Preface

Operations is an interesting thing.

As one of the most popular job functions in today's Internet industry, it is often referred to as a "metaphysics".

On the one hand, its status and weight are getting higher and higher; on the other hand, it seems very vague, and it seems that few people can explain what "operation" is in the true sense.

Looking back, the job of "operation" has only been around for a little over a decade.

In a sense, we are willing to believe that if you don’t know enough about the past of a thing, it will be difficult for you to truly understand its present and future.

We guess that it would be interesting and valuable if we could look back and seriously review the development history of "operation" in the Internet world. This formed the original intention of writing this article.

So, what exactly is “operation”?

I found that in the existing Internet world, the specific work content that can be included in the scope of "operation" is extremely complicated: promotion and delivery, event planning , content production, data monitoring, user management, customer service... A lot of content seems to be able to be filled in. Almost every Internet practitioner who is called "operation" will carry more than one job content.

Therefore, to try to talk about operations, we must first define operations.

According to the definition I gave in the first chapter of "The Light of Operations", the ultimate purpose of operations is to "better connect products and users." Going further, there are two purposes here. One is to acquire users and make them pay; the other is to better maintain these users and make them willing to continue to have a relationship with you.

All specific work content carried out around these two purposes can be regarded as a certain means of operation. In addition, a reliable operation must be able to understand and master a variety of operation methods - this is completely different from the situation in traditional industries.

But how did such a complex, diverse and sometimes somewhat broad function come about? And why was it born?

In order to better answer these questions, we have sorted out the industry development history from the birth of the Internet to the present, extracted the representative products of each stage, and tried to focus on analyzing how these Internet products achieved "user acquisition & user payment" and "user retention" in their era.

In addition, we are also paying attention to the changes in the perception of the concept of "operation" among industry practitioners.

I tried to trace the development of the Internet over the past 20 years and observe what different specific practices have been produced in each stage around the two goals of "user acquisition & payment" and "user retention". After observation and thinking, I roughly came to the following conclusions:

• When the Internet was first created, there was no such function as "operation". This function and its name evolved gradually.
• The first positions that appeared and were closest to current "operations" were "network editor" and "community BBS administrator", followed by various network promotions;
• The concept of "operation" was first formed around 2001, and the concept and function of "operation" in a true sense began to become popular in the Internet circle around 2004 or 2005. From that stage on, "editors" in a large number of Internet companies including Sina began to be called " content operations ", and terms like "community operations" also began to become popular.

I found this to be an interesting process that is worth pondering.

Below, I will bring you my more specific observations and thoughts in 7 stages.

1984-1993: The Beginning of the Internet

Few people know that the first time people could exchange information on a large scale through the "Internet" was around 1984.

That year, a BBS website building program called " FidoNet " appeared in the United States. Users are connected via telephone lines and forward letters in a point-to-point manner. Huiduo.com is the world's first BBS network.

Seven years later, the "Great Wall" station of China's Huiduo.com was opened. At that time, almost all the users of the "Great Wall" station were Chinese students who made long-distance calls from overseas, as well as some domestic cutting-edge technology enthusiasts who later came to visit. At that time, people like Ma Huateng, Qiu Bojun, and Ding Lei were already at the "Great Wall" station.

Young Ma Huateng

Starting in 1993, with the increasing number of PC users and the development of many related technologies, the "Internet" began to grow wildly like weeds in the United States across the ocean, and Internet companies such as Netscape and Yahoo were born one after another.

The grand scene on the other side of the ocean is undoubtedly thrilling. Thus, starting from 1995, the Internet came to China across the ocean and began to take root.

1994-1997: What is the Internet?

• Number of Internet users: less than 300,000
• Representative Internet products: portals, early BBS
• Representative operations: Web editor, BBS administrator

For the older generation of netizens and people in the Internet circle, one thing that is basically not controversial is that the starting point of China's Internet development was the emergence of a company called "Yinghaiwei" on Zhongguancun Street before 1995. Perhaps people will never forget the classic advertisement of Yinghaiwei: "How far are the Chinese from the information superhighway? 1,500 meters to the north."

Yinghaiwei billboard

So, you see, in China at that time, the biggest attraction of the Internet to people was “information”. In an era when the main channel for most people to obtain information was still watching the "News Broadcast", information was still a 100% scarce commodity.

As a result, the earliest two product forms were born in China around the acquisition and consumption of "information", namely "portal website" and "BBS".

Among them, the representatives of the former are Sina, Sohu, and NetEase, while the representatives of the latter are Tianya, Mop, Xici, and forums affiliated with major portals. They almost all appeared between 1995 and 1996.

Although both provide information, the biggest difference between "portal" and "BBS" is that the content of the portal website needs to be collected and written by themselves, while the information on the BBS mostly comes from the spontaneous contribution of users. In today's terms, one is PGC and the other is UGC.

At that time, people's understanding of the Internet was still vague. Everyone only knew that the Internet was a new and fun thing that allowed you to "obtain global information without leaving home." Basically, no one would have thought that you could make money on the Internet. Many people started to build websites or software, most of them were half curious and half experimental, and did not have any specific expectations or plans.

At the same time, before 1998, there were very few people in China who could access the Internet. According to data provided by the China Internet Information Center, in 1997, there were only 250,000 dial-up users nationwide. Therefore, online services at that stage were relatively simple. Basically, apart from portals and BBS, there were only a few software download websites.

At that time, the vast majority of websites and products did not need to consider "user acquisition" - there were very few websites and online products to be found, and there were not many people online. Basically, as long as you could make something and it was not too bad, people would naturally be able to find it, and various portals, forums, etc. would be willing to unconditionally recommend and introduce your product for free - after all, at that time, if you didn't introduce some new websites and hot events, they wouldn't have that much to introduce.

However, in terms of "user retention", portals and BBSs still have something to do. At the very least, since you are providing the supply and consumption of information, you have to do a good job of updating and recommending information, right?

Thus, the earliest two representative jobs on the Internet were born: web editor and BBS administrator. Among them, the former's work is mainly to collect, compile and write content, while the latter's work is mainly to add featured posts, pin posts to the top, delete posts, and occasionally organize online activities such as flooding the top posts.

This can basically be regarded as the earliest "operation" related job. When information on the Internet was still relatively scarce, what they did was mostly related to "content production and maintenance."

1998-2001: The first wave of trends?

• Internet user volume: from 1 million to 20 million
• Representative Internet products: chat rooms, more mature BBS, QQ, Lianzhong, various download sites
• Representative operation jobs: online promotion, community management

If we were to define a milestone for the early development of China's Internet, 1998 might be the most appropriate year. With this as a node, the development of the Internet in China ushered in its first explosion and blowout lasting 3-4 years, and ushered in its first wave of spring.

In 1998, the following two things deserve our attention:

• In June 1998, Microsoft released the Windows 98 operating system, which fully integrated Internet standards for the first time. The evolution and updating of operating systems have paved the way for more families and individuals to access the Internet.
• Also in 1998, ISDN began to become popular in China as a faster way to access the Internet than "modem dial-up", and 26 provincial capital cities across the country began to open ISDN.

The significance of these two events to China's Internet is no different from a small mountain village that originally had only a muddy road leading to the outside world, but finally started to build an asphalt road.

Therefore, we can also see that many significant events occurred on the Internet around this year.

1. The golden age of BBS and forums

On October 31, 1997, the Chinese team lost 2:3 to Qatar at home in the World Cup Asian qualifiers and lost the chance to qualify. Two days later, a man named Lao Rong went to the Sports Salon Forum of Sohu Sports (the predecessor of Sina) and published an article titled "Dalian Jinzhou Does Not Believe in Tears".

China lost 2:3 to Qatar at home

This article spread across the country almost overnight and was later called "China's No. 1 Football Blog". Within two months of its publication, it was reprinted and reported by almost all mainstream sports media and even mass media in the country, including Southern Weekend. As a result, among the football fans of that era, there was almost no one who had not heard of this article and the name "Lao Rong".

By the way, the moderator of the Sports Salon Forum at that time was called "Lao Chen", who later became Chen Tong, the editor-in-chief of Sina.

According to Lao Chen's recollection, after Lao Rong posted "There are No Tears in Dalian Jinzhou", the number of visits to the Sports Salon reached dozens of times the usual level. Countless netizens left messages saying that Lao Rong made them "tears filled their eyes."

This incident marked the first time that people in the mainstream world felt the power and influence of the Internet firsthand. Unintentionally, it has brought many people into the door of the Internet world. From then on, BBS and forums began to usher in a golden period of development, attracting wave after wave of creative players to join.

2. The rise of online chat rooms

In the same year, an online novel called "The First Close Contact" suddenly became popular. It tells a romantic story about a man and a woman who met in an online chat room, then met and fell in love, and finally the heroine left without saying goodbye and eventually died of illness. It has been sought after by countless young people.

"First Intimate Contact" by Pi Zi Cai

This is also the first novel to become popular on the Internet, and it is so popular that almost everyone knows it.

With the popularity of this novel, people are becoming more and more curious about the Internet. They are subconsciously eager to explore and communicate on the Internet, and even begin to secretly look forward to encountering some beautiful romances.

So, more or less because of the popularity of this novel, "online chat rooms" capable of hosting real-time interactive communication among multiple people began to emerge from this year.

Looking back, another situation people faced at that time was indeed loneliness. Most people's offline social circles are limited and full of restrictions. You will find that almost everyone has a lot to say in their hearts but can't find anyone to talk to in the real world, from teenagers to uncles and aunts in their thirties and forties, without exception.

As a result, chat rooms began to develop rapidly. The most popular chat room at that time was called "Blue Sea and Silver Sand". The most popular room would always have at least a hundred people online at any time, which was very popular.

In short, the gradual improvement of infrastructure, coupled with the frequent occurrence of various "focus events" in the Internet world, has begun to prompt groups of curious netizens to enter the door of the Internet world.

3. The birth of QQ and Ourgame

Of course, as mentioned above, when countless netizens first started using the Internet, the biggest demand was "to find some way to relieve their emptiness, loneliness and solitude." So, in addition to the more mature forums, portals, BBS and chat rooms, two other epoch-making products appeared.

These two products, one is called OICQ and the other is called Lianzhong.

OICQ (later renamed QQ) was launched in February 1999, focusing on instant online chatting.

QQ

As an online casual game platform, Ourgame was launched even earlier, in March 1998.

Ourgame

These two products showed "explosive growth" among netizens almost as soon as they were launched, and even to a certain extent further stimulated the growth of Internet users. It is no exaggeration to say that after online novels such as "First Intimate Contact" became popular, many people bought PCs and started "surfing the Internet" just to find someone to chat or play with online.

The popularity of QQ, in a sense, is a combination of "the right time, the right place, and the right people". It was related to both timing and Tencent's greater emphasis on user volume (Tencent's pioneering cartoon avatars, chat history cloud storage and other features at the time all became a powerful boost to QQ's growth) .

As I recall, in the small county town where I grew up, it was the emergence of QQ that really made places like "Internet cafes" popular. I still remember that around 1999 and 2000, six or seven Internet cafes suddenly appeared in the small county town where I grew up. Every weekend when you walked in, you would find the room full of people using QQ and chatting with others.

The data seems to support this. By looking up the data on the number of Internet users nationwide provided by CNNIC, we can find that from 1998 to 2001, the number of Internet users nationwide maintained a growth rate of more than 100% almost every year, becoming the fastest growing period of user base in the history of China's Internet development.

4. Internet business opportunities emerge

As the number of Internet users increased, business opportunities on the Internet finally emerged.

During the 1998 World Cup, Sina.com attracted a large number of netizens by broadcasting news 24 hours a day, and earned 180,000 yuan in advertising revenue - this seems to be a typical "traffic monetization" case that we can find in the early history of the Internet.

During this period, Lianzhong also began to launch value-added services such as "personal membership" + "identity privileges".

So, when we began to realize that "it turns out that you can make money on the Internet", and some people began to understand that "the number of clicks and visits to a website is the key to determining the value of a website", "traffic" began to appear on the stage as a standard term, and gradually everyone began to realize that "to do business on the Internet, you must increase traffic."

In general, for some mainstream phenomenal products such as QQ, Lianzhong, chat rooms, etc., user acquisition during this period is relatively worry-free - they only need to provide basic services well, and a large number of users will naturally pour in. According to current sayings, this is still the "bonus period" in the development of China's Internet.

According to data published on the official website, three years after Lianzhong went online, by 2001, the number of registered users had reached 20 million, while by 2001, the number of registered users of QQ had exceeded 50 million, and the number of online users also exceeded 1 million.

For webmasters and individual developers of a large number of small and medium-sized personal sites, they must start to find ways to do more to acquire users compared to large websites and mainstream products.

At that time, in order to increase the traffic of their own websites or the download volume of their products, they often used methods, including but not limited to exchanging friendly links, seeking publications on portal websites, posting advertisements on forums and BBS, finding ways to improve their rankings on various software download sites, providing various data packages for download to divert traffic, etc.

All of the above has given rise to a job called "online promotion", and "traffic diversion" and "channels" are what they pay most attention to.

5. The emergence of operational theory

As the number of netizens increases, the management of some forums and BBSs has become more and more complicated. If you only need to serve 10,000 people, maybe you just need to regularly manage and clean up some forum posts, add some featured posts, etc., but when you start to need to serve 500,000 or even more users, the situation starts to become complicated. You need to consider dividing the forum into more sections, and you need to start thinking about how to influence and maintain the "atmosphere" of a forum. You can no longer handle and manage the affairs of each section "personally".

As a result, a common practice began to emerge in a large number of communities and BBSs - recruiting and managing a group of administrators and "moderators" to help the official better manage the community. The official only needs a small number of "community management" persons in charge to maintain this group of administrators and moderators. In fact, many community managers on the Internet have summarized the so-called four-step forum management method of "guiding interest, interest spawning topics, concentrated discussion on topics, and information aggregating users."

This is almost the origin of the "community operation methodology " and "user pyramid" model that were later widely circulated in the operation industry.

Also, during this period, some products began to consciously organize and plan activities to attract user attention, and began to launch certain paid value-added services, a typical example being Lianzhong.

Since 1999, Lianzhong has repeatedly introduced professional chess and card players such as Ma Xiaochun to play online games with users, which has attracted media coverage and attention from netizens.

In 2000, Lianzhong held the China-Korea Online Go Tournament , which attracted more than 12,000 players to participate online simultaneously, setting a Guinness World Record at the time.

In addition, since 2000, Lianzhong has also launched its own paid value-added service - Lianzhong membership. Users pay a monthly fee and can obtain privileges including beautifying their personal online image and kicking people out. From today's perspective, this is actually Lianzhong's own "QQ Show" and "QQ Member", but it was more than a year earlier than QQ Member.

Practices like these have almost formed the prototype of common operational logic such as "activity operation" and "user payment conversion".

2001-2005: The era of traffic being king and the emergence of “operation”

• Number of Internet users: 22 million to 103 million
• Representative Internet products: Baidu, hao123, various mandatory installation plug-ins, Tomato Garden, Taobao, online games
• Representative operation jobs: SEO / SEM , traffic distribution, QQ group management, e-commerce operation

In the Internet world during the period 2001-2005, several things happened that cannot be ignored. They are——

• The rise and popularity of online games;
• The rapid development of e-commerce, led by Taobao;
• With the rapid increase in the number of Internet users, the entire industry has paid more and more attention to "traffic acquisition" and the formation of some "traffic entrances".

It was also during this period that "operation" began to gradually become popular as a job title in the Internet industry. This is closely related to the development and changes of the industry.

Let’s talk about them one by one below.

1. The rise and popularity of online games

Since 2000, the concept of "online games" has become popular.

In 2001, Shanda launched "Legend" and NetEase also launched "Westward Journey Online", and online games entered a period of popularity that lasted for 4-5 years. Among them, "Legend" is the most successful. This online game introduced from South Korea quickly became the most popular and profitable online game in a long time. It was not until the emergence of World of Warcraft that the popularity of "Legend" was surpassed.

"legend"

The business model of online games is also different from that of other Internet services. Compared with the "traffic-generating" method of other Internet services, online games have a clearer profit model - selling game point cards or game equipment.

It is precisely around this clearer profit outlet that, in addition to online promotion, some operating methods that have rarely been seen in the Internet industry have appeared for the first time in the business operations of online game companies.

First, a large number of offline channels and agents have been developed around the sale of "game point cards", especially on campus, where a large number of "campus agents" specializing in selling point cards have emerged;

Secondly, centered around the goal of "increasing users' online purchases of gaming equipment or value-added services," some less visible operating methods have begun to emerge. For example, I once knew that an online game company used a similar approach to increase user payment frequency and payment rate: registering a large number of so-called beauty accounts, using the beauty accounts to seduce some "sponsor" and let the sponsors pay for equipment for the beauty accounts.

The above two can almost be regarded as the earliest " offline promotion " and "retention of key paying users".

2. The rapid development of e-commerce

Along with "online games", "e-commerce" is also gradually rising.

Jack Ma and the founding of Alibaba

In 1999, Alibaba was founded and entered the e-commerce field through B2B . In less than half a year, the company was able to provide business information from 178 countries and regions around the world.

At the end of the same year, Dangdang.com was established, opening up an online book sales platform;

In 2000, "Joyful Network", co-founded by Lei Jun , went online and began operations;

In May 2003, Alibaba's Taobao went online, and at the end of that year it launched the third-party payment tool " Alipay ". It completed a transaction volume of 34 million yuan that year and gradually developed into the largest e-commerce website in China.

Like online games, e-commerce is also a business that can directly generate transactions and payment behaviors. In this field, in addition to simple promotion, there are also some work contents that are completely different from other Internet fields.

For example, how to select products and manage the store's product categories, how to manage product inventory and distribution, how to provide good store customer service, how to package products, how to cultivate user loyalty of online stores by creating "explosive products", etc.

These tasks almost constitute the prototype of early "e-commerce operations". Moreover, in the e-commerce industry, "operation" is a functional name that has existed from the beginning. Its job content covers almost all the things mentioned above, and it is mainly responsible for the daily operation of the store and the increase in sales.

3. “Entrance” and “Flow”

In addition, during this period, with the increasing number of users in the entire Internet world and the influx of various types of information and websites, people began to face a problem: How can I find the information that suits me from the vast online world and remember them?

So, starting from 2001, a concept gradually emerged and increasingly occupied an important position in the Internet world, and that is "portal". To put it simply, if you can occupy a certain "entrance", you will naturally have a huge amount of continuous traffic. And as mentioned earlier, in the Internet world, traffic has been proven to be valuable.

During this stage, 3721, hao123, Baidu, browsers and even the integrated operating system "Tomato Garden" which is further up the industry chain have all become a kind of "portal" with huge traffic and user base.

Now that the entrance is there, seizing the "entrance" has become something that many Internet products must pay attention to. Therefore, during this period, everyone began to show off their skills in how to make their products and brands get more exposure and clicks at the "entrance".

For example, some people began to discover that the web crawlers of Baidu and other search engines follow certain rules. In other words, as long as you make your website more friendly to these rules, you will be able to have a higher ranking in the search results page of relevant keywords of the search engine. Therefore, a job gradually evolved around how to make your website more friendly to search engines, which is called SEO (search engine optimization) .

Of course, search engines are not stupid. When they discovered that the ranking of their search results would directly determine a large amount of traffic, they resolutely decided to start selling their search results and adopted a rule called "bidding ranking" to sell their search results. Simply put, whoever offers the highest price will get the position and entry. As a result, a job called SEM (search engine marketing ) was gradually born around how to complete paid promotion through search engines.

For example, some people have discovered that in addition to "centralized" entrances such as search engines, there are also some entrances that may be "distributed" - a typical example is the many news pages on portal websites. Perhaps each of their pages does not have much traffic, but if the traffic on these pages is added together, it will be an astonishing number.

So, someone developed something called " advertising alliance ". Simply put, it is a method of forming an alliance by gathering a large number of small and medium-sized online media resources (such as small and medium-sized websites, personal websites, etc.) , and using these pages and sites to uniformly carry out advertising and online promotion.

Of course, regarding how to obtain traffic, the previously common methods of forum promotion, traffic exchange between websites, portal website publication, and even the gradually emerging QQ group promotion, are still common means.

Therefore, a job called "traffic operation" began to emerge slowly during this period, focusing on how to acquire traffic more effectively and reduce the cost of acquiring traffic.

Also, as the user base of some Internet products, especially community products, has skyrocketed to millions, how to better manage such a large user base has become an issue that needs further consideration.

As a result, some communities began to try to combine data and use some productized mechanisms to better guide and constrain user behavior. Typical methods include user levels, medals, points, etc., which have begun to appear in many communities.

To the extent that, standardized BBS site management tools such as Discuz have emerged around the construction and management of forums - this can almost be considered an early standardized operation tool.

4. The birth of the concept of “operation”

According to our observations, it was during this period in the Internet industry that the term "operation" began to be used within first-tier Internet companies such as Sina and well-known Internet companies such as Tianya and Mop. For example, the previous "editing" began to be called "content operation", and the previous "community management" began to be called "community operation".

Looking back at the reasons behind this change, we have the following speculations and understandings:

• With the development of the Internet industry and the continuous increase in the number of netizens, the sources of traffic are becoming less single and more abundant and diverse, with more and more technical content and sophistication, and more and more complex, including the monitoring of relevant data, which is becoming more comprehensive and complete. The era when you could see a sharp increase in data through simple promotion is over. Now, you may have to evaluate the status of competing products, the degree of match between channels and users, and monitor data such as the conversion rate of each channel, etc.
• Similarly, in terms of "content", with the increasing number of related products and services, the work that "editors" need to complete and the skills they need to master are also increasing. For example, in addition to writing a good manuscript, you also need to consider how the content itself can be more search engine friendly, what kind of title is more likely to attract traffic, whether the relevant manuscript can be cooperated and distributed with other media and sites, etc.
• Similarly, when it comes to "user retention", the means we can use are becoming more and more numerous. For example, we can create a QQ group to get closer to users, organize offline activities , and send small gifts from time to time. Including, with the sharp increase in the number of users of many websites, managing millions of users also requires a more rigorous management mechanism and system.
• As more and more options are presented to us in any work direction, we will have higher requirements for the skills and professional knowledge of practitioners in related positions, and we will hope that they will be able to complete more and more things independently. For example, it would be hard for you to imagine that an early Taobao store could have someone dedicated to writing copywriting , right? A more common situation is that one person is responsible for some promotion, some product packaging and copywriting, and can also provide customer service.
• Therefore, with the development of the industry, when the Internet industry is in greater and greater need of similar all-rounders, but can no longer be defined by positions such as "editor", "planner", "online promotion", etc., the best way may be to call them "operators".

So far, the function of "operation" has officially entered the big stage in the Internet industry.

2005-2009: Operations in the Web 2.0 Era - The Rise of "Users"

• Number of Internet users: 103 million to 384 million
• Representative Internet products: blogs, wikis, video sites, P2P downloads, forums, SNS
• Representative operation types: network promoter, forum marketing, event marketing and communication

Around 2005, a concept began to become popular again in the Internet circle and swept the world. This was "Web 2.0".

The so-called Web 2.0 can be simply understood as "an Internet product model in which content is generated by users". In order to distinguish it from the "product model in which content is generated by companies and website employees", it is called Web 2.0. Of course, the corresponding one is Web 1.0.

1. The rise of user power

Following this concept, in the time window of 2005-2009, a large number of so-called Web 2.0 products were born and emerged, such as video websites like Youku, Tudou, and Ku6, a large number of P2P download software, SNS communities like Douban, Kaixin, and Renren, and blogs.

They all have one thing in common - "users" are the protagonists of content creation, and the more important thing for the official to do is to maintain management and shape the atmosphere.

According to the generally accepted view in the industry, web2.0 is an upgrade of the concepts and ideological system of the Internet - from the original top-down Internet system dominated by a few resource controllers, to a bottom-up Internet system dominated by the collective wisdom and power of the vast number of users.

It seems that after the number of Internet users in China exceeded 100 million, "users" finally began to gain more and more voice, giving full play to their energy and creativity that have nowhere to be released, making the entire Internet world richer and more exciting, with greater possibilities.

This is indeed the case. During this period, the power of "users" and "individuals" began to grow increasingly powerful in the Internet world. If we say that in the past Internet world, the dissemination and distribution of information was mostly completed in the form of "one to many", after this period, the entire online information distribution and dissemination logic began to present a situation where "one to many" and "many to many" coexisted.

To be more specific, in the entire Internet world, the power of opinion leaders and public opinion has begun to gradually overwhelm and even lead traditional media.

For example, during this period, countless bottom-up hot topics began to occur, such as the Tianya Forum's legendary post "Northern Latitude Zhou Gongzi vs. Yi Yeqing" and Hu Ge's spoof of the movie "The Promise" "A murder caused by a steamed bun."

Hu Ge spoofs the movie "The Promise"

Another example is the “human flesh search” that was initiated many times by netizens during this period, which completely influenced the direction of public opinion.

For example, during this period, with the help of blogs and countless online communities, the first batch of " Internet celebrities " in China were born, such as Ayawawa, Liumang Yan, Muzi Li, Dangnian Mingyue, Wen Yi in the food world...

2. New key point of operation: communication

Therefore, during this period, the way of acquiring users in the entire Internet world began to quietly change. If in the previous period of 2001-2005, people paid more attention to "occupation of key channels and efficiency of traffic acquisition", in the period of 2005-2009, people paid more attention to "communication". That is, whether it is possible to achieve wide dissemination in the entire Internet world through some interesting or topical content or event planning, with the help of blogs, BBS, SNS, etc.

For a long time, this has become the most popular practice for online promotion and marketing.

Therefore, during this period, functions such as online promoters, event marketing, and topic marketing began to appear.

Among them, the Internet promoters are a group of very interesting people, who often evolved from administrators of many small and medium-sized forums in the early days. The whole process is generally like this:

• Everyone knows that once a forum becomes popular, various small advertisements will begin to appear. This kind of small advertisement is extremely annoying, and it is omnipresent, and it can't be blocked, making various forum moderators and administrators very impressed.
• Until one day, some moderators and administrators suddenly got to know each other: Why do you have to ban this? Brothers and others joined forces to open an agency or something. Who would like to post advertisements and directly contact us? We are responsible for pushing them on the forum? This money is very natural to make.
• Later, moderators from various forums were integrated one after another, and this group of people became the earliest online marketing team, or Internet promoters.

Behind many of the Internet celebrities and hot events that we once knew, from Sister Furong to Sister Tianxian, from Xiaoyue incident to "pin changing villa" to Jia Junpeng incident, the shadow of these "pushers" are indispensable behind them.

Generally speaking, the "user acquisition" of a large number of products during this period is indeed more dependent on "dissemination" rather than "promotion and delivery".

In terms of user maintenance, with the advent of the Web2.0 era, there are more mature sets of logic and practices in terms of "user hierarchical theory", "user data mining", and even "KOL management and maintenance". The best in this field are Maopu, Tianya, Sina, etc. - among them, the countless famous blogs and KOL resources that Sina has accumulated in the blog era have since directly determined the rapid rise of Sina Weibo .

3. From "closed" to "open"

In addition, another phenomenon is also worth noting during this period of time - during this window period, the entire Internet ecosystem began to gradually change from "closed" to "open". Specifically, this is reflected in the fact that many SNS and social applications including Tencent, Douban, Kaixin.com, Tianya, etc. have begun to build their own "open platforms" or provide their own "open interfaces" of their account system, allowing external third-party developers to call their own basic user information and develop applications for themselves through the open platform.

For developers, this move can make it less expensive to acquire and reach users. For the platform, they have also strengthened the services and content provided by their own platform through this move, thereby consolidating the platform ecosystem. In my impression, Kaixin.com and Renren.com have relied on their own open platforms to gain considerable user growth.

On the other hand, this practice of "using the other party's platform and user resources to develop some small applications to better obtain traffic and users" has gradually become a common idea of ​​"acquiring users". From then on, we will see that this practice will become popular in both Sina Weibo and WeChat ecosystems.

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 purchase
• Representative operating types: Weibo operation, social media marketing, and various APP promotion

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

In the second half of 2008, with Apple's release of iPhone 3G and the announcement of the opening of the App Store, as well as the release of Google 's Android operating system, people began to realize that the era of mobile Internet has 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. Repeat 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 APP promotion methods, becoming a typical representative of the "operation" work during this period, commonly known as "APP promotion and operation" in the industry.

2. Unprecedented Weibo

During this period, a huge monster was born in China's Internet, which is Weibo.

In August 2009, Sina Weibo launched an internal test. In the next 2-3 years, with the large amount of resources accumulated in the blog and portal era, as well as the "fast dissemination" product mechanism of Weibo itself, it swept the entire Internet at a storm-like 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 EMU incident, from the "free lunch" charity to save beggar children to celebrity entertainment gossip and scandals, Weibo has become the first public opinion base in countless major social and entertainment events. Its ability to spread and ferment information and its ability to ferment information and occur in major events have made almost any traditional media pale.

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 Jokes" and "Devil Economics" have gradually been born. Most of their operators are grassroots webmasters in the PC era. They are naturally sensitive to the turbulence in the Internet world and the psychological preferences of netizens. With their hard work in the early era of Weibo, they quickly became a new channel for traffic distribution and promotion.

But unlike traditional promotion channels, Weibo promotion has already begun to have higher requirements for "promotion 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 to 710 million
• Representative Internet products: WeChat, various O2O products, Didi Chuxing, Toutiao , Luoji Siwei and other self-media
• Representative operating types: new media operation , community operation , Weibo operation, social media marketing, and 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, the so-called "Internet+" statement began to appear, that is, allow the Internet to connect to more things other than 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. Operation 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 representative of this is the development and growth of Didi Chuxing - its user acquisition and user maintenance in the process of development include a large number of offline "heavy actions" and fierce competition with competitors, as well as a large number of online data monitoring and product forms and product strategies design (such as Didi's red envelope distribution, order distribution strategies, and user incentive measures such as Didi) .

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

2. The full rise of WeChat

Another thing that must be mentioned during this period is the overall 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 public accounts was highly similar, the two began to be put together by people in the Internet circle and collectively called " new media operations". In the era of the rise of WeChat and the popularity of "Internet +" and "Internet thinking", this function began to become popular quickly and became the hottest position in the Internet circle for a time.

3. Return to content value

But similar to any new platform, after the "bonus period" of WeChat public accounts and WeChat business circles has passed, WeChat public accounts have also shown a situation where content is highly homogeneous and reading volume is gradually declining. To this end, WeChat officials quickly launched a series of measures including "appreciation", "protecting original content", and "report".

These measures immediately made the entire public account gradually upgrade from the "title party" and "joke content" that were of varying quality in the early years. More and more high-quality content producers have joined the content ecosystem of WeChat public accounts. In addition, the improvement of user taste has made content and creativity increasingly important criterion for the quality of a public account, and whether it can obtain 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 building an APP or developing a product by yourself, the biggest attraction of "community operation" is:

• It does not require product development, so startup costs may be lower;
• 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;
• 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 operation

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 20 years of the entire Internet and the many changes above, we can find that the so-called "operation" is actually a function that requires the two purposes of "user acquisition & user payment" and "better achievement of existing users" through more diverse means and skills.

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 has never been 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 become "traffic portals", people are willing to spend a lot of time and effort thinking about how to rank higher on search results pages and get more recommendations in portals;

When the Web2.0 era arrived, people began to be willing to spend more time on "event planning", relying on the voices and power of users such as forums and communities to help themselves gain more attention;

Today, people are more willing to spend more time and energy on the attention and operation of WeChat public accounts, Zhihu and other places, and the logic behind it is the same - where "traffic" and "users" are, the focus of operation is .

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.

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

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media information flow

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!