A brief history of operations: 20 years of development and evolution of Internet operations (continued)

(Continued from the previous article)

2009-2013: Operations in the era of microblogs and mobile Internet

Number of Internet users: 384 million to 618 million

Representative Internet products: various APPs, Weibo, Zhihu, WeChat , group buying

Representative operation types: Weibo operation, social media marketing , various APP promotion

Starting from 2009, another key turning point of China's Internet began to arrive.

In the second half of 2008, with the release of iPhone 3G by Apple and the announcement of the opening of its App store , as well as the release of Google 's Android operating system, people began to realize that the era of mobile Internet had arrived .

From then until now, China's Internet has entered another magnificent era - the so-called "mobile Internet era".

The gradual popularization of smart phones and the arrival of the "mobile era" have instantly opened up a whole new battlefield in the Internet world. It means that the original pattern and user habits may be broken and reconstructed, that people's fragmented time will begin to be snatched away and occupied, and that it means many new opportunities.

So in this era, countless people have achieved great success by relying on the bonus period of the "mobile Internet" era and the APPs they developed themselves, from Plants vs. Zombies to Fishing Master , from Dayima to Mayu , from Lamamabang to Babytree , from Momo to WeChat , all have risen in this time window.

1. A repeat of the logic of the PC era

We all remember that in the PC era, the Internet world had successively experienced a "germination era" and a "traffic-driven era". In a sense, these two eras were reproduced on mobile devices during the five years between 2009 and 2013.

Initially, when the mobile era was just emerging, the things that could quickly become popular and occupy everyone’s attention were mostly some more “light” things . Typical examples include some tools , reading applications, or games . During this period, apps like Ink Weather, Tom Cat, and a large number of magazine apps have become widely popular.

Then, with the increasing number of mobile users after 2011 and 2012, more and more Internet companies joined the mobile battle, and the "traffic era" that once appeared on the PC side once again appeared on the mobile side - a large number of application stores appeared and developed one after another, becoming the "traffic entrance" of the mobile side, and making a lot of money by relying on the "traffic distribution" business.

In addition, various methods of intercepting and distributing traffic around mobile terminals have begun to emerge one after another . Methods such as mobile advertising alliances, point walls , and exchange rates have gradually become popular and popular on mobile terminals.

During this period, countless new positions and new job opportunities were born around the above-mentioned APP promotion methods, which became a typical representative of the "operation" work in this period, commonly known as " APP promotion operation " in the industry.

2. Unprecedented Weibo

Also, during this period, a giant was born in China's Internet. This is Weibo.

In August 2009, Sina Weibo was launched for internal testing. In the following 2-3 years, relying on the large amount of resources accumulated in the blog and portal era, as well as Weibo's own "rapid spread" product mechanism, it swept the entire Internet at a stormy speed and became the most eye-catching product in the Internet circle.

In the three years between 2010 and 2012, from the Zhong Rujiu incident to the high-speed train incident, from the "free lunch" charity to rescuing begging children to celebrity entertainment gossip and scandals, Weibo has become the first public opinion battlefield in countless major social and entertainment events. Its ability to spread and ferment information and its ability to report on major events have almost eclipsed every traditional media.

Yao Chen, who was only considered a second-tier star at the time, managed to accumulate more than 10 million fans in just three years by "playing Weibo" - this means that her voice in public opinion has surpassed that of most TV stations.

"Weibo may change everything." This statement was first said by Kai-Fu Lee and became a consensus among almost all Internet circles during that period.

Faced with the huge centripetal force of Weibo, almost everyone was drawn into it, from opinion leaders and entertainment stars in the forum era to enterprises, government agencies and business leaders, almost no one was spared.

Weibo has also become the largest gathering place for "traffic" and "users" in this era.

As a result, Weibo has also brought new possibilities for "operation". Many sharp-eyed people have discovered that based on Weibo's ecology and product logic, as long as you can do a good job of maintaining some Weibo content and user interactions, you will be able to gain huge numbers of fans and spread here. Also, even if you are doing the same promotion, promoting through Weibo may be much more cost-effective than advertising through other channels .

In addition, Weibo's strong interactivity and communication properties also make it an optimal choice for many products and brands to "maintain users."

As a result, a function called " Weibo operation " and " social media marketing " emerged, and it became another representative "operation" job of this era.

On Weibo, some "big accounts" such as "Selected Cold Jokes" and "Freakonomics" have gradually emerged. Most of their operators are grassroots webmasters from the PC era. They are naturally sensitive to the slightest changes in the Internet world and the psychological preferences of netizens. Relying on their painstaking efforts in the early days of Weibo, they quickly became a new channel for traffic distribution and promotion. However, unlike traditional promotion channels, Weibo promotion at this time has begun to have higher requirements for "promotional content". In short, even if you find a big account to help you promote, it will be useless if your promotional content is not forwarded in large numbers.

3. Group buying war

In addition, another remarkable event that happened on the Internet during this period was the rise and fierce battle of "group buying".

The emergence of group buying websites was the first attempt to connect the Internet with more specific services in people's offline lives. It was also the first time that the war in the Internet world was pulled from purely "online" to "online + offline simultaneously."

But this is just the beginning.

2013 to present: Internet and operations that connect everything

Number of Internet users: 618 million-710 million

Representative Internet products: WeChat, various O2O products, Didi Chuxing, Toutiao , Luoji Siwei and other self-media

Representative operation types: new media operation , community operation , Weibo operation, social media marketing, various APP promotion

After entering 2013, the user growth rate of the entire Internet world began to slow down significantly . According to CNNIC data, from 2013 to 2016, the number of Internet users only increased by 100 million, making it the slowest period of user growth in the 20 years since the birth of the Internet in China.

In any market, when the growth space of the "absolute number of users" is no longer so obvious, the focus of competition and PK will begin to shift direction, either to open up new battlefields or to be more "sophisticated" on the original basis to seize scenarios with higher frequency of user use and touch. This is an eternal law.

At the same time, with the widespread popularity of smart phones, people began to have a terminal device that can help them connect to the Internet anytime and anywhere. For the first time, people began to have the possibility of "connecting everything".

From this period onwards, the so-called " Internet + " began to emerge, which means that the Internet can be connected to more things besides information, such as services.

From around 2013 to 2016, there was an extremely rapid wave of O2O entrepreneurship in the domestic Internet industry. A large number of companies like Didi Chuxing and Meituan grew up and became new giants with valuations of tens of billions of dollars.

The emergence of many O2O start-up companies has truly pulled the "operation" competition from online to offline. During this period, due to fierce competition and the increasing scarcity of user time and attention, one-dimensional "online promotion and communication" has become significantly ineffective for many O2O companies to acquire users. The more common practice is to use offline promotion + online promotion + PR communication and other methods in parallel. Only in this way can better results be achieved.

1. Operational upgrade

During this period, the relationship between operations and products began to become closer, and there was an increasing need for more precisely calculated and planned "strategies". Because more and more operational actions and means begin to need to be implemented through products, and with the increase in user size and the complexity of user composition, the users attracted by operations will increasingly affect the growth of a product. Therefore, at the level of "strategy" and "rhythm operation", operations also begin to need more precise and detailed thinking.

The most typical example of this is the development and growth of Didi Chuxing. Its user acquisition and retention in the process of development involves not only a large number of offline "heavy actions" and fierce competition with competitors, but also a large amount of online data monitoring and product form, product strategy, etc. (such as Didi's red envelope distribution, order dispatching strategy, Didi Rice and other user incentives, etc.).

As a result, during this period, the functional requirements for "operations" in Internet companies were upgraded and improved again.

2. The rise of WeChat

And another thing that must be mentioned during this period is the comprehensive rise of WeChat.

In 2012, WeChat launched Moments and WeChat Official Accounts . It was these two functions, together with instant multi-person interaction functions such as " WeChat Group ", that allowed WeChat to begin to seize a large amount of time from Internet products including Weibo.

According to statistics, WeChat’s daily logged-in users reached 570 million in the second half of 2016 - a number that is far ahead of any other Internet product.

As a result, WeChat's Moments and WeChat official accounts began to become more popular "traffic entrances", followed by the emergence of a large number of WeChat official account operations and "micro-businesses".

Later, because the execution logic of many activities and content maintenance in Weibo and WeChat official accounts are highly similar, people in the Internet circle began to put the two together and collectively referred to as " new media operations ." With the rise of WeChat and the popularity of "Internet +" and "Internet thinking," this function began to quickly become popular and became the hottest position in the Internet circle.

3. The return of content value

However, similar to any new platform, after the "bonus period" of WeChat official accounts and WeChat Moments micro-businesses has passed, WeChat official accounts have also shown a situation of highly homogeneous content and gradually declining readership. To this end, WeChat officials quickly launched a series of measures including "appreciation", "original content protection", and "reporting". These measures were effective immediately, allowing the entire public account to gradually upgrade from the "clickbait" and "joke content" of the early years. More and more high-quality content producers have begun to join the content ecology of WeChat public accounts. Coupled with the improvement of user tastes, content and creativity have become increasingly important criteria for the quality of a public account and whether it can get more forwarding and reading volume.

After entering 2016, as users' time and energy became increasingly scarce, this situation has become even worse. A large number of WeChat public accounts that still rely on non-nutritious content such as discount promotional advertisements have begun to struggle, while public accounts with the ability to produce high-quality content have become more popular among users.

During this period, many people in the entire Internet and operation circles were shouting: the value of content is returning .

4. The rise of community operations

Also, as users’ time becomes more scarce, their voice becomes greater, and their time becomes more fragmented, another concept has gradually emerged, that is, “community operation.”

Simply put, community operation is a practice of "gathering a large number of users together based on common interests and hobbies, and achieving user interaction and maintenance through continuous output of high-quality content and tools such as "WeChat groups"."

Compared to making an APP or developing a product yourself, the biggest attraction of "community operation" is——

1. It does not require product development, so startup costs may be lower;
2. If done well, it is possible to aggregate a large number of users and traffic through WeChat groups in a short period of time, and these users and traffic are real;
3. Because of the instant and highly interactive nature of the "group" itself, if the community is well managed, users in the group will often have a higher conversion rate when it comes to further behavioral conversions such as payment and registration.

In the domestic Internet circle, those who first tried community operation and achieved certain achievements and success on a small scale included Luoji Siwei , Qiu Ye and others. The success they achieved at low cost also attracted countless people to follow suit and try.

But so far, the so-called "community operation" is still more of a concept. More people may tend to obtain short-term traffic and conversions by "quickly pulling groups and aggregating users". However, the long-term vitality of a so-called "community" still needs to be based on the continuous supply of high-quality content and cultural construction.

5. Today's Operations

In general, during this period, with the emergence of WeChat official accounts and the full-scale explosion of mobile Internet , various means used to achieve "user acquisition" and "user retention" have become more and more diverse and complex, with more and more intersections between them.

It was during this period, starting from when Zhang Liang serialized his "Starting Operations from Scratch" on Zhihu, that the Internet circle gradually tended to divide operations into three modules: " content operations ", "activity operations" and " user operations " according to different work focuses.

However, when it comes to specific work content, there is still a lot of overlap between these three modules, which makes "operation" still a highly abstract and vague thing for more outsiders or even newcomers to the industry.

Conclusion

Looking back at the entire Internet over the past 20 years and the many changes mentioned above, we can find that the so-called "operation" is actually a function that requires the use of more diverse means and skills to better achieve the two goals of "user acquisition and user payment" and "better maintenance of existing users".

It is precisely because in the entire Internet world, there are so many and rich means for us to choose and use around these two purposes, and the things that need to be done are too complicated, that we cannot describe such positions with a more specific word, so we can only call it "operation."

At the same time, we will also find that the work content of the "operation" position is never fixed, but often changes with the mainstream product form and the logic of information distribution and dissemination in the entire Internet world.

For example, when search and portal recommendation positions became "traffic entrances", people were willing to spend a lot of time and energy figuring out how to make their websites rank higher on search results pages and get more recommendations on portals; and when the Web 2.0 era arrived, people began to be willing to spend more time on "event planning", relying on the voices and power of users in forums, communities, etc. to help themselves gain more attention; and today, people are more willing to spend more time and energy on the attention and operations of WeChat official accounts, Zhihu, etc., and the logic behind them is the same - where the "traffic" and "users" are, the focus of operations is there.

Therefore, an excellent operator must have strong learning ability. What TA needs to pay attention to is not only specific means and skills, but also the logic behind a lot of surface phenomena.

In any case, at any time, the purpose of operations is to better achieve "user acquisition & user payment" and "better maintain existing users". The former requires attention to the logical changes in information distribution and dissemination and the cost of traffic acquisition, while the latter requires more attention to how to better communicate and interact with users as a group in combination with product forms as the user size changes, and better control user expectations, composition and even experience.

From this level, an excellent operator must be a manipulator.

As we have mentioned repeatedly, in the era we live in today, the value of "content" and "individual users" is constantly rising . This trend has been demonstrated by the popularity of concepts such as "content payment", "knowledge monetization" and " Internet celebrity economy" in the entire Internet world in 2016.

As I mentioned in my book "The Light of Operations", in today's world where "products are highly homogenized and the space for innovation is getting smaller and smaller", the competition between different companies and products will increasingly shift to "operations." Moreover, the dimensions of such competition may be richer and more three-dimensional. It may include traditional promotion and customer acquisition, more sophisticated user retention, and the more practical "brand building" and "communication".

In such an era, the challenges for "operation" practitioners will be even greater, and of course, it will also mean more opportunities.

-- over--

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The author of this article @三节课黄有姹自赞 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!