How do operators construct event creativity and topic planning?

There was a joke in the circle of friends today: "On Monday morning, Xiao Ming fell into a ditch and went to the classroom with a body full of stinky mud. The teacher asked him if he was injured. Xiao Ming said that he was fine, but his summer homework fell into the ditch and was washed away by the water. The teacher laughed and said: Your routine is deeper than the ditch.

Hahahahahahaha... Of course, this is not funny, but it also reminds us that the school season is here and it's time to chase hot topics again. Well, this is even less funny.

1. What is the hot topic of the school season?

When I was planning to write this article, I specifically looked up some cases of chasing hot topics during the back-to-school season. I did find some cases, but I haven’t found any opinion articles that specifically analyze the hot topics during the back-to-school season. So, is the back-to-school season a hot topic?

Generally speaking, the hot topics we follow are mostly holiday hot topics, such as the Mid-Autumn Festival and Dragon Boat Festival, the Summer Solstice and White Dew, and some special anniversaries. For example, the author of Chibi Maruko-chan passed away, and perhaps next year there will be a one-year anniversary of Miki Miura's death.

We divide hot spots into holiday hot spots (holidays with statutory holidays), folk hot spots (24 solar terms), seasonal hot spots (spring, summer, autumn and winter) and social hot spots. Social hot spots refer to periodic or sudden events that attract high social attention. For example, the Didi incident is a sudden event, while the start of the school season is a periodic event.

Social cyclical hot spots are often ignored by brands , especially those that are not highly correlated with the hot spots. Taking the start of the school year as an example, the industries that come to mind with a high degree of correlation are first the education industry and campus products, followed by the e-commerce industry. For other industries, the connection does not seem to be strong.

But this is related to our definition of hot spots. Our behavior of chasing hot spots is actually to interact with users through common topics, speak on behalf of the brand, and discuss with users empathetically. The back-to-school season seems to have little relevance to many brands, but from the user's perspective, the back-to-school season is directly related to students, parents, and teachers, and is even more closely related to children. By extension, it is actually related to all families with children. The start of school may also lead to social scenarios such as more traffic jams during rush hours, more crowded subways, and fewer elementary school students playing games . Through these scenarios and crowds, we can also find the connection between products and the back-to-school season.

2. 3-stage breakdown of the personnel field to establish the relevance between the brand and the hot spots

When following hot topics, I often worry about creativity. I have creative ideas, but find that they are not relevant to the brand. For example, if you look at Durex too much, you will think about human emotions and desires, but you are a safe seller and you cannot indulge yourself too much. What should you do?

The first step in hot spot planning is to find the hot spot elements through the white-drawing decomposition method.

Plain decomposition method: describe the hot scene in one sentence, summarize the three dimensions of the personnel field, and extract the hot spot correlation elements. For example: At the beginning of the university term, the younger students, carrying their school bags and pulling their suitcases, greeted the meaningful targets of the seniors with youthful and sunny faces. A hunting operation is about to begin...

This sentence describes the scene of college students enrolling. According to the target user group and positioning of each brand, you can write a targeted sentence, and then extract the three dimensions of people, things and places from this sentence.

In order to prevent this article from being too hormonal, I have summarized the characters, events, and scenes related to the start of the school year from a general perspective. The characters include elementary school students, junior high school students, high school students, college students, parents, teachers, deans, school bus drivers, etc., who are strongly related to the start of school. Of course, depending on the audience positioning, it can also include weakly related characters such as recent graduates, unmarried young people, and parents of preschool children.

Events include strongly correlated events such as not finishing summer homework, crying when starting kindergarten, looking ugly in school uniforms, novelty of group life, inconvenience of school pick-up and drop-off, etc.; they can also include weakly correlated events such as fewer people playing games, more students during the morning rush hour, etc.

The scenarios include strongly related scenarios such as welcoming new students at the beginning of the school year, handing in homework, grading homework, taking a train, military training, purchasing stationery, etc., and can also include weakly related scenarios, such as planning activities for the beginning of the school year...

The core of the three-dimensional hot spot analysis method of people, things and places lies in the positioning of the crowd and finding the target group to associate scenes and events. The advantage is that it is relevant to your audience, so you will not deviate from the planning intention. After breaking down the relevant hot elements, the next step is to use the association method to make connections or the reversal method to create creativity. Simply put, it is to do a connection question.

3. Think in five dimensions and effectively connect people, things and objects

August is coming to an end. Primary and secondary schools in some areas have already started, and university orientation has also begun. The start time of school is different in different regions, and the timeliness of the start of school is relatively lenient, so the popularity of the school season generally lasts for a week. There are more than half of the hot topics, but there are not many activities that attract the attention of the whole nation. Among the 100,000+ articles related to the school season, we found these titles :

China Construction Bank: Taking stock of the "three major items" for the start of school over the past 50 years, one thing has never changed!

The Central Committee of the Communist Youth League: School has started for the post-2000 college students! Girls 100% beautify themselves when taking photos? Netizens’ comments are bright...

Class Teacher Research Association: People's Daily released the most comprehensive and thoughtful guide for the start of school in primary and secondary schools: Children, please be prepared for school!

EMS China Post Express Logistics: The blockbuster "Back to School" is about to be released! Have you set your goals for the new semester?

China Daily Bilingual News: The first batch of post-00s freshmen have started school! Girls love beauty, boys love sunscreen!

Mai Mai Jun: The most comprehensive dormitory artifact guide in the universe is here!

Visual Journal: The summer homework that made parents angry to tears, I was really impressed after reading it! ! !

Internet comments: Confused? What apps do students need to install on their phones?

After breaking down the hot elements through the three dimensions of people, things and events, we also need to think about how to connect the topics based on the crowd. Whether it is content selection, event planning , or brand promotion, there are many dimensions of thinking based on human nature. In my daily work, I am more accustomed to the five-dimensional thinking method of topic selection that I have summarized.

The five-dimensional thinking method for selecting topics includes five quadrant dimensions: useful, relevant, interesting, timely, and novel. Taking the hot topics of the school season as an example, the five dimensions are explained one by one:

Useful: Bring practical guidance to users’ real lives

Among the hot topics of the back-to-school season, there are many application scenarios in the "useful" quadrant for students or parents, such as a guide to items to prepare for college admission, a list of stationery to prepare for the start of school in primary and secondary schools, a guide to campus life, guidance on university life in various cities, etc., which provide users with the acquisition of highly relevant knowledge.

For example, the People's Daily published a comprehensive guide to primary and secondary schools, and another public account forwarded the article, which also received a high number of readers. The start of school is an important node for parents, as it affects their children’s life in the new semester. Practical guidance content can reduce parents’ anxiety.

Related: Make use of the relevance of regions, scenes, and events

I have shared the five-dimensional thinking method for topic selection several times, and many students are not very clear about the difference between "useful" and "relevant". Simply put, useful must be relevant, but relevant may not be useful.

Useful refers to content that is instructive for the user's actual scenario, while relevant refers to content that is relevant to the user. For example, the back-to-school season is strongly relevant to students, their parents, and teachers, but not very relevant to young people in society without children. The guidance at the beginning of the school season cannot be considered useful, but everyone has experienced campus life, and it is relevant to everyone.

Using the "Related" quadrant can expand the base of the user population and allow non-target users to participate. For example, content such as campus memory-killing, " Changes on the campus in 10 years of college", " Campus snack streets we visited in the city", "Those overly enthusiastic seniors when freshmen reported", etc. can all trigger a wave of memory-killing for the graduated population.

In 2017, the People's Daily launched an H5 activity called "My Student Photos". By uploading photos, users could generate their own student-style avatars, which also satisfied the needs of a group of show-off enthusiasts to "show off their youth".

Interesting: Funny and interesting content is more likely to be spread

The "interesting" quadrant is relatively easy to understand. It is achieved through user dissemination through light-hearted and humorous content. Interesting can be used as both a design element and a design theme. For example, useful information can be presented through funny animated pictures, which takes into account both the useful and interesting quadrants. Another example is that taking stock of the welcome banners of various universities can link the three quadrants of timeliness, fun, and curiosity together.

The hot topics of the school season can be divided into funny and complaining categories. The most popular topics of the school season are summer homework and seniors and juniors. Visual Magazine posted an article titled "Summer homework that makes parents angry to tears. I was really impressed after reading it! ! ! 》By complaining about summer homework, it resonated with many parents and satisfied the audience's desire to complain.

Timeliness: representative events that occurred at a specific time

The "timeliness" quadrant is an essential element of hot activities. News content is most likely to reflect the characteristics of timeliness, while social observation content further expands the timeliness content and summarizes the special phenomena in the timeliness hot spots. For example, the group of post-00s who start school are different from other groups going to college.

Curiosity: describing the characteristics of a crowd or scene to satisfy the user's curiosity

Curiosity is one of the basic human emotions. It can arouse people's curiosity by exploring events under specific groups of people or scenes, or scenes under specific groups of people and events.

For example, what are the dormitories for international students like? What do the admission letters from various universities look like? What is it like for people from Guangdong to study at university in Harbin? What is the major for only one student?

Through the description of the five quadrants, you may find that curious content can be interesting, timely content can be relevant, and useful content can be curious. If so, then you are correct, because the five-dimensional thinking method of topic selection itself is interrelated. After selecting a topic or planning point, use the 5-dimensional thinking method to evaluate your ideas.

IV. Two effective models of 5-dimensional thinking method for topic selection

We usually use one dimension as the main direction for topic selection. For example, we select topics from the perspective of "curiosity": "List of colleges and universities whose dormitories are like five-star hotels". We score this topic based on five dimensions: 5 points for curiosity, 2 points for timeliness, 3 points for interestingness, 2 points for relevance, and 2 points for usefulness.

Another example is choosing a topic from the perspective of "usefulness": "5 tips for getting food in the cafeteria after crossing the Yangtze River to go to college." This topic is somewhat instructive, but it is not a must-read. It gets 3 points for usefulness, as some people resonate with the idea of ​​crossing the Yangtze River to go to college, which gets 3 points for relevance. What about its timeliness? At this point, I give it 3 points. Curiosity can also be given 3 points. The fun is a little worse, but you can complain about the food in the cafeteria, so I also give it 3 points.

The above two topics form two usage models of the five-dimensional thinking method. One is the single-point highlight type, which achieves the extreme in one quadrant and supplements in other quadrants. This type of topic requires unique insights or resources and is easy to produce explosive products; the second is the comprehensive type, which can take into account all five dimensions and is above 3 points. The attention it attracts will be higher than the average, but it is difficult to detonate and can be used as a regular topic evaluation method.

Summary: The above is a summary of activity creativity and topic planning methods using the start of the school season as an example. Creative planning is a process of disassembling and reconstructing elements. Hot elements are disassembled through the three-stage method of personnel field. This is a brainstorming session that can be completed by team collaboration, and the five-dimensional thinking topic selection method is the process of assembling creative elements, splicing and associating information with the user as the core dimension to form an effective information service closed loop.