Wu Yizhong, Vice President of 31 Conference: The Secrets of Community Operation and Monetization You Don’t Know (with PPT Download)

Xiaomi has built a company with a valuation of US$45 billion by grasping user participation and operating fans. Luoji Siwei has created an Internet knowledge community and recruited paying members twice within four months, with membership fees totaling nearly 10 million! However, most communities still need to continuously input value and energy into the community through business models. Without commercial value, it will be difficult for the community to survive in the end.

On the evening of June 2 (last Thursday) at 20:30, Qidian Academy specially invited 31 Conference Vice President @Wu Yizhong to be a guest on the free online lecture "Qidian Academy Open Class" column, focusing on the secrets of community operations and interpreting the methods of realizing community value in the commercial era.

Guest introduction:

Wu Yizhong, Vice President of 31 Conference, conference digital technology planner and community operations consultant.

15 years of experience in global information operation management of Fortune 500 companies, 10 years of experience in the Internet industry as a senior information manager, digital conference project director of the first Internet Conference 31, with very rich theoretical and practical experience in digital conferences and community marketing.

The following is the main text of the sharing, which was compiled by the notes group of the Everyone is a Product Manager team @郑灿烂 based on the guest’s on-site sharing content, and edited and modified:

1. You need to know these before doing community

1. What is a community?

Some people may ask: What is the difference between a community and a neighborhood?

For example: in some celebrity forums, fans participate for their common celebrity, but often they do not know each other, and the relationship is weak, and the community is more about content; whereas, I believe that a community is a social interaction among acquaintances, and although they may not have met each other, they can be called friends in the circle of friends, and there is a strong relationship between them. In a community, more emphasis is placed on the management of relationships and connections.

My understanding of community is that it emerges when a group of people with common interests begin to interact to promote that interest.

Community is the Internet's reconstruction of the traditional social structure.

2. So why do we need to build a community?

I think there are several issues to be addressed:

• Solve the traffic problem: Everyone is talking about the traffic problem now, and the community is a way to solve the traffic problem;
• Solve brand communication problems;
• Solve new opportunities brought about by the sense of crisis.

The future business model will be: content + community + business.

Content is a media attribute and is the entrance to traffic; community is a relationship attribute and accumulates traffic. A WeChat group is a small community that actually serves to precipitate traffic. Business is a transaction attribute that monetizes the value of traffic. Why is it called business? Two years ago, when I was discussing communities with my friends, the community economy was quite hot at that time. People seldom talked about the business model of the community, whether it would be monetized in the future, and whether the established community would promote my company's business model.

3. So how do you position the community?

Nowadays, most communities can be roughly divided into: product communities, self-media communities, learning communities, brand communities, etc.

Product-based community : Xiaomi community is a typical product-based community. It includes a lot of content: online MIUI Forum, Xiaomi Forum, Xiaomi.com, and offline MIUI Club, Xiaomi City Meeting, and Xiaomi Popcorn.

When Xiaomi first established the entire community, it did not sell its mobile phones on the community. Instead, it provided improvement suggestions for its products through these core users. Xiaomi’s core community provided great help to Xiaomi in its early stages of development. The Mi Noodle community has a common value: respect individuality and shape commonality.

Self-media community: I think Luoyouhui of Luoji Siwei is the earliest definer and practitioner of community economy. Lao Luo himself said that it is a knowledge community, but I prefer to define it as a self-media community.

There is a very interesting phenomenon in it: there are a large number of book recommendations in its community. I am also a Luo fan and I will order books from it. The price of these books is not necessarily a problem, because I may be able to buy cheaper books in other places such as Dangdang. Why would I buy from a place like Luoji Siwei? That's because I very much agree with Lao Luo's recommendation and evaluation of this book.

Learning community: We have to mention Chaos Study Society. It is also a community that cooperated with us 31 very early, the Disruptive Innovation Study Group. Defined as China's first Internet self-organized learning community. In fact, this kind of Internet learning community has a huge impact on traditional learning. Many of my friends in business schools ask me: Why can a study group complete the registration and sale of a course for 1,000 people within 3 hours? We can have a discussion afterwards.

Yanxishe and 31 have collaborated on a very interesting scenario-based application: free lectures and rewards for satisfaction. The course is free, and if users feel that what they hear is worthwhile, they can give a reward to the teacher. We say that the future is an era of consumer pricing. This model actually means that if you think my knowledge is good, you will pay for it. In this process, a lot of knowledge will be consumed reasonably.

2. Community Construction and Operation

1. Community building

Everyone is more concerned about how to build a community from 0 to 1. Through my own practice, I have sorted out these experiences. I think there are four steps to building a good community:

Find like-minded people : Find people with the same hobbies and interests. To maintain the activity of a group, usually when people in the group have the same interests and hobbies, the activity will be very high, but if there are all kinds of people in the group, its activity will be relatively low.

But who are your target members? What kind of people should I bring in? So find people with similarities.

How to do community positioning well? Do you want to be a product-based community or a knowledge-based community? Having a clear positioning is very important for your future operations.

How to find the first members in the community? The role of the initial core members is very important. When you first start operating, you must have a group of people who strongly identify with the value of your community and are willing to build this community with you.

Fixed structure:

• Composition members: Many people started to quickly pull in traffic from QQ, Moments, etc. In fact, there needs to be a sense of rhythm in the entire community meeting process.
• Communication platform: Is it necessary to be on WeChat group, QQ or other platforms?
• Joining principles and management norms: What is the screening and invitation mechanism of the community? Everyone is discussing the decentralization of communities. Any organization has its own rules, which does not affect centralized or decentralized operations. It is very difficult to operate without rules.

Smart operation:

How can I make my operations more streamlined? Here are a few points:

• Sense of ritual: Sometimes when we join a group, we will find several phenomena. Some people like to post photos, some people like to post business cards, and sometimes the group owner will help to introduce people. This is actually a sense of ritual for joining the group. The first is to make community members feel respected, and the second is to increase mutual understanding among community members.
• Sense of participation: How to organize group sharing and what tips can improve group vitality.
• Sense of organization: How to collaborate. Every member of the community has the potential to collaborate with you in organizing the community.
• Sense of belonging: Why do we do offline activities? How to conduct offline activities?

Can copy:

When establishing a core community, how to quickly replicate it into other communities. This involves two points: whether a core group has been formed; and whether self-organization and core culture have been established.

This culture is what we call a sense of identity, and this value point needs to be jointly established by partners in the core group. The summary is as follows:

Building a group: positioning well, building sentiment, and designing hot products;

Seed users: In the initial stage of group building, it is recommended that you start with 100 people, which is a relatively appropriate number and can help you verify your operating methods, content, activities, etc. Then it will slowly expand, usually with some turning points at 1,000 people;

Maintain and create topics: One way is for our own operating partners to create topics, so can we also let our community partners create and produce them together? I once visited a women's community where these women loved flowers very much. After ordering certain flowers, they would definitely take them out to show off, which would become a spontaneous topic. The next step is to spread it to more communities in the same way.

2. Some examples

Here I would like to talk about a community case: Funiutang.

I guess this is the most popular rice noodle shop in China. It has a community called Bamanshe, which is a living community for young people from Hunan in Beijing. The current valuation of Funiutang should be over 100 million.

For them, their rice noodles may not be the most delicious, but their rice noodles are the purest. This community has a characteristic: joining the community requires a somewhat complicated ceremony, and there are many review conditions. The group owner will chat with each group member to understand your true situation and whether you can identify with his culture, etc. Only those who agree will pass the review. In the process of joining the Baman Society, the sense of ceremony is given great importance, so this can also be used as a reference.

I have done testing before. We usually have a lot of groups, and everyone always wants to know who are my biggest fans or friends in my group. I told you to make a very complicated survey form and put it in the group, and whoever helps you fill it out will be your loyal fans.

The planning and operation of the brand community group are summarized as follows:

When planning, there should be certain plans for product and brand portraits, fan portraits, community strategies and models, event content, etc.

In terms of operation, it can be summarized into several points:

• Origin: Find 100 initial launchers and establish the model with feelings and ultimate experience;
• Inflection point: When your community reaches 1,000 people, you should promptly increase participation, interaction and sharing to maintain the activity of your 1,000-person community; Explosion point: When the community reaches 10,000 people;
• Hot spot: This cannot be solved with traditional organizational management methods, but requires building a community ecosystem and conducting circle interactions. And one problem is that you will abandon some of your community members because they may not be part of your community. After the explosion point appears, circles will definitely appear.

Summarize the key points of community operation:

• Sense of participation: ways of signing in, scoring, discussing, and sharing;
• Sense of organization: defining rules, how to mobilize the crowd (helping each other), crowd benefits, crowdfunding;
• Sense of belonging: How to promote communication and gathering through online and offline activities;
• Sense of ceremony: Introducing yourself, posting photos, etc. add a sense of ceremony.

Brand reversal management strategy in the social era:

The logic in the industrial age is: first you need to be well-known, and then form customer loyalty through reputation; in the mobile community era, I think it is a reverse process, because only when there is great loyalty will your product have great reputation and popularity. Just like I would buy books from Luoji Siwei, I am a fan of Lao Luo so I would agree with his evaluation of some books.

Start with a small number of “brainless fans”, whom we call core members of the community. They will support your product design, brand promotion and channel marketing.

The core idea of ​​community operation is what I call content with attitude + circle interaction + mutual benefit through sharing.

First of all, the content must have its own attitude, and then different groups of people should have different interactions. Thirdly, the community belongs to everyone, and we want every member of the community to gain something from themselves. This is a core idea of ​​community operation.

3. Digital operations

After talking about the construction, planning and operation of the community, I would also like to say that the operation method of the community in the Internet era is no longer something that requires a lot of manpower. I myself am very interested in some data-based operations, that is, digital community operations. Its core is dataization: how to digitize the dynamic behaviors of users in the community, grasp a trend of users, and provide a direction for future operations.

The overall idea of ​​digital communities is basically this:

In the initial stage, we introduce members, identify them, and then connect them. So how do we activate our members? This is a new customer marketing method formed by using community methods in many commercial enterprises. A very common method now is to send red envelopes in the group. Ultimately it is about member conversion. If our community has a business model, we ultimately hope that community members can be converted into consumers of the business model.

The following pyramid diagram is a presentation of the overall idea:

The key point in community operation is the management of community members. Community members are the basic core of the community, so the behavioral trajectories, interactive communication records, member classification management, member levels and interests of community members all need to be digitized.

Let’s look at another picture. There are many labels on the head of the person below. We often mention a term called user portrait. I think it is to materialize the virtual character through labeling, including the basic attributes of gender and age, as well as additional attributes such as what activities the person has participated in, whether he has signed in, whether he has interacted, and some interests, hobbies, consumption and other attributes. When these attributes are labeled, a three-dimensional image will be constructed at the data level.

Let me give you an interesting example: One of our users is a company that does human resources recruitment. It holds many job fairs with about 3,000 people every year. One time, it told me that I could label all these people. At each job fair, 10% of the people found jobs, while 90% couldn’t. I would label the remaining people and send them the corresponding job position information at the next job fair. The 10% of people who find jobs also need to be managed. After a year, these people should have room for advancement, and we will send them corresponding job information with higher career paths. This is an example of a user portrait.

Another one is the intimacy between members and the community: it is used to quantify the relationship between community members and the community.

31 has a digitally operated community tool platform. We have developed a very interesting feature called intimacy, which uses dimensions such as the number of classes attended, the number of interactions participated in, the number of offline activities, and even consumption behavior and amount to form a visual display of intimacy.

We conducted a very interesting test with a training organization. Through data analysis, we divided all its members into three categories: top students, good students, and poor students. We then generated a page and sent it to each member. We found that these pages were shared, and we calculated the effect value after sharing. 70% of the effect came from 30% of the top students. This data means that the top students have a high degree of intimacy with your community. What kind of attributes will these top students have? The first is that they are willing to consume your community products. The second is that they are willing to help you recommend new students. The third is that they will give you a lot of product suggestions. Many top students in the academy volunteer to become administrators of certain groups.

For these community members with very high intimacy, if we have a business model, then they are our best users and we should do some marketing activities to them. They identify with your products and brands and are willing to consume your products and services, so you should market to these people more and at the same time give them better services and care so that they can enjoy more privileges.

Let me give you an example here: we used data to classify all of Joy City’s customers. They are the practical type, the super fan, the fashion addict, the object fetishist, the literary type, and the social person. All of their product definition areas are designed for these six types of customers. I think this is also a way to solve actual business problems through user profiling and data-based operations.

To sum up, if we want to carry out data-driven operations, we need to open up all the meridians, just like practicing martial arts.

The first is to open up the system. In the Internet age, how should communities function? The next step is to connect your products, data, interactions, traffic, transactions, users and delivery. Opening up these eight meridians will make your community operations easier. When we talk about community operations, one point that must be connected is the virtual identity and real identity in social networks. We chat with the operations staff of many WeChat public accounts and ask them how they are doing now that they have so many fans. They will say that they have a lot of tags and a lot of data. I would ask a question: These people are a social identity in your WeChat account, how do you connect with this real person?

3. Exploration of community business models

Everyone is more concerned about whether some business models will emerge from building communities. The core of the community business model still lies in your product: the product is the entrance, the user is the asset, and the community is the business model. The product is actually 1, and the community is 0. It needs the product as a carrier to proceed.

Here is a framework for a community business model

Most communities are now doing three things: The first thing is to establish communities and gather traffic. In the second step of community monetization, there are several ways: one is to collect membership fees; another is to convert it into training, like Chaos Study Club; and the other is through product marketing. Continuing down the framework, there is another thing called investment. During the operation of the community, several types of people will definitely emerge. Many communities will have investment behaviors to a certain extent, such as crowdfunding or project investment, etc.

Case 1: Let’s look at a few examples of communities. The first one is Live for me. This community is defined as a high-end women's community. I can summarize it as women who are rich, have free time and have high demands.

At the beginning, Zhang Heng set out to find 100 female friends who were good-looking, wealthy, and willing to support his entrepreneurship. Then he created a brand called "Little Black Mask" for facial mask products. People in the community had such a demand, so he created such a brand and then sold the products back to these people. Then he created a membership system. You can see that his members are divided into several types: elite members, black card members, and investment members. Different members enjoy different benefits; later it moved towards crowdsourcing and crowdfunding business; and finally it became C2B business, building its own business model. So why do C2B cost purchasing? First of all, it is a membership system. Let members enjoy the benefits. I use my own costs to achieve what you want. Only then will you be willing to pay the membership fee and make a profit through crowdfunding.

There is a trick when it comes to the membership system: many times in some domestic environments it is difficult to get a member to fill out a membership form and pay 1,000 yuan. In actual operations, there are many ways. For example, there will be a course taught by a big name, which is only worth 3,000, but it is free for members. When you go to class and find out it is a membership course, you will be guided to pay. At this time, your mentality will change. You will still fill out the form and pay the money, but you will weigh the pros and cons to maximize your own interests.

Case 2: The second one is Wu Xiaobo Channel, which is also a community that has been cooperating with the 31st Conference for a long time. Let’s take a look at his community model.

At the beginning, he had 1 million fans and many QQ groups, 60% of whom were boys. 60% of them were born in the 80s and 90s and were concentrated in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Based on the huge QQ group, he started to do offline activities: turning these communities into interest groups through self-organization, and then merging the groups into large interest groups through some rules: for example, financial management groups, travel groups, creative groups, etc. There will be a lot of offline activities in this large group. In this process, Wu Xiaobo Channel used crowdfunding, charity, cafe renovation, etc. to realize commercialization.

Case 3: Let’s take a look at Luoji Siwei. As we all know, it used to sell many different things. Now the biggest business model of Luoji Siwei is through books. Many niche books are first released on Luoji Siwei. A profit point is generated through books, and then these books will be used in other ways. As you all know, Luoji Siwei now offers free membership, but it used to charge a fee, so Luoji Siwei has completed a transformation from a membership fee model to a book profit model.

Case 4: Teacher Li Shanyou’s Chaos Study Society also has its own business model. Now the study group has two kinds of membership: one is called the hardcore member at 3,000 yuan per year; the other is the city online member at 600 yuan per year. It is actually an Internet business school that allows you to gain a lot of knowledge. It now has tens of thousands of members.

Finally, let’s make a summary, which is called the community matrix summary. From content to interaction to mutual benefit is a relatively complete process, which gradually realizes a transformation of community operation and business model.

The summary of the community is as follows. Before you start a community, you may wish to take a closer look at these contents.

Another thing is how we promote and operate the community

There are many communities now, and many friends are working on them. Finally, I would like to say that I believe every community should find a way of survival that suits it and embrace the community economy.

Download the PPT for this sharing: http://pan.baidu.com/s/1kVnP94r Password: qyer

Here are some questions asked by our friends:

Q1. Is the 31st conference itself building a community?

Answer: 31 is also working on communities. In fact, 31 is a tool provider in the event and conference market and a B2B enterprise. Everyone is discussing B2B enterprise communities. I don’t think 31 is very successful in the B2B community right now. We are still exploring the possibilities.

31 now has two types of communities: one is the user community, which allows us to have more ways to interact with users and give us suggestions. 31 will also find more entrepreneurial opportunities through communities, allowing our customers to learn more about 31's products; the second type of community is some of 31's C-end users, who are concerned about how to find good conference information through 31. 31 does this more through official accounts. Because the volume is relatively large, we push content through the official account to let them participate in some of our things, such as conference sharing or ticket grabbing, etc.

Q2. Conference activities are a low-frequency and rigid demand. How can we retain users?

Answer: In fact, I found that many conference organizers are discussing this issue with me. Large exhibitions have hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. For traditional exhibitions, people just leave and then they go. The second exhibition requires a lot of advertising invitations to gather these people again. So the organizer discussed with me: How can we keep these people at the meeting? How to design a lot of services during the meeting to help these people retain? For example, we will create a public account to provide a registration portal, venue navigation, conference services, and even information about exhibitors' products. We will put interactive content in the public account to help retain content.

Afterwards, we will do a lot of online interactions and questionnaires to separate these groups. By gradually accumulating information, we can conduct more accurate publicity and push in the next event to let them know the content they are interested in. Therefore, low-frequency meetings can also achieve staff retention, which is a subsequent derivative of the business and influence of low-frequency meetings. Including the fact that we were previously in a relatively cold place and could only hold exhibitions for a few months a year. How can we have a continuous online interaction with people who have participated in the exhibition under such conditions? Can we move the exhibition online? These are also some of the topics that everyone is discussing.

Q3. What should I do if the community becomes enthusiastic only when red envelopes are distributed, but becomes quiet after the red envelopes are grabbed?

Answer: Have you ever found that in the group you are in, only 10% of the people are playing with you, and most of the people in it are either blocked or just watching? I think everyone in the group should not think that if the group is very cold or very hot, there must be something wrong. I think the group is actually a management tool. Now many people's method is "I have a group, I turn the people in the group into my fans; the second is that I have fans, I put them in the group to interact. These are some ways and methods. In the end, you have to find a way to present the data of the people in these groups. This is a relatively large value. Your interaction with them is not limited to what you do in the group.

If you really want to set up some business groups and make them popular, there are ways to do it by sending red envelopes. Let me give you an example: We have a client who is a product agent, and his group is for buying things. He sends out red envelopes like this: more than a dozen people will continue to send red envelopes in the group every hour. Only after the group is activated will he carry out some rush buying activities. There are requirements for this. The prerequisite is that the group members must be interested in your product. You just use the method of sending red envelopes to activate them. You can try many community management tool assistants to help you operate your group.

Q4. How to count user behavior?

Answer: User behavior can be divided into offline behavior and online behavior. How does 31 do this? We use 31meijia to automatically record users' behaviors. For example, when I register online, I will fill out some forms and write my information. These data will be collected and labeled as having participated in this event. An online questionnaire will also be collected, online likes will be collected, and online purchases of a product will also be collected.

We also have many offline methods. For example, there may be some electronic check-in methods such as scanning codes when participating in offline events. The behavioral data of on-site lotteries, interactions, and guessing games will be automatically saved, labeled, and grouped. A database will be formed. How to count you? The key is what you want. We have a client who makes cosmetics. She will group people by region and recommend acne-removing products to people in Chengdu and moisturizing products to people in Beijing. Before each new product is launched, she will send a lot of pictures and texts, and questionnaires. In this process, she will collect statistics on users' interests, hobbies and tendencies, and finally analyze the data of the people she wants, and carry out corresponding promotion and publicity.

Q5. It is difficult to build a community from scratch and a product from 0 to 1. What should we do when starting from scratch?

Answer: I have run two communities that have failed. The key point is that in the initial stage of establishing a community, you must define your own products and content well. Often in the later stages you will find that without good products and content it is simply not possible.

A friend just said that Xiaomi has lost a lot of fans. Is their social media operation method outdated? So the product and content are 1, and the community is the 0 behind it. It is very important to build a community based on good products and content. When you are building a community, don’t rush to expand it. Instead, first polish your product in a small community.