Community business operation model: IP + community + scenario + sharing economy

The community is the shortest path for every brand to communicate with users, with the lowest cost and highest efficiency. The establishment of strong relationships wins companies unlimited business opportunities and imagination space.

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.

--"godfather"

This is a line from "The Godfather". Although it is just a line, it reveals the biggest difference between people. Whether one can see the essence through the phenomenon determines the difference in their destinies. What is the essence of community? What value does the community have for businesses? How do communities enable enterprises to achieve Internet transformation and upgrading?

The key to community operation lies in top-level design

If you want to build a tall building, what should you do first? Is it to dig the foundation, move bricks, pull cement, or buy steel bars? Insiders know that the first step should be to draw a design drawing. If you want to build a community, what should be the first step? Is it to recruit people and organize activities, or to carry out top-level design of the community? Clarify what kind of talents can join? What are these people doing together? What is the purpose? Where there are people, there is the world, and where there is the world, there are its rules. What rules do we follow when we are together? Such as the "Three Major Disciplines and Eight Points for Attention".

At present, many problems in community operation , such as how to attract new members , how to promote activity, and how to monetize, are difficult to solve thoroughly at the operation level, and often one problem is solved only when another one pops up. Einstein once said, "Problems can only be solved at a higher level." This means that there is basically no solution to the problem at the same level, so problems arising at the community operation level must be resolved at a higher dimension.

What is a higher dimension than operations? Looking at the evolutionary trajectories of many communities on the market, from Xiaomi to Mi Home, from Entrepreneur to Dark Horse , from Luoji Siwei to Get Platform, it is clear that the next stop of the community is the platform. If you really want to build a vibrant and competitive community, you must stand at the height of the platform and systematically think about the value of the community's existence from the perspective of the platform.

If we examine the commercial value of communities from the perspective of platforms, the role of communities is to gather and retain people. Through community goals and community culture, the relationship between enterprises and potential users is catalyzed from no relationship to weak relationship, and from weak relationship to strong relationship, and then a community brand with distinctive personalized characteristics that is highly recognized by fans is created. As for how to catalyze, it is inseparable from content with attitude and warmth and high-frequency, high-quality activities. In other words, the value of the community is to convert potential users into fans, fans into partners, and fans into shareholders. When users become shareholders, they will naturally buy the products at all costs and introduce them to their friends around them to buy the products at all costs.

Therefore, the community is the shortest path for every brand to communicate with users, with the lowest cost and highest efficiency. The establishment of strong relationships wins companies unlimited business opportunities and imagination space. Business in any era only does one thing: build trust and shape the brand.

Wang Anshi, a famous thinker in the Northern Song Dynasty, once said, "I am not afraid of the clouds blocking my view because I am standing at the highest level." Simply put, the reason why a person's vision is not blocked by the clouds is because he is standing higher. If you look at the community from the community level, the community is always constrained by how to monetize. If you look at the community from the perspective of a platform, you will find that the value of the community is not to sell products, but to build a community brand. Relying on the brand's value proposition, vision, and mission to attract a group of like-minded people, and ultimately influence more similar people through this group of people. Once you have truly figured it out, and then look back at how to build and operate a community, you will be able to realize what Chairman Mao said: "It is better to take a long-term view of things; when you climb high and look far, the world is vast." You will no longer have to worry about tactical issues such as user scale, activity, and conversion rate .

Community reshapes the business landscape

No one can control change, but one can stay ahead of it.

—Peter Drucker

Management guru Drucker predicted that in the future, competition between companies will not be competition between products, but competition between business models . So how can the competition between business models be determined? For enterprises, the business model obviously belongs to the superstructure. The revolutionary mentor Marx told us that "the material basis determines the superstructure", so what is the foundation that supports the business model? I think it is the massive user resources, and the community can be said to be users among users - a super user group.

How high a building can be built depends on how solid its foundation is; how tall a tree can grow depends on how deep its roots are. It is obvious that how far an enterprise's business model can go depends on how solid its user base is. What is the relationship between the community and the business model? The community is the only way to consolidate the user base, consolidate and expand the user base. Ultimately, it is found that the strength of the community determines the success or failure of the business model.

Financial writer Wu Xiaobo said that for a business model, the formation of a valuable community is more important. Once a community with good values ​​is formed, the business model will naturally be realized. However, most companies currently still regard social networks as marketing channels and operate according to the logic of selling products in WeChat friend circles . The community follows the logic of friends. What is the logic of friends? If your friend were to buy this product, how would you sell it? Xiaomi's logic is that Lei Jun announced that Xiaomi's comprehensive net profit margin for hardware will never exceed 5%. If there is any excess, the excess will be returned to users in full.

Currently, only a very small number of companies have truly felt the power of the community and realized that the community is the carrier of the business model. In the future, the community will become a commercial infrastructure like a highway. Once the road is built, all kinds of cars can run on it. Once the community is built, various business models can be grafted on.

If users are compared to a gold mine, how much have you mined from it? 1%, 5% or 10%. How much energy and value of users are utilized? 5%, 10%, 20%, how can we maximize the energy and value of users? What determines the realization of user value? Or to put it bluntly, what exactly influences a person's consumption decision? What are the main factors that influence whether to buy this product or that product?

In this context of overwhelming information and unmanageable channel fragmentation, it is obvious that word of mouth in the circle of friends has the greatest impact on users. Apart from product experience, what else influences user word of mouth and user sharing? It all depends on what the relationship is between the enterprise and the user. Is it a one-time transaction relationship or an integrated community relationship? Communities empower businesses by rebuilding the community relationship between enterprises and users.

The social media operation routine of "Dying to Survive"

The recently popular movie "Dying to Survive" is expected to gross over 3 billion yuan. People's Daily commented: It has been a long time since we have had such a classic Chinese movie. It has even become a must-see training material for many people working in the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

There is a scene in the film where the male protagonists Cheng Yong and Lu Shouyi start from the hospital registration office in order to sell medicine, but are rejected without exception. They then raided every corner of the hospital, but still ended up in failure and were driven out by the hospital security.

They went to places where leukemia patients lived in groups and sold their products door to door. Despite racking your brains and talking your mind, either no one pays attention to you, or you get scolded directly or chased away. After working so hard for most of the day, I didn’t sell a single bottle of medicine!

Did they do something wrong? In fact, there is a lot that is worth learning from.

First, they chose places where the target group was highly concentrated. Whether it is a hospital or a place where leukemia patients "gather", there are highly concentrated target users , and the probability of success will be higher than other places. Secondly, they grasped the pain point of users - wanting cheap medicine.

For the same medicine, others sell it for 40,000 yuan, but they sell it for 5,000 yuan. They definitely have an advantage in price. Their target users are very precise, fully meeting the characteristics of "pain points, rigid needs, and high frequency". The scenarios are also very precise, such as hospitals and residences. There is also a leukemia patient named Lu Shouyi who shared his personal experience: "I am a patient myself and I have tried it." "The efficacy of the medicine is the same, do you want to try it?" Still rejected. Doesn’t this kind of scenario happen often in real business, where seemingly reasonable and effective efforts end up being in vain?

Why is this happening? Because the trust issue has not been resolved! The core of business is transaction, and the premise of transaction is trust. Would you trust a stranger casually? The turning point of the plot occurs when a key character appears, Liu Sihui, the group leader of the Shanghai Sixth Hospital patient group. Liu Sihui's daughter is a leukemia patient, and more importantly, she knows the group leaders of all the leukemia patient groups in Shanghai.

Liu Sihui is close to users and understands them, and users trust her. Liu Sihui brought the group owners of all patient groups in Shanghai to meet Cheng Yong. Through her, we brought in more key KOLs (group owners of the QQ groups of the first, second and third hospitals) and attracted a large number of very precise user groups. Through word of mouth among users, patients quickly and spontaneously formed a community, actively promoting and maintaining the community, and the medicine was in short supply in an instant.

Lv Shouyi, Liu Sihui, Meng Hao, and Pastor Liu played dual roles in the film. They were not only users but also distributors. Therefore, Cheng Yong gave them medicine at a price of 3,000 yuan per bottle.

As for other group owners, they are "local opinion leaders" in the community and can influence their fan groups. Cheng Yong gives them a price of 4,000 yuan per bottle (20% discount). Ordinary users will need to bear the full price of 5,000 yuan per bottle. Whoever contributes more to the organization will be given more rewards. Rewarding according to merit effectively motivates users to make more contributions. By operating users according to their classification and grading, we form a community of interests with core super users.

At the same time, in order to maintain the continuous operation of the community, a community convention was established. "From now on, buy medicine through the QQ group. Everyone should keep a low profile. If something goes wrong, no one will have medicine to take." Due to the limited operating capabilities of the community, medicines are not allowed to be sold outside of Shanghai. In contrast, many communities in reality have only been established for three months and they are eager to take over half of China through community fission.

Three revelations from movies on community operations:

1. Find opinion leaders among the target group and influence more people through them.

2. Classify and grade users according to their value, contribution, and influence.

3. Establish three rules and regulations, formulate a community convention that is commonly observed, and determine common community goals.

Top-level design of the community model

As we all know, the underlying codes of business in this era have at least two points: 1. People are the origin of everything and the center of everything; 2. The development of mobile Internet technology has made connections within reach, which proves that connections between people have become more important than ever. Metcalfe's Law, one of the three laws of the Internet, states that the more users a business connects, the more valuable the business becomes. Therefore, the standard for measuring the value of a company is how many users it is connected to and how many users it has strong connections with. Especially with the awakening of people's awareness of consumer sovereignty, according to Maslow's five-level needs theory, when people are full and satisfied, the next biggest need is social interaction , so it is entirely possible that there is a group of users behind one user.

As Amazon CEO Bezos said: "In the offline world, if a customer is dissatisfied, he will tell six friends. In the Internet world, he will tell 6,000 people." Super-connectivity between consumers has greatly enhanced user dominance, and individual voices are amplified through the Internet, thereby affecting market dynamics.

Top-level design is originally an engineering concept. Its original meaning is to comprehensively consider all levels and elements of the project, trace the root causes, take the overall situation into consideration, and seek fundamental solutions to problems at the highest level. What does the top-level design of the community model include? Is there a path to follow?

The community model includes at least six modules: community entrance: where users come from, community carrier: where users settle after coming in, and community culture: what exactly do this group of people want to do together? What did it turn out to be? What principles to follow? That is what is called community goals and community conventions. Community structure: How to design community organizations? What is the relationship between the upper and lower levels? How to reflect it? Community mechanism: How to stimulate user participation, how to enhance user sense of belonging, and form self-organization and self-drive? Community model: How to realize the commercial value of the community? What are the paths?

The three-stage rocket theory is popular in the Internet circle, taking Luoji Siwei as an example. The first stage of the rocket was that Luo Zhenyu attracted a large number of users by producing free content. The second-stage rocket is to develop the Get App based on users’ knowledge service needs, and the third-stage rocket is to form a commercial closed loop with paid products on the Get platform. The question is, what is your first stage rocket? If there is no first-stage rocket and you directly make paid knowledge products, not only will there be no traffic pool, it will also be difficult to form a product matrix, and you can imagine how difficult it is to monetize. In the context of increasingly complex business, the traditional simple and crude way of making profits from product price differences is becoming increasingly unsustainable. That’s why Mr. Ma said earnestly, “Don’t think about how to sell things, but how to serve customers well.”

If we use an equation to express the business logic behind the community model, community model = IP + community + scenario + sharing economy. The business logic behind IP is to solve the problems of traffic and trust, which is equivalent to Liu Sihui in "Dying to Survive". Communities are used to catalyze user relationships, build user trust, and expand the user base. Scenarios are used to enhance user experience , make users feel they are getting good value for money, and induce new demands. The sharing economy mainly solves the problems of community commercialization and sustainable development. Users are not only experiencers and consumers, but also distributors. The sharing model can not only lock in users and form a community of interests with users, but also trigger a resonance effect through user word-of-mouth fission.