What did I do to get 60 people to produce 15,000 words of product optimization suggestions in one week?

Just a background introduction: Our company's main business is internships and campus recruitment for college students. The company recently developed a set of guidance courses for job hunting for fresh graduates, such as teaching users resume writing, interview skills, etc.

This is the first time the company has tried this section, so it hopes to select a small number of users from the fans as an internal testing group to provide reference suggestions for the course products and promote course optimization and iteration.

After receiving this task, I formed a community of 60 people along the following lines and successfully got them to produce a total of 15,000 words of product optimization suggestions within a week:

1. What is the purpose of this community?

Many people pursue community activity. But activity itself is not the goal. No matter how active a community is, it must be responsible for higher operational indicators: such as promoting conversions , monitoring public opinion, providing corporate services to users, collecting user suggestions, promoting product upgrades, etc.

This community's goal is obviously the latter.

2. What kind of users can help achieve this goal?

To put it simply, it means to pre-draw an ideal user portrait for this community, and use it as a blueprint to find the target user group.

After thinking about it, my ideal community user should have the following characteristics:

1. Looking for a job or internship
2. High viscosity, recognition of our company
3. Have a certain degree of self-motivation, willing to learn, communicate and share
4. It is better to have taken some other online courses

After outlining the ideal user portrait, the next thing to do is to find this group of people.

3. How to find ideal users and explore their demands?

My strategy is nothing special: I write a tweet and push it to various groups.

But the key is: what tone should this tweet have in order to attract my target users?

Based on the user portraits I envisioned earlier, I emphasized the following two points in this tweet:

1) Sense of scarcity - there is a certain threshold, high requirements for members, and limited places.

This is to ensure that the users who finally enter the community are of high quality.

2) Sense of value - the community itself has high value and allows members to learn a lot.

This setting ensures that both parties get what they need. As students, users can learn some practical skills and ways of thinking that are not normally taught in schools, and we can also get what we want after the users feel satisfied.

There are actually two problems hidden behind this:

• How to set this threshold?
• What is the user's ideal sense of value?

Regarding the first question, I set a questionnaire link at the bottom of the tweet. When users are attracted by the tweets and the various values ​​promised in the tweets and want to join this community, the prerequisite is not payment or anything else, but to pass the questionnaire screening.

This questionnaire is like an exam paper. In addition to filling in basic information, it also requires users to answer some questions. For example, describe a good product you have experienced and explain why it is good; what kind of online courses you have taken; please give examples to illustrate that you are a motivated and perseverant person, etc.

The last question is: Why do you want to join this community? What surprised me was that this seemingly "pie in the sky" problem actually played an important role in the later community operations .

As mentioned above, the second question is: What kind of community value do users pursue? I couldn’t be sure about this question, so I had to write down all the possible values ​​in a tweet and throw it out for a test. These community benefits include but are not limited to: personal guidance from an experienced person in writing a business report, volunteer certificates, free trials of high-value courses, small gifts sent by our company, growing together with excellent partners, etc. There is reality and there is illusion, there is material and there is spiritual.

Surprisingly, through the last question "Why do you want to join this community?", I found that the most common reason is: I want to meet excellent companions here and learn and grow together with everyone. Some tangible rewards, on the contrary, are rarely mentioned.

Through such a question, I roughly determined what the users’ demands were, and thus clarified the direction of the subsequent community operations.

4. How to cater to user demands?

After screening 60 people, I started preparing for the opening ceremony. In my opinion, this is the top priority of community operation: the opening ceremony largely lays the foundation for the atmosphere and tone of the community, and is also the user's first impression of the community.

As mentioned earlier, users’ demand is to grow together with all the outstanding people. So my goal is to find a way to let users know that there are really many excellent like-minded people in this community.

The first type of "excellent person" is myself. This community is essentially a learning community. The group owner should have certain knowledge and skills and a certain level of cognition in order to build authority. Fortunately, my reserves are still sufficient in this group.

The second type of excellent people are the community members themselves. If I, as an "excellent" professional, seem a little distant to them, then excellent peers will give them greater stimulation and motivation.

How to show the excellence of these two types of people? I mainly did the following three things at the opening ceremony:

1. Make a comprehensive review of group members’ responses (i.e., the questionnaire answers they submitted) and point out their shortcomings.
2. Publish excellent group member assignments in the group
3. Publish growth topics to guide everyone to think together

Through these three things, I successfully made everyone see the value of this community at the opening ceremony. Within a week, we received a large number of valuable course product suggestions.

In addition, users are also actively thinking and participating, often posting personal thoughts in the group that take two or even three screens to read.

5. Notes on community operations

Next, I would like to share what I think are the three most important points in community operations.

1) Make the rules clear and fixed

This is the basic action of community operation. Fixing basic rules helps reduce users' cognitive costs and form the so-called "sense of ritual." It includes but is not limited to

• A. Fixed time (8pm every Friday)
• B. The columns are relatively fixed (every Friday, we review the homework of community members last week/announce outstanding homework/release new growth topics)
• C. Fixed format (e.g., when posting thoughts in a group, you must follow a fixed posting format)

2) Clarify the community atmosphere through reward and punishment rules, and strengthen the atmosphere through timely feedback

In a community, what kind of behavior is worth encouraging and what kind of behavior will be punished is something that needs to be absolutely clear. Only in this way can the community develop in the direction you want, and you will have a feeling of being a "operator". For example, I told everyone at the opening ceremony: Here, [thinking] and [practice] are behaviors that are worthy of encouragement.

It is not enough to just clarify the boundaries of behavior. If you want to achieve better results, you also need to give everyone a "behavioral consequence" or "behavioral exit." That is, what would happen if I followed your rules. For example, "Students who actively think and speak up will become outstanding members of this community and will receive a gift from me personally..."

After clarifying the rules, the next step is to reinforce the rules through timely feedback to create a virtuous cycle between managers and members.

For example, when a member expresses his or her opinion in the group, you should respond appropriately and promptly and make brief comments. Or participate in the members' discussions.

3) Do things beyond expectations and create a sense of surprise

A few days ago, I saw this point of view: only 1% of events will be spread and achieve the effect of word-of-mouth marketing . The prerequisite is that they must "exceed expectations". It is not enough to just make users feel "satisfied".

This view also applies to community operations: only when you create surprises for users first can users treat you sincerely.

For example, users did not expect that their answer sheets would be carefully read and commented on by me, nor did they expect that their answer sheets would be displayed at the opening ceremony.

For example, in the first week after the camp started, I assigned tasks to everyone. After they sent the assignments to my email, they didn’t expect that I would read them one by one, reply to each person’s email, and give brief comments on their assignments.

For example, give users what was promised in the beginning without any discount, so that they feel that reality is a little better than they imagined.

These are things I didn't explicitly state at the beginning, and they are not necessary to be completed. There is a lot of gray area between promises and reality. Only by doing this part as well as possible can users be surprised and it is possible for me to do things that exceed my expectations: such as working on homework after 12 o'clock.

Group administrators and users are like teammates. All interactions between the two sides are a process of mutual feedback, continuous cooperation, and continuous cycles. How I pass the ball to my teammates determines a lot about how they pass the ball to me.

VI. Conclusion

To sum up my experience, I found that this community, from conception to design to final implementation, is like doing an "academic research", which is a process of hypothesis-testing-feedback-optimization. The general idea is shown in the figure below.

Of course, the success of this idea is based on two premises:

1. Users have already established a strong sense of identity with us.
2. This is a learning community where users have a naturally strong internal motivation.

Anyway, I hope it can give you some inspiration.

The author of this article @Ayoub compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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