looking at more than 90% of the communities on the market now, operations are basically based on a large group. Some communities don’t even allow group members to add each other as friends. Just one large group can easily lead to a social evaporation cooling effect. Then you might ask, is there no evaporation effect in small groups?

There is also an evaporative cooling effect within the small group. However, we use a principle when allocating small groups. To control this cooling effect.

What is it?

"Three approaches and one opposition".

The formation, growth and income generation of a community must all follow this simple rule: "three close and one opposite". The "three nears" form the foundation of a small community, and the "one opposite" helps the community earn income . No matter what kind of social environment we are in, it cannot be overemphasized that these four words "three approaches and one opposition" should be emphasized.

In social networks, we summarize the basis for promoting user activity, lowering the threshold for mutual acquaintance, and adding friends (networking) as "three close and one opposite".

Among them, "three nears" refers to similar regions, similar ages, similar interests and hobbies, etc. "Yi Fan" originally referred to opposite genders, but the accurate definition of "Yi Fan" refers to two parties who help each other but also have conflicts and collaborations. In addition to the most familiar relationship between the sexes, typical examples include Party A and Party B, supply and demand sides in a business environment, etc.

Pay attention! Typical cases of "three nears and one opposite":

The gaming community "Laoyuegou" already has 40 million users. So how does the "Laoyuegou" team manage these users?

If I am a new user and register on the "Laoyuegou" app, I need to enter my game ID (account) and character first. The system will recommend the user to 4 game circles with the same hobbies and the same record (three close and one opposite principle). The topic interaction rate will be higher when similar people are together.

If the system detects that the user has not spoken in the circle within a week. New circles will be recommended again to keep the user interface active. The 40 million users are scattered across 800,000 groups, with most groups having around 50 members. This is a typical practice of using the "three close and one opposite" principle to build a small group within a large group.

Looking back at the interest group established at Funiutang mentioned above, it is also an application of a similar mentality.

The research data of "Laoyuegou" also shows that if a user has 3 friends in the community, he can remain active for 6-9 months. 80% of the community’s dynamics come from this group of users. If a user has 7 friends, he or she will become a die-hard fan of the community.

The same goes for our community operations. If I join a community and develop a few friends with similar interests in a small circle, then I will actively speak in the large group (because I am not afraid that no one will respond after I speak, and I am not actually lonely). To run a community, we need to encourage people with similar interests to get to know each other. Here, we introduce three criteria for excellent small groups:

1. Everyone knows each other

How many friends can members make in the community? This metric represents the tightness. The more friends you have in a community, the longer people will stay, stick to it, or be active in it. In reality, many communities will arrange a fairly long "ice-breaking" session when arranging offline activities, which is the practical application of this principle.

2. Everyone trusts each other

Do members trust each other? This represents trust. The lowest trust cost is the basis for achieving high community conversion.

3. Frequent interaction between members

The number of interactions and the frequency of interactions represent the currency of time. A core indicator to measure whether a community has what it takes is to see how much time the community consumes from its users. Generally, users stay longer. This indicates that the community has a greater impact on users. The most significant consumption occurs during the frequent interactions between members. Frequent interactions can lead to roughly unanimous recognition of community changes, resulting in widespread dissemination of information, and are the basis for rapid user growth.

Method 4: Six driving forces behind the community

In social networks, there are six major driving forces that cannot be ignored. They are: honor-driven, interest-driven, relationship-driven, event-driven, region-driven, and interest-driven.

Profit-driven and honor-driven are like the two most prominent attacking forces, relationship-driven and regional-driven are more like basic forces, and interest-driven and event-driven often have a powerful effect internally.

The model of six driving forces behind the community was proposed by Mr. Xu Zhibin, the author of "The Small Group Effect". These six driving forces can be summarized in three sentences for easy memory: event-driven is not as good as relationship-driven, interest-driven is not as good as region-driven, and profit-driven is not as good as honor-driven. But these three sentences do not mean that one driving force is really inferior to another, but they make it easier for us to remember and understand. In different scenarios, the use of different driving forces will vary greatly.

Event-driven is not as good as relationship-driven.

Event-driven means that people work together to accomplish something. The large number of silent groups on our mobile phones that are formed when attending meetings and initiating activities, discussion groups when going out for travel, and work groups formed with customers around a certain cooperation obviously belong to this category.

Relationship-driven means that people gather together for various relationships, such as groups of relatives and friends, peer communication groups, work groups formed by colleagues, etc. Communities that emphasize relationships go further. The purpose of forming a WeChat group is different, and the lifespan of the group will also be different.

According to rough statistics, WeChat now creates about 3 million groups every day (including conversation groups with 3 or more people), of which more than 40% of the groups die within 7 days, and only 30% of the groups can survive for more than a month. From the birth and decline of countless similar groups, Tencent PMs summarized the following:

The life cycle of a group formed by event-driven is very short, usually 3-7 days. The life cycle of a group formed based on relationship is longer, at least one month.

Interest-driven is not as good as region-driven .

The user interaction brought about by regional drive is much stronger than that brought about by interest drive. This conclusion was reached by Douban researcher Null pointer after studying 5,024 interest groups. On Douban, discussions on the same topic among people from the same region and school are stronger than interest groups on the same topic.

Regional drive means that similar living areas naturally bring people close and connect them for a long time. (Think about it, in the 1980s, our parents went out to live with their fellow villagers, the hometown associations at universities were always more lively than other interest associations, the WeChat groups of mothers in the community had the best micro-business, and groups like "Chaoshan people in Guangzhou" were always the most active...)

Interest-driven means that people naturally gather together because of similar interests. These two driving forces are powerful driving forces in homosocial interaction, coupled with similar age and opposite gender, constitute the basic principle of community building of "three similarities and one opposite".

Being driven by interests is not as good as being driven by honor.

Benefit-driven means that community operators fully provide benefits to users, or guide users to actively obtain the desired benefits, so as to ensure that users are active and sticky and achieve operational goals. There are two companies that are very aggressive in profit-driven activities: one is Didi Taxi, namely Didi Red Packet; the other is Alibaba, namely Alipay’s Spring Festival blessing-collecting campaign in recent years.

Although users want to gain benefits, benefits are not everything. If interests can be combined with the image that users want to create, the relationships they want to maintain, and the demands they want to express, greater power will be generated.

Honor drive, the big brother among driving forces. For example, all of Tencent's products have rankings, and they are constantly compared, including the relationship chain rankings of users in the game, such as which friends the user has surpassed; in addition to its own relationship chain, Honor of Kings also involves regional rankings, including various ranking comparisons. One good strategy is the point ranking and group ranking of users in the Honor of Kings in the WeChat group. This ranking function permeates into the details of every Tencent product, such as Kugou, WeChat Reading, WeChat Sports, and Airplane Shooting. Recently, WeChat's mini-programs can call various interfaces and functions of the game. Jump Jump already has more than 100 million daily active users, but it still uses the ranking comparison of users and friends, which is crucial to attracting users. In addition to having many tools, Tencent's deep understanding of how to activate users' desire for comparison, sense of honor, and various ways of showing off has a lot to do with it. When leaving Tencent to start their own business, many product managers analyze the market strategies they have adopted and promoted. When acquiring customers in the early stages, they habitually use various competitions, such as campus karaoke competitions, to achieve a cold start. These rankings, showing off, and competitions are basically driven by honor. .

Honor drive: users want to shape their own image. (To put it bluntly, it’s just about saving face.)

Why does “comparison” have such great magic?

The purpose of "comparison/competition" is to shape the image that one wants. People often compare with each other in various occasions and even in real life. People always share their winning results in various selections and never get tired of showing off their new image. This simple need of "wanting to shape their own image in front of others" has become one of the original driving forces for the explosion of one application, phenomenon, and activity after another in social networks. In small groups composed of acquaintances, the sense of honor brought by this comparison is more direct and stronger.

Having said that, we will understand why so many early-rising check-in activities and running activities are successfully held in the community. The core is "comparison". In order to gain virtual honor or status and shape one's own image, people will continue to invest time, resources, money, etc.

Honor drive is not that difficult to understand. In addition to “comparison/competition” at its core, the more important core is what we Chinese often call “face”.

If you understand the word "face", you will understand it very clearly when you apply it to some honor-driven cases.

For example, in live shows, why do many big Rs spend money to support a girl? It’s not really to sleep with her, but to outdo another man so that they can save face.

3. The Art of Community

If we divide the community into two parts, it is a combination of internal strength and techniques. What lies beneath the iceberg is inner strength, the invisible part. Above the ice are moves, used in actual combat.

Zhang Tianyi of Funiutang said that internal strength is more important than physical moves. I deeply agree with this point. Only when the basic capabilities are built well, will we be able to carry out actual combat with ease. Your confidence comes from your experience and knowledge.

The 72 Shaolin Kung Fu skills in "Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils".

The monks in Shaolin Temple can only practice one or two of these unique skills in their entire life. After Jiumozhi practiced the powerful internal skill of Xiao Wuxiang Gong, he could master the moves of 72 unique skills in an instant.

We can simply understand the moves as routines.

The longest road I have ever walked is your routine. We have spent about ten thousand words talking about internal strength, now let’s talk about the moves.

We mentioned in the chapter on inner strength and mental skills that WeChat creates approximately 3 million groups every day (including conversation groups with 3 or more people), of which more than 40% die within 7 days, and only 30% of the groups can survive for more than a month.

A group has its life cycle, and the length of the group's life is mainly determined by the stages it goes through.

The complete life cycle of a group includes several stages, including the early germination stage, growth stage, active stage, interactive stage, decline stage, and dormant stage. Most of the "flash in the pan" groups go through the entire cycle within 7 days and die directly. 30% of the groups can survive for a month. If we take into account the community’s operating strategies and tactics, based on observations of most communities, the community’s life cycle can last for more than 6 months.

Communities that operate commercially will generally complete the conversion of their commercial value within 6 months. The mining is almost complete and maintenance is continuing. The costs will outweigh the rewards.

(Many communities claim to be lifelong, but in fact, the effective operation cycle is only about 6 months. The essence of the community is profit. Can it guarantee lifelong operation by charging such a small entrance fee?)

Therefore, before we start a community, an important thing is to decide how long we want this community to last. The time dimension is the basis of community operation. The time dimension is missing. Our subsequent routines and moves could not be carried out.

Assuming that the community operation cycle is 6 months, we use 4 major strategies throughout the entire operation cycle.

Abbreviated as C 4 (community 4)

The internal skills mentioned above will be reflected in our operating routines. You can think about it.

Each of our C4 routines reflects those mental methods (brand, evaporation, 6 major drivers, 3 close and 1 reverse)

When we read books on practical community operations in the future, we can immediately understand what is the supporting logic behind the actual operations?

Routine 1: Preliminary preparation

We are starting to show our moves. The first step: accurate positioning .

Positioning is about capturing the ideas in consumers’ minds. To put it simply, it means labeling yourself; for example, we are all familiar with "Pork Rong", "Fish Selling Sheng", "Sweet Potato Chang"... As soon as we hear the name, we know what the other person does.

For example, Volvo Cars represents "safety", Xiaomi represents "Internet thinking", and Zhucheng represents "inspiration". These have occupied the minds of consumers and cannot be erased for a while.

The same is true for community marketing. For example, Luo Pangzi’s Luoji Siwei is synonymous with “knowledge-based community”.

So you need a label to let others know what you do and what problems you can solve , so that it will be easier for like-minded people to join. When designing a community, it is necessary to carry out differentiated positioning, state the highlights and characteristics of the group, and establish the group's unique value and lasting appeal.

The second step: create value.

Do you still remember the nature of the community and the six major demands for joining the community? This is used in our second strategy of “shaping value”. It is human nature to seek profit. If a community only has a positioning but no value, it will be difficult to attract people. Therefore, after we determine the positioning of the community, shaping the value of the group is crucial and natural.

So how do we shape the value of a community?

Let me first tell you a French folk tale that won the Caldecott Medal, "Stone Soup"

"Three soldiers walked wearily along an unfamiliar country road. They were on their way home from the battle. They were tired and hungry. In fact, they had not eaten anything for two days."

When three soldiers approached a village, the villagers began to get busy. They knew that soldiers were usually hungry, so every household hid anything edible, such as hiding barley in the attic, sinking milk barrels in the well, and hanging meat in the cellar. The soldiers went from house to house begging for food, hoping to stay in the attic, but the villagers said they had no food or place to stay, and the whole village tried hard to pretend to be starving. This is a battle of wits.

The hungry soldiers were forced to resort to a desperate measure. They announced to the villagers that they were going to make the most delicious stone soup in the world . The curious villagers prepared firewood and a cauldron for them, and the soldiers actually started to cook soup using three large round stones! Of course, in order to make the soup taste better, they also need some seasonings, such as salt and pepper... Of course, some carrots would be better... Cabbage, potatoes, and beef would also be good... If there were some barley and milk, even the king could drink it... A pot of magical stone soup was really cooked!

Let’s take a look at how the three soldiers managed to get something for nothing by creating value.

When you add stones to water to make soup, after it boils it is still essentially water. It's not soup at all. The value of the three soldiers' stone sculptures is: the most delicious stone soup in the world. Only then did they attract the food hidden by the villagers.

Teacher Zhang Bing summarized a set of value shaping models:

1. High-end connections. Without joining the community, it is basically difficult for you to reach these people. After joining the community, you can add them as friends, you can deeply connect with high-end contacts, and you can cooperate with them.
2. Questions and answers. After joining the community, we will answer your questions within 48 hours so that you will no longer be troubled by these problems.
3. Shared by great people. There are elites from various industries in the community, and we will invite them to make wonderful sharing.
4. Online training. Join our community and enjoy online training once a month.
5. Resource docking. The talented people in the community have various resources, and you can obtain other people’s high-quality resources. You can also contribute your own high-quality resources.
6. Offline gathering. After joining the community, you can participate in monthly offline gatherings and have in-depth exchanges with many great people. study.
7. Special price for members. You can purchase products from members in the community at low prices.
8. Priority investment. Join the community. You can get the opportunity to get investment from community members, and you can also invest in other projects as an investor with priority.
9. Useful information. You can obtain a lot of high-value practical information, the market value of which far exceeds your membership fee.

The third trick: set a threshold.

Do you remember the social evaporative cooling effect? The purpose of setting a threshold is to find people at the same frequency and level as you and reduce the evaporative cooling effect.

Don’t be afraid that setting a threshold will reduce the number of people coming in. 100 general powders are not as good as 1 precise powder. Building a community is not about attracting traffic, precision is the most important thing.

Rules for introducing 5 types of thresholds

1. Invitation system: Small circle introduction generally adopts the invitation system and is not open to the public. Invited by the group owner or group members. More privacy
2. Task-based system: This method of joining a community requires a certain cost, and generally one can only join after completing a certain task. The most common ones are "forward to your circle of friends and take a screenshot to the editor", "collect X likes" and other small characters.
3. Payment system: What do you think would happen if a park didn’t charge admission? First of all, the people who came in were a lot of different people: an old lady growing vegetables, an auntie dancing, a mistress walking her dog, a man and a woman in love… I don’t charge any fees, which means I won’t be responsible for you. For members of Logical Thinking, the admission ticket is 200. Gong Wenxiang, the first person in micro-business self-media - the ticket for the Lightning Meeting is 10,000.
4. Application system: no active invitation, no need to pay to purchase products or become a member, but you must go through an assessment like applying for a job. A typical example is Li Jiaoshou's "Li Jiaoshou Research Society", which recruits openly through a WeChat public account. Applicants need to submit their resumes and go through a WeChat video interview. Dozens of people are selected from nearly a thousand resumes.
5. Inspection system: The community represented by Uncle Akiba’s IP Camp. You need a recommendation from an old camper and a self-recommendation letter. If the initial review is passed, a short-term preparatory camp will be arranged to observe everyone's performance. If both parties are not satisfied during the preparatory camp, the fees will be refunded and the parties will be persuaded to withdraw.

The fourth step: common goals.

We cannot unify everyone's thoughts, but we can unify everyone's goals.

"For example, our country has a population of 1.3 billion and 56 ethnic groups. It is too difficult to unify the thoughts of so many people. So what should we do? Unify the goals!"

"What is our country's goal? It is to realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. This goal can be broken down into two hundred years, that is, by 2021, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, and by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, we will gradually and eventually realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. The specific manifestation is the prosperity of the country, the rejuvenation of the nation, and the happiness of the people."

"In a community, as a founder, one would definitely want the community to grow bigger and bigger, and for members to gain more and more. However, some members want to add others as friends, and some members just want to post advertisements. Taking Uncle Qiuye's IP Camp as an example, the common goal is to hone a skill, build a personal brand, and unify everyone's goals with a big goal."

The fifth step: community leader.

A community must have a leader. There must be a leader, if this person is missing. Then this community will definitely not be able to continue. A community is an organization, so it cannot be decentralized and it cannot be without a leader. The community leader is the maker and executor of the positioning, values, goals, thresholds, and rules of our community. He is the mobilizer of community resources and the specific leader for realizing the community’s values ​​and goals. Irreplaceable within the community. It is the cohesion and attraction in the community.

The most powerful community should be religion. Such as Jesus in Christianity and Sakyamuni in Buddhism.

Tip 6: Community rules.

There is only one purpose for establishing community rules: to help build group culture and regulate group operations. Under this purpose, we can see two types of group rules. One is strict restriction. One is loose management.

Strict restrictions: Users are explicitly required to comply with various "not allowed" requirements, up to 40 of which are very detailed. Any user who violates the rules will be kicked out of the forum.

Why are netizens on XX website (forum) often very rational in their comments? – Chen Bin’s answer – Zhihu

https://www.zhihu.com/question/19711033/answer/12855729

On the contrary, the group rules of Qiuye's IP Knowledge Base are much more humane.

The purpose of setting group rules is always to serve the community culture.

Routine 2: Recruiting people (starting with seed users)

To talk about community, we must first talk about users. Without users, everything is bullshit.

Why put this model? Because as long as you understand this model, you can correctly find your early top seed users. The secrets that successful communities won’t tell us are all in this chart.

Moore’s theory in “Crossing the Chasm” states that companies only need to capture a small number of enthusiasts to drive the entire mainstream market. When faced with something unprecedented, the vast majority of people have no opinions or views of their own; they are the so-called “mob.” (When Henry Ford was producing cars, he asked consumers what they wanted. They said they wanted a faster horse)

In routine two, especially in the early stages of a community, it is crucial to find the right seed users - the small group of people in front of the gap. We always see the glory of others in building communities, but we fail to see the hardships they went through at the beginning. The process of spending a lot of time and energy to slowly find users.

Funiutang was so successful in building a community that it achieved a valuation of 100 million yuan within a year. I think the 2,000 seed users they found at the beginning played a decisive role.

In April 2014, Funiutang opened. In the two months before opening, I only did one thing. About 50 people were found and each of them was given a task to find someone on Weibo. His identity tag was "Hunan + Beijing". Such people are the Hunanese people in Beijing, who are the early angel users. In the end, we recruited about 2,000 people. Later, we sent private messages to these people on Weibo one by one, and then added them on WeChat. Finally, we met with these angel users separately and invited them to try the rice noodles. Gradually became friends.

(Jianfeng, who is engaged in user growth fission, started his own business in 2017. He also mixed in the operation circle community, gradually accumulated seed users, and then exploded. The process is exactly the same)

When we have the first batch of seed users, the number should be around 1,000. (The number 1,000 is based on KK’s theory that if you have 1,000 die-hard fans, your life will be worry-free.)

We will use the four-dimensional communication theory + seed users to flood the circle of friends. Welcome the outbreak.

Assume that your friend has 5,000 friends, then a first-level communication event will be seen by 5,000 people. For example, if you post a photo of a pet, some people will like it, but no one will forward it. This is a typical message with first-level dissemination effect, and 5,000 people in your circle of friends will see it.

But the message with secondary dissemination effect is different, your friend will forward it once. Let's assume that you have 5,000 friends. When this message is posted on WeChat Moments, 10% of your friends, or 500 people, will forward it. Let's assume that each of the 500 people has 500 friends on average. Then there will be a secondary communication effect copy that will be seen by 250,000 people. Typical secondary communication copywriting includes "If you don’t forward this, you are not a Chinese" and "Be careful, there are 10 kinds of junk food you don’t know about". These copywriting are usually sent to us by our parents, but obviously we will not forward them again. (If you are building a community for the elderly, this method can obviously be used)

How many people will see an event with a third-level communication effect? If we still use the above formula to derive, we will probably have

250,000 people x 10% x 500 = 12.5 million people saw it. It has become a communication event involving tens of millions of people. This means that your city and several industry circles around you will know about it.

The fourth level of communication effect can be called ultimate communication. According to the above communication formula, it will eventually affect 625 million people.

But in fact, when we are operating. The average person only has about a hundred friends on WeChat. It is impossible to achieve the desired effect of the fourth-level communication effect, but the theory of the fourth-level communication effect is correct. When we actually use seed users for fission, the general propagation level can reach 6 layers or above. Then the entire communication activity will achieve good results.

Dingxiang Doctor - an APP application that develops users through social networks. Through data backtracking, it is found that the fission level is as large as 12 layers.

The Didi Taxi service that we are most familiar with has reached 17 levels of communication through red envelope fission!

Routine 3: Operation (sense of ritual, sense of belonging, sense of participation)

Tactic three, which is our third move, is the most difficult to explain. Operation is a very broad concept. You can read any book about operations for several days. I can only pick out the essence to write about, and later I will recommend a list of books on community operations.

My own understanding of community operations can be summed up in two sentences:

See a thousand swords before you know the weapon, play a thousand songs before you understand the sound.

No move is better than a move.

Grandpas all come from grandchildren. No one is born great, everything has a process. When we were grandchildren, we naturally knew nothing. If you tell me at this time that the key to operation is “no tricks are better than tricks”, I will definitely throw shit at you.

When we are still in the novice stage, the most urgent thing is to watch more, think more, and imitate more. We should learn more about how other people’s communities are operated from start to finish, what tactics are used, and whether there are similarities between the operating tactics of different types of communities. We must learn and imitate these basic routines and tactics, and internalize them into our own tactics. The minimum requirement is to master the basic moves, and then we can show them to the novices and receive some praise!

As we continue to advance in the process of imitation and learning, our own skills continue to improve. Then we will naturally analyze the essence behind these specific moves. For example, why is this move done in this way? Can the same effect be achieved by changing the action?

To sum up, behind all the specific tactics mentioned above, they are essentially manipulating people's emotions. No matter how the tactics are used during the operation, as long as it can arouse a sense of ritual, belonging, and participation within the community, it is a good operation.

This is the second sentence "No move is better than a move". As long as you have a sword in your heart, even falling leaves and flying flowers can be seen as enemies. When it comes to operations, we no longer need any fixed strategies. Instead, we need to decide based on the actual situation. I will create whatever strategies are needed. Otherwise, we will only be imitating others forever.

If you still remember the internal skills we learned in the previous article, you can create your own school in the community operation world based on the six driving forces, three close and one reverse, and large and small group operation strategies, and we can be the leader ourselves.

So what exactly is a sense of ritual? I always have an indescribable feeling about these three words. It is a kind of mysterious feeling that can only be understood but not expressed in words.

But if we divide the "sense of ritual" into two parts, it is: sense of ritual = ritual + feeling.

"Ritual" plus "feeling". The ritual is fixed, but everyone's feeling is different, so the "sense of ritual" means different things to each of us.

For example, when I eat watermelon, I have a “ritual” of cutting it beautifully and placing it crosswise with a fork. Give myself the "feeling" that this watermelon represents beautiful things. Summer is coming, and I should enjoy the sunny afternoon. This kind of experience is my sense of ritual, but some readers may think, "You are so pretentious. Just eat watermelon, why do you have to do such a thing?"

Because we are in different environments, the ritual feels different to each person.

People use the sense of ritual brought by this ceremony to give themselves a strong self-suggestion. The suggestion that we must treat something with sincerity, honesty, concentration and hopefulness can enable self-transformation and maintain a respectful attitude towards what will happen after the ceremony.

"Some rituals can help us realize that the game has begun, so we can make various preparations, switch to the corresponding roles, and prepare ourselves for battle. For example, if we regard marriage as a game, we should hold a grand wedding ceremony. This ceremony tells both parties that the game of marriage has begun and we should quickly switch from boyfriend and girlfriend to the role of taking on family responsibilities. Why do some people feel that getting married is the same as living together? It must be because of the lack of some rituals."

Nowadays, most communities have a ceremony to welcome new members : a "new member" joins the group today, and the generous group owner will put 200 yuan into a red envelope, write "Welcome XX to join the XX community" on the red envelope and @the new member's name.

This orientation ceremony has several benefits:

Benefit 1: Give the newcomer a hint and tell her that the game has begun

Benefit 2: When you send red envelopes in the group, other members will come to grab the red envelopes. After grabbing the red envelopes, they will also @ the newcomers and send their own welcome messages.

Benefit three: Newcomers can take this opportunity to introduce themselves and eliminate the sense of unfamiliarity. The group owner recommends the new members’ business cards and asks old members to actively link to new members. The closer the connections between members, the greater the value of the community.

Benefit 4: Many people come together to welcome new members, which makes them feel a sense of belonging and helps them better integrate into the community in their later interactions.

In the community age, everyone will join different communities. If every community’s welcome ceremony is similar, we will soon become bored with the community’s “sense of ritual”. "No tricks are better than tricks." Every successful community will have its own unique rituals in the end to give group members a sense of ritual and belonging.

Jin Yong's novels are the best textbooks for community operations. In The Deer and the Cauldron, the description of the "opening of the incense hall" ceremony when Wei Xiaobao worshipped Chen Jinnan as his master and served as the incense master of Qingmu Hall fully demonstrated the creation of a sense of ritual and belonging:

At this time, Li Lishi came in to report that the incense hall had been set up. Chen Jinnan led everyone to the back hall. Wei Xiaobao saw two spirit tablets on a wooden table. The middle one was inscribed with "The Emperor of Ming Dynasty", and the side one was inscribed with "The Princess of Yanping of Ming Dynasty, General Zheng". There was also a pig's head, a sheep's head, a chicken, a fish, and seven incense sticks on the table. Everyone knelt down and bowed to the spirit tablet. Cai Dezhong took a piece of white paper from the altar and read aloud:

"Everything in heaven and earth, restore the Ming Dynasty, and exterminate the barbarians. We should live and die together, imitate the story of Taoyuan, and make a pact as brothers, with the surname Hong and the name Jinlan, and become one family. Worship the sky as father, the earth as mother, the sun as brother, the moon as sister, and worship the five ancestors and the first ancestor Wan Yunlong as all the gods of the Hong family. We are born at the hour of Chou on the 25th day of the seventh month of the year of Jiayin. All the two capitals and thirteen provinces in the past should be united in the omen of exterminating the barbarians. We should follow Chen Jinnan's order and travel all over the world to seek heroes. Burn incense and swear an oath, follow the will of heaven, restore the Ming Dynasty, and avenge the humiliation. Swear an oath of blood, and the gods will witness it."

Cai Dezhong finished reading the script and explained, "Do you know the story of the Peach Garden Oath mentioned by Brother Wei?" Wei Xiaobao said, "Liu, Guan, and Zhang Fei swore brotherhood in Peach Garden. They did not want to be born on the same day, but to die on the same day." Cai Dezhong said, "That's right. Now that you have joined the Tiandihui, we are all brothers. We are brothers with the chief leader. You worship him as your master. We are your uncles, so you have to kowtow to us when you see us. But from now on, we are all brothers, and you don't have to kowtow to us anymore." Wei Xiaobao replied, "Yes." He thought to himself, "That's great."

Cai Dezhong said, "Our Tiandihui is also called Hongmen. Hong means the reign title of Emperor Taizu of the Ming Dynasty, Hongwu. The surname Hong and the given name Jinlan mean brothers of Hongmen. Our Hongmen respects Wan Yunlong as the ancestor, so Wan Yunlong is the King of the Country. Firstly, the King of the Country has a real surname and real name, and brothers dare not call him casually; secondly, if the eagle claws of the Tartars hear it, it will be inconvenient, so brothers call the King of the Country Wan Yunlong. "Wan" means millions of people, and "Yunlong" means clouds following dragons. Millions of people will protect the emperor of the Ming Dynasty and restore our splendid country. Brother Wei, this is the secret of our association, and you can't tell it to friends outside the association. Even if Master Mao Shiba is your good friend and good brother, you can't tell him." Wei Xiaobao nodded and said, "I know. Brother Mao really wants to join our Tiandihui. Can we let him join?" Cai Dezhong said, "Brother Wei can be his guide in the future. After the association sends someone to investigate in detail, it will naturally be possible."

Cai Dezhong added: "The hour of Chou on July 25th was the day and time when our association was founded. The five ancestors of our association were the five generals of this army who died in Jiangning. The first one was named Gan Hui. I remember that when my army attacked Jiangning, I led the garrison troops and, following the order of the chief military advisor, ambushed outside the west gate of Jiangning. The Tartar soldiers..." When he talked about the attack on Jiangning Prefecture that year, he gestured and couldn't help but talk about something further and further away.

Ma Chaoguang smiled and interrupted: "Master Cai Xiang, we can talk about the attack on Jiangning Prefecture later."

Cai Dezhong smiled, stretched out his hand and gently tapped his forehead, saying: "Yes, yes, once we talk about the past, it's endless. Now I will read the 'Three-Point Revolutionary Poem', I read a sentence, and you follow me." He then recited the poem: "Three points hide the revolutionary spirit, join our Hongmen and don't let it spread. Develop a sharp momentum to hate Japan, and vow to wipe out the Qing Dynasty." Wei Xiaobao followed suit.

Cai De said: "The word Hong in my Hongmen is actually the Chinese character 'Han' for the Han people. Our land was occupied by the Tartars and we had no land left. So the character 'Han' was removed with the character 'Tu', and the name became 'Hong'." He then explained to Wei Xiaobao the thirty-six oaths, ten prohibitions and ten punishments, and twenty-one rules, which were mostly about loyalty, filial piety to parents, harmony with fellow villagers, brothers as one family, helping each other in times of trouble, etc. If anyone leaked secrets, implicated his brothers, surrendered to the government, raped and plundered, bullied the weak, broke his promise, embezzled public funds, etc., the punishment would be cutting off his ears or beatings at the least, or dismemberment or severed his head or body.

Wei Xiaobao obeyed every word and swore not to disobey. He was sincere this time and was not playing tricks when he swore.

Ma Chaoxing took a large bowl of wine, pricked the middle finger of his left hand with a needle, and dripped blood into the wine. Chen Jinnan and others all pricked their blood, and finally Wei Xiaobao pricked his blood into wine. Everyone drank a sip of the blood wine, and the initiation ceremony was completed. Everyone held his hands and hugged him, being very affectionate. Wei Xiaobao felt warm all over, and he felt that from now on, he would no longer be helpless in this world.

In Jin Yong's description, we see how a community is constructed, including the community rules, the sense of ritual for joining the community, and the sense of belonging generated by the ritual.

Community rules: thirty-six oaths, ten prohibitions and ten punishments, twenty-one rules, and the punishment for violation.

An activity full of ritual sense, "opening the incense hall" itself is a serious activity. Later, when Wei Xiaobao infiltrated the Shenlong Sect and was appointed the leader of the White Dragon Sect, the Shenlong Sect also opened an incense hall, but the ceremony was much simpler.

Sense of belonging: "Wei Xiaobao obeyed everything and swore not to disobey. He was sincere this time and did not play tricks when he swore... He just felt that from now on, he would no longer be helpless in the world." The sense of belonging to the community is very important to its members. Many times, the result of the combined effect of various community rules and mechanisms is the shaping and formation of a sense of belonging.

Tencent once conducted an internal analysis of hundreds of millions of QQ groups and found that the average active rate of each group was only 10%. That is to say, in a group of 500 people, usually only about 50 people are active. The active ones are always active, and the inactive ones are always diving. If this continues for a long time, it will lead to the evaporation of the community.

After the welcoming ceremony for new members, the community has entered the formal operation phase, which can be divided into two parts: daily online operations and offline operations. In these two parts, the six major driving forces of the community often run through them. For example, check-in activities utilize honor-driven factors, lottery activities utilize interest-driven factors, offline gatherings utilize region-driven factors and event-driven factors, and so on.

Use specific operational activities to increase community participation. In this regard, we take Uncle Akiba's "IP Camp" as an example:

An important reason why many groups become dead groups is that most members are not activated during the operation process, causing them to gradually become lurkers. If the proportion of lurkers in a group exceeds 50%, it is not good. If you can show up in the group once a week, it is considered participation.

The Knowledge IP Camp builds a sense of participation among community members through a large number of low-threshold activities.

3 key elements to creating a sense of community engagement: timing, format, and interaction.

【opportunity】

In a community, everyone has different schedules and it is difficult for everyone to be online at the same time, so timing is very important.

From an online perspective, there are 4 golden time periods:

The time between getting up in the morning and going to work;

Lunch break at noon;

After-get off work traffic time period;

After dinner time.

【form】

After all, activities are not RMB, so it is difficult to make everyone like them. For example, asking everyone to send a voice message at 6:30 in the morning. On the surface, the threshold for this activity seems low, but in fact, many people are unwilling to send it. Because I don’t know what to say. But if we lower the threshold for the activity, and change sending a voice message to posting a photo of the sky you saw on the road today, the threshold for participation will be much lower.

However, the low threshold for an activity does not necessarily mean that everyone is willing to actively participate. It is also necessary to combine it with a form in which everyone has similar habits in life and is willing to interact.

Post your lunch: Post photos of your lunch. Everyone needs to eat. One of the most popular events

Chatting about gossip: Holy shit. Once they started talking, everyone got up.

A little complaint: Let everyone vent their negative energy every day and lower each other's pressure.

【interactive】

It is not easy to get everyone to interact. There are three problems. First, everyone likes to chat with friends, not strangers. Second, everyone hopes to get feedback, rather than being ignored. Third, everyone has common topics.

To solve these three problems, we have three corresponding methods:

First, actively guide. To create an atmosphere, someone must take the lead first. If you want someone to take the lead, you actually have to arrange a few people to take the lead. We cannot expect community activities to be spontaneous from the beginning. A community without support is not a qualified community.

If someone takes the initiative to share, even if the content is average, you should actively encourage them. This is a very important point in creating an atmosphere. The threshold for ordinary people to share is not high, so I will share too. The sense of participation comes.

Second, respond positively. If someone participates in an activity but finds that he or she does not receive any response after participating, his or her enthusiasm for participating in the activity next time will be greatly affected. Therefore, if the operation team finds that someone who usually doesn’t talk much has started talking, they must make every effort to reply to his content by name to make him aware. In this group, there are people who will watch what he does and listen carefully to what he says.

Third, motivation. No matter what kind of interaction it is, we should think of various ways to praise and motivate those who perform outstandingly. In this way, those who are motivated will turn from participants into organizers and drive the participation of more people. Forming a virtuous circle.

We have almost finished talking about routine three.

We are born with seven emotions and six desires, and all rationality will eventually return to sensibility.

All operational measures will create a certain feeling for users, forming a sense of ritual, belonging, and honor. All work in community operations is aimed at controlling user emotions and ultimately creating "emotional asymmetry". For community operators, they can obtain greater commercial value benefits.

Those who are favored have nothing to fear. Emotional asymmetry means gaining user preference.

Jianbings are everywhere on the street. Huang Taiji sells a pancake for more than 20 yuan, which is quite expensive, but many people buy it. Everyone knows this. Some people have analyzed that the reason why it is sold at such a high price is because Huang Taiji is a brand with a brand premium. But I think, in addition to the brand factor, another important point is that Huang Taiji used "Internet thinking" to create an emotional experience for users. This creates emotional asymmetry and gains user preference.

The Smartisan R1 is priced at 8848, which is so expensive. Because there are old Luo fans willing to pay for it. If an ordinary person has no preference for Lao Luo, then I won’t buy a hammer.

The same goes for communities.

Uncle Akiba’s “Knowledge IP Base Camp” community lasted for 2 and a half years, with each session lasting half a year. This is the fifth issue so far.

It is said that the proportion of old campers in each session exceeds 50%. In other words, every time a new camp opens, more than half of the old campers will stay and continue to switch to the new community. If it were not based on emotional conversion, which communities could achieve such a high conversion rate?

In the Internet age, a truly good community must have an "emotional" function. Only by returning to the essence of the community, "interests" + "emotions", can it continuously attract new people and increase the conversion of old users.

Routine 4: Ending (sense of ritual, precipitation and transformation)

We have one last routine left in our C4 set, and this last one is particularly simple. To sum it up is a sense of ritual, sedimentation and transformation.

The "sense of ritual" must be consistent from beginning to end and run through our entire operation.

The final "sense of ceremony" is equivalent to a graduation ceremony, reviewing and summarizing the achievements of our entire community, how many members have made progress and gained, and issuing graduation certificates. It also tells all members that the game is over. To continue, please join us for our next episode (Achieving Transformation).

The last task is to organize and archive community information, such as community member address books, community highlights, essences, achievements, etc. Organize and save them together and send them to group members.

4. Social Tools

Marx said that the biggest difference between humans and animals is "making and using tools."

Tools are the last part of our community model “Tao, Fa, Shu, and Qi” - “Qi”.

Most online communities now use WeChat groups as their hosting platform, but as a WeChat group owner, our greatest power is to invite and kick people out + @ everyone. Apart from this, there are no other advanced permissions.

If you don’t use tools, the specific community operation work will be very tiring.

Based on actual operational work, I divided the needs into four categories.

For group member management, we will need to record the time when members join and leave the group, set relevant welcome messages, etc.

Group message management requires collecting and retaining the essence of the group. Group files need to be managed

Group operation management, clocking in, signing in, giving lectures, collaborative work within the group, etc.

Group data management, analysis of active members and those who are lurking. Those who have been silent must have blocked the group. Are they the same people who have been talking the whole time? Someone sneaked someone in again? As the group owner, how could I not know this! . Is there anyone else who secretly posted ads without me noticing? I need all this data.

1. Almost all-around community operation tool: XiaoU Butler

Because it is used by many people, has stable performance and is reasonably priced, it is recommended first.

2. Community content accumulation: Knowledge Planet

To use Little U Butler to view group highlights, you also need to call within the group to activate Little U Butler.

When we use WeChat, the disadvantage is that messages cannot be accumulated. Once there is too much information, we cannot find the information we want, which is not conducive to the accumulation of knowledge.

When using Knowledge Planet, you need to download the APP, or you can follow the official account. The usage experience in the official account is average. If you use the APP, the experience can score more than 90 points. The advantage of Knowledge Planet is that it can accumulate knowledge. The published articles, cases, and questions and answers can be saved, which is a bit similar to Tieba. Adding the like and praise functions will also help motivate group members to produce more.

The group's important files can also be stored on the planet.

Easy to use: Download the APP → Create your own planet → Group members scan the QR code to follow

3. Check-in operation: Whale Check-in [Mini Program]

Improved functions:

This is a small program designed mainly for training camps/communities, which meets all basic needs within the training camps/communities.

1) Check-in function

Checking in is the most basic function of this mini program.

The second highlight is that the punch-in can be modified. There is only one chance every day, and people always want to show their best side, so this function gives people such an opportunity.

This feature is very suitable for training camps/communities and is very practical for students to check in and complete tasks.

2) Scoring function

I hadn't thought of this feature before using this mini program.

Going forward, the only evaluations are pass/fail. Later I found that this was not a good idea and the judgment of details was unreasonable.

The evaluation is exactly the same if there are 10 details wrong and 1 detail wrong, which is obviously unreasonable.

During use, it was also discovered that scoring can be done by multiple people at the same time. In the end, just like a competition, the system will combine the scores of all administrators and take the average.

This is obviously fairer to the person punching the clock in, and also places higher demands on the person scoring the clock.

After scoring, a corresponding message will pop up in WeChat. Just as you take an exam, you will be issued a score report and comments.

3) Reminder function

The reminder function is mostly designed for procrastinators.

4) Management functions

5) Daily Signature Function

The daily sign-in is generated by clicking after checking in. The content is a famous quote, and below is the QR code of the check-in mini program and the name of the activity.

4. In-group teaching tools: Qianliao, Lizhi Micro Class, Xiaoetong

The three tools have similar functions and can all enable voice lectures, voice + PPT lectures, in-class interaction, recording and broadcasting, and charge for course settings.

Some people may ask, why not just give lectures directly through voice, pictures, or text in the WeChat group. You also need to use a third-party teaching platform.

Because some communities have more than one WeChat group, if you want to broadcast to multiple groups, you will need to add additional robots to collect the essence of each group. The operation is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Directly setting up a live broadcast room for lectures can solve the problem of giving lectures to multiple groups at the same time. It can also consolidate the course content.

5. In-group operation tools: GiftTalk [Mini Program], Funrolling Star [Mini Program]

I have used these two more frequently recently. One is used to distribute benefits, which saves me the trouble of collecting members’ addresses, phone numbers and other information. One is used to investigate user needs, eliminating the need for manual statistics. It greatly facilitates the hard-working community operations officers.

The main selling point of Gift Talk [Mini Program]: send gifts on WeChat, the other party fills in the address, and it is delivered to your door free of charge, but remember that you have to pay for the gift.

Qujuanxing [mini program], used it once, there is a template for the questionnaire. Automatic statistics and notification after the survey is completed. The questionnaire has all the necessary functions.

Source: His Royal Highness Fengfeng