[Practical Tips] Tencent Senior Product Manager: Talking about Operations with Seven Emotions and Six Desires

What is Operations

When it comes to operations, there are many aspects that people want to know, such as: how to carry out a high-profile operation with low cost for tool products, how to build a community website from an unknown one to a well-known one, etc. What I want to share with you today are some Internet products and operating methods that combine human nature. I have many cases to share with you, and I will not summarize them into set rules. The Internet is unpredictable, and it is difficult to have a single methodology that can unify the entire world, just as it is difficult to have a single panacea that can cure all diseases. I hope that this case study can help everyone think, so that when facing future planning and operations, they can take into account the weaknesses of human nature and make operations that are more in line with human nature. Many students who work in operations have this feeling that operations are like doing miscellaneous tasks, doing everything, including content editing, activities, promotion, item design, etc. It feels like operations are a hodgepodge.

So, what is operation? From a broad perspective, all manual intervention surrounding website products is called operations. To be more specific, operations are the process of marketing products through content, channels, etc. to different groups, and optimizing operational methods, product functions and experiences through data indicators. Products are like giving birth to children, and operations are like raising children. Product + operation; only then can a product operate normally and truly play a role; and achieve coordinated operations.

What problems will operations encounter when facing "people"

Attracting new users, attracting active users and attracting remaining users are the three common modes of operations targeting people. What I want to share with you today is the human nature operations hidden deep in people's hearts behind them.

Attract new users: How to attract more new users to the product. Attract active users: How to make involved users active. Attract subtracted users: How to make settled users become active and active users continue to be active.

About Humanity

A good product and operation must cater to one of the seven deadly sins of human nature. This quote comes from Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and an extremely successful venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Humanity refers to a concept, which is specifically reflected in the fact that it can be beautiful and based on consumers' living habits and operating habits, and be convenient for consumers. It can not only meet consumers' functional demands, but also meet consumers' psychological needs. To use the most popular words nowadays, good products, operations and services must find the user's pain points. The empiricism of the Internet can help us judge and find these pain points and needs, but if we trace back to the source, where do users’ pain points, needs, or desires come from? What are they? How does it affect our product planning and operations?

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Let's look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The most basic level is people's physiological needs, including food and sex. After their survival and safety needs are met, people desire to be respected and hope that their personality and self-worth will be recognized.

Self-actualization needs respect, belonging, security, physiological needs: food, sex, and

Analysis of the five weaknesses of human nature

The nature behind human beings can be explained by a movie called "Seven Deadly Sins". The seven deadly sins are: pride, envy, wrath, laziness, greed, gluttony and lust.

In a limited time, we will focus on sharing five of them, hoping that it will be helpful for everyone in product operations, especially social product operations. Why mention social products? YY previously worked at Mop as a forum operator and established an online radio station. He then came to Tencent to work on QQ Space and operate Penguin FM, all of which are based on relationships between people. Social products cater to, induce and amplify the humanity of each individual, and restore, transfer and reconstruct the relationships between people in the entire society.

The five weaknesses of human nature: lust, vanity, greed, laziness, and snooping

Lust: Let’s first look at the most primitive side of human nature: lust

Desire is people's most primitive and instinctive physiological need. From the early days of dial-up Internet access to the present day, there is a type of website that has remained standing. Can you guess what it is? It’s not QQ or games, it’s adult websites that have always stood the test of time. Now it has evolved into various forms of making friends, sharing common interests, etc., satisfying the most primitive needs of human nature. From adult books and CDs to the era when mobile phone text messages were popular, operations combining lust have never left the user's sight, using high-definition photos of beautiful women to make users involuntarily send text messages from ** to **, satisfying the original demands of psychological instincts. Gradually, pictures can no longer satisfy people, and with the popularization of broadband, video products have been derived. In 2011, QVOD rose rapidly by converting BT seeds directly into online videos. Its search volume continued to surpass QQ and became the number one client software in Baidu's search volume. This model was reused by Baidu, which launched a similar product, Baidu Video, in February 2011. There are also many video websites that benefit from lust, a human weakness. For example, when I went to Taiwan on May 1, I saw someone on the MRT subway wearing headphones and watching a certain type of pornographic video on YouTube. This form of video that can only be watched but not interacted with gradually failed to meet the needs of users, and video chat rooms began to spread. The more famous one in the early days was the 9185 video chat room, which was replaced by YY Voice, 6 Rooms, Guagua Video, and there are also video live broadcast rooms in Baidu Tieba.

About two or three years ago, I was doing market research in an Internet cafe in a third-tier city. I found a lot of wretched old men in there, staring at their computers intently, whispering and giggling from time to time. When I got closer, I saw that they were looking at six rooms. Of course, no matter how lively the online scene is, the ultimate goal of hooking up still has to be done offline, so various products in the name of making friends and interests have emerged. A few years ago, the word "dating" did not exist, and we called this behavior online dating. In fact, online dating is very normal. I wonder if anyone here has ever had an online dating history. There is a colleague in our group named Dandan, who is our colleague who does security audits. He met his wife through online dating. It is said that she helped this girl decorate her QQ space. She did not do anything stupid. Now she has a baby and is a very good, quiet and handsome man. Speaking of social software for hooking up, what is it? What's the first thing that comes to your mind? Some people mentioned Momo, and Momo officials have always stated that this was just a beautiful misunderstanding.

When Momo first realized that users understood it in this way, it was probably reluctant to give in. Later, Momo has been developing its layout around interests, groups, games, etc. Or we can say that some social products led by Momo that combine voice and location to meet strangers are emerging in an endless stream. There are many similar apps, such as YuJia, YouJia, BiLin, MeiLiYue, Duimian, YouYuan, HuaTian, ​​and one called Friction. I don't know if it's because I've heard too much about "My Skateboard Shoes", but when I think about it, it's a very descriptive and connotative name. The earliest products of this type typically attracted users by drawing on the most primitive human need, lust, among the seven deadly sins.

The advantage is that it can reach the user's pain points through this instinctive human need, which is what we often call rigid demand, and form viral transmission, but the disadvantage is that the sustainability is poor, the community atmosphere is difficult to maintain, and it is also difficult to find revenue points. Momo is relatively successful in this transformation. Let’s take a look at WeChat, which was launched by Tencent in January 2011. It has developed from a simple communication application to an integrated platform with a public platform, game center, shopping and payment. Shake is an important node in the development history of the product. Many lustful people regard WeChat as an important function. Statistics from Caoliu also show that WeChat is the most popular app for people who really go to Caoliu.

Speaking of Caoliu, there is a set of data and revenue charts that have been very popular on the Internet. From the pictures, it can be seen that Caoliu has a daily revenue of about 300,000 yuan. Of course, the data here are likely to be fabricated. Regardless of how much revenue it has, let’s take a few minutes to briefly introduce Caoliu and its profit model. Relevant data of a certain community: The average daily visits to the website exceed 30 million; the number of stable active users is close to 14 million; the average stay time of users is 32 minutes; an average of 400 films are released every day, and the cumulative number of downloads for each film is as high as 100,000 times; an average of 10,000 posts are updated every day, the average number of visits to each post is 300,000 times, and the economic benefit of each post is 30 to 50 US dollars.

The website's daily revenue is at least $300,000 to $500,000. The Caoliu community was created in 2006. Its server is located in Colorado, USA. The actual controllers are several Chinese Americans. Caoliu mainly makes profits through cooperation with advertising alliances and online storage companies. In terms of advertising profits, there is a blank area at the bottom of each post on the website, which is the advertising space. If you put a website alliance in it, it will automatically match the advertisements over there, and then charge a fee on a click basis with the website alliance. You can get a certain amount of money for each click by a user. At the same time, we cooperate with online storage companies and share the rewards with users. The distribution of activation codes is not a direct profit model, because the activation codes are distributed to internal users. Users who distribute films and seeds in Caoliu can earn points and can buy activation codes. After the activation codes are purchased, they can be sold to the outside. You can search on Taobao or other e-commerce websites, where many people sell activation codes.

In addition to Caoliu, there are also content apps such as Tianwang Gaidihu, Encyclopedia of Embarrassing Stories about Chicken and Mushroom Stew, and Drawer New Hot List. Many contents related to lust are carefully selected by editors, which deeply attract users' primitive physiological needs. There is also Douban, which is full of literary and fresh temperament, and is also a typical example of socializing and making friends based on common interests. As well as the secret launched by Wu Mi Company, now renamed You Mi, which exposes countless company gossip secrets. Later, Secret launched private chat functions and group chats, which greatly improved the success index of appointments. Lust is the most instinctive need of human nature and one of the effective ways for products and operations to spread spontaneously at the beginning. Various functions have been derived around establishing connections between people, such as shake, people nearby, private chat, group chat, and so on. There are also many areas where we can focus our efforts in operations, such as the types of activities, the "Breast Beauty Contest" previously held by Mop and Taobao, the beauty guild in the game, and upgrading to get married; for example, the beautiful anchors in YY voice, and differentiated operations that divide users into different levels. As the patron saint of the beautiful anchors, you can drive a Ferrari into the venue, etc. In addition to satisfying the primitive needs of human nature, it also satisfies the second greatest need of human nature: vanity.

To summarize, the main product types of lust are: 1. Pictures 2. Videos: QVOD surpassed QQ to become the number one search keyword thanks to lust, and Baidu Video was born in 2011. 3. Interactive operations represented by 9158, YY Video, and Liujianfang are not just about watching and listening. 4. Hookup tools: They do not necessarily represent negative information. In the past, they were represented by online dating, but now they are represented by meeting, adding friends, friction, friendly neighbors, and strangers.

i'm rich! This is probably one of the most direct apps to show off wealth in history. It is the most expensive app priced at $999 and has only one function: when it is opened, a ruby ​​wallpaper will be displayed, indicating that I am rich. Although the app was later removed from Apple's shelves, its developer still made a profit because 8 people still bought the app during its online period. Last year, when Microsoft's Windows Phone store opened, the developer launched the WP version of I'm Rich for $499 (it has also been removed from the shelves). Baidu Magic Photo In July 2013, the Baidu Magic Photo application suddenly became popular. The reason for its popularity was the "PK Big Name" function, which combined with Baidu's facial recognition technology to scan user profile pictures, find the most similar celebrity photos and share them on social networks. Satisfy users' vanity of comparing themselves with celebrities. The Space Watermark Camera also launched a similar function - identity verification. After Fan Bingbing’s version of The Empress of China became a hit in the TV series a while ago, the Space Watermark Camera product team quickly launched the Empress of China makeup, which immediately triggered various celebrity shows. How-Old, the age show that went viral on WeChat Moments a few days ago, also combines people’s vanity with human nature. Short holidays such as May 1st are the peak periods for people to upload photos. Taking into account the users' love of showing off and competing, Space Album plans to launch the 51 Crazy God List. Using the number of photos uploaded, cities visited and other data as the underlying algorithm, a series of user titles are calculated, such as "Stay-at-Home" and "Crash Commander". The daily peak of space photo uploads during the 5.1 period was 650 million, of which 10% of the photos came from the Crazy God List event.

In the Internet age, the power of self-vanity and self-satisfaction may be beyond your imagination. The bigger your vanity, the bigger the market.

Gluttony and greed (avaritia & gula) - the desire to have more than one actually needs

What is greed?

Greed is the desire to possess more than what is needed, which means wanting to get more than the limited needs. Just like gambling, many people want to win more after they win, which is due to people’s greed. If gambling is too far away from our lives, I believe many people have heard of or played Texas Hold'em. The mechanism of gambling with hole cards is the most suitable for stimulating the gambling and greed in human nature. To put it simply, greed means being greedy for bargains. There are many manifestations of greed in daily life. I don’t know how many girls here buy cosmetics for samples. In fact, we don’t really need those samples, but we just think it is more cost-effective and worthwhile. We can get an extra sample set for the same money. In recent years, what product operations and functions on the Internet have exploited human greed? Which products and functions meet people's psychological demands?

In the future, many users will receive small profits from merchants, whether it is gas, a meal, or a set of free photos for their babies, and they will keep spreading the news to their friends and asking for likes. Let’s take a look at Xiaomi mobile phone. In just three years, Xiaomi mobile phone has become the No. 1 best-selling mobile phone in China. I believe many people will wonder why Xiaomi is so successful. Initially, Xiaomi focused on enthusiasts. What do you think was the reason for its successful marketing and success? Some people say it is because of the high cost performance, some people say it is hungry marketing, in fact, it is ultimately because of the low price. From 1999 to 1699, and then after the price reduction, the Redmi is only sold for 699. In the final analysis, Xiaomi is targeting the psychology of ordinary users who are greedy for bargains. For ordinary users, they don’t know what MIUI is, what Qualcomm quad-core and Qualcomm dual-core are, they only know that Xiaomi phones are cheap, presentable, and not easy to buy. Let’s take a look at another miracle created by an Internet product.

Last year's Taobao Double 11 Shopping Festival achieved a record of 30 billion in 10 hours and 51 minutes, and 57.1 billion throughout the day. I wonder how many of you here also contributed. Have you noticed that in the past two years, especially this year, almost all e-commerce websites are rushing to celebrate Double 11. Mogujie, Jumei, and even JD.com are also introducing the concept of Double 11. Some products are only sold online at special prices, and even the packaging has "Double 11 special offer" written on it. This was not available in the early days, and even many terms and jokes have been derived, such as "hand-cutting party" and "buy, buy, buy". So, why is Double 11 so popular? Including myself, I have been hoarding facial masks and hand sanitizers for nearly a year? In front of it, I feel like a lower creature completely controlled by dopamine and adrenaline, not much different from the hound in Pavlov's experiment. Do I really need so much? Or was it my greed that instigated me to buy, or was it the saying "want to possess more than what is needed"? Greed gave rise to the desire to shop. When encountering cheap and discounted things, the human greed of possessing more will be doubly sprouted, as if those things were free. . If you don’t buy during the discount period, you will lose money. You may even think that the more you buy, the more you will earn.

Let’s take a look at the network disk

In the operation of Internet products, cloud storage makes very good use of users' greedy nature. There has been a "race" in the capacity of online disks, and the concept of cloud platform has been hotly debated. After Baidu's marketing of "100GB capacity for one year at 20 cents", Kingsoft QuickPan, which successfully raised its A round of financing, added 100GB of permanent free space to each user. 360, which knows its users' psychology well, also started an activity of giving users 360GB of permanent free space. Just like that, with so much “joy” on Weibo, the capacity of the online disk that was between 5GB and 10GB a few days ago instantly doubled to 100GB/400GB. But, can ordinary users use up hundreds of GB of network disk? Some of the students below may use up all of it. Friends who like photography can store high-definition photos and high-definition movies. I saw several students laughing silently. The picture was too beautiful and I dared not to look at it. This is the form of online disk in China. It seems to be different abroad. Microsoft has reduced the free space capacity for new SkyDrive users from 25GB to 7GB. Microsoft has conducted a user survey and found that 99.94% of online disk users only used capacity below 7GB. User needs can be met, but users’ greedy desires are difficult to be truly satisfied.

So why should we participate in the activities if we can’t use all the users? Because users are greedy! For the vast majority of ordinary users, the larger the capacity, the better. They only pursue the maximum capacity without considering their actual needs. Kingsoft and 360 take advantage of users' greedy mentality of "wanting more" and make users actively promote their products. This once again proves that "user needs can be met, but users' greedy desires are difficult to be truly satisfied." Tencent has many businesses, especially many diamonds, and it takes advantage of users' greed to operate products, such as yellow diamonds for space, membership business, blue diamonds for games, and green diamonds for music. Many activities take advantage of users' greedy nature, such as "Recharge xx annual fee now and get xx free", or "Recharge xx now and win xx prize". Many users have been charging diamonds for 10 or 30 years. Is it because it is not enough? No, because they want more. The space check-in function operates at the profit-seeking human nature and the demand for traffic, so it launched the "sign-in and get free traffic activity".

The total number of participants exceeded 10 million, with a peak of 300,000 participants per day. QQ Space users received more than 40,000G of traffic through this event. I don’t know if everyone here has experienced this, but I have a very deep feeling about it, including my relatives and colleagues, especially pregnant mothers. They choose to buy milk powder and diapers from overseas, and buy children’s toys and daily necessities online. I have a very deep experience myself. I go shopping less and less, and buy more things online, including clothes, socks, daily necessities, and even fruits. I buy a lot of them online and they are delivered directly to my home and at my doorstep. I don’t have to carry them back. This is what I will talk about below, laziness.

Lazy

Students who work in product and operations often say: users are very lazy. There is a very famous book that product managers must read called "Don't make me think". Based on many years of professional experience, the author analyzes the user's psychology and puts forward many unique viewpoints on user usage patterns, navigation design, homepage layout, etc., and provides a large number of simple and easy-to-implement usability design suggestions. That is, how to make users reduce their thinking, or preferably not think at all.

Internet products are no exception. Here are a few emerging Internet industries:

Audiobooks :

Recently, more and more people have mentioned Lazy Listening, Himalaya Radio, and Listening to Books Bag. There are also vertical apps such as parent-child apps and our company's wholly-owned subsidiary Baby Listening, as well as various children's story-related listening apps. People are gradually getting used to using videos and audiobooks instead of traditional reading. On the way home on the subway, many people listen to "Things about the Ming Dynasty" and "Grave Robbers' Chronicles" with their eyes closed. There are so many product operations and application scenarios that can be combined with LanDe, such as one-click selection of all, fingerprint unlocking of WeChat and QQ, QR code, remembering this login, multi-platform synchronization, including one-click search of Baidu, etc. In the field of food, you can now order food directly by searching on Google and entering the name of a restaurant you want to order from. The premise is that these restaurants are connected to food ordering service platforms such as Seamless, GrubHub, Eat24, Delivery.com, BeyondMenu and MyPizza.com. Recently, the children's robot company Wonder Workshop received US$6.9 million in Series A financing. Perhaps in the future, the one accompanying children will no longer be a nanny, but a cute robot that can speak various languages, various Tang and Song poems, as well as nursery rhymes and stories. It may be Doraemon or Baymax. The subtext of "lazy" is convenient, lightweight, easy to operate and fast user experience. When we do operations and product planning, the first thing we need to focus on is how to make users lazy and happy.

While users are too lazy to think and operate, we must also pay attention to protecting their privacy from being leaked, because there is a darker side of human nature called snooping.

Snoop:

The word "voyeurism" sounds quite academic. To put it simply, it refers to the curiosity and gossip about unknown people and things around us. We want to know other people's privacy, but at the same time we don't want to expose our own. This is human nature. As the Internet becomes increasingly developed, privacy is becoming more and more important to us, but it is also becoming more and more difficult to protect. We often receive various inexplicable calls. Behind the Internet, on the other side of the screen, many people are curious about their privacy. So what are the ways and products that can satisfy our desire to spy on human nature? The first thing to mention is anonymous social networking. When various analysts were pessimistic about the anonymous social networking field, on July 15 last year, the American anonymous social application Secret announced that it had received US$25 million in Series B financing, with a valuation of US$100 million. At this time, Secret was only founded for 9 months. On April 30 this year, Secret announced its closure. At the same time, Whisper appointed a new vice president, Mark Troughton, and announced that the number of active users in a single month reached 10 million, and the number of application openings per hour exceeded 1 million. This was also the first time that Whipser released its user data. Why are there such huge differences between the two services in the same private social networking field? Many people in the Internet industry are analyzing that due to their different user groups, they do a better job in confidentiality and preventing cyber violence.

Yik Yak, a 1,500-meter anonymous LBS-based social application, has been used by 1,600 college campuses in just one and a half years. Within a few months of its launch, Yik Yak had been downloaded 100,000 times. Yik Yak now has millions of monthly active users. In December last year, Sequoia Capital, a well-known venture capital firm, led an investment of US$62 million in Yik Yak, with a valuation of US$400 million. In March this year, it received another US$11 million investment. Its success was so fast that it was unimaginable. This is undoubtedly a shot in the arm for domestic anonymous social products. Since Wumi became popular in the first half of the year, the field of anonymous social networking in China has been surging. Currently, the total number of anonymous social apps on the market has exceeded 20 applications of varying sizes: the earliest anonymous social networking app for strangers, Secret (founded by Wang Jian, then spun off for independent operation, and now a product of Inno Unlimited, with Zhang Hao as CEO), anonymous social apps among acquaintances include Wumi founded by Lin Chengren, Secret Chinese version, Crow, Hehe, Toast, BiBi, etc. Liu Cixin wrote in "The Three-Body Problem", "The dark forest has both harsh laws and hope for survival." Therefore, the living environment is full of dialectics: big trees block the sunlight, and small trees cannot survive in an environment without sunlight. But at the same time, in such a large space there is always a piece of land that is missed by the big trees, so we must discover it, occupy it, and gain great benefits with small efforts. It is this path that was chosen secretly!

Let’s take a look at the splash screen of the Toast app. Each one is a single point of entry.

With the popularity of acquaintance social networking represented by WeChat and LBS stranger social networking represented by Momo, the relationship between acquaintances and strangers has been over-exploited. Anonymous social networking among acquaintances meets the condition of high user participation and just meets the user's demand for prying. Youmi has launched private chat and group chat functions, people nearby, etc., and continuously attracts users to join by pushing group information. After looking at anonymous social Internet products, let’s take a look at privacy leakage and protection. With the increasing popularity of LBS, nearby xxx is almost omnipotently integrated into every scene of our lives. We are accustomed to checking nearby people, nearby groups, and nearby Weibo. Japan has an application called App Map, which can check the usage of nearby apps around the world.

This year, Apple also added a similar feature in the App Store in the latest iOS7, "Near Me", which allows you to view popular apps near you. Last year, Taobao Mobile launched a feature called "What People Nearby Are Buying" on its mobile terminal, which allows users to check what people nearby have bought. There are also some nearby services that combine lust. Xunlei once launched a feature called "Xunlei Neighborhood", which allows users to view nearby "movies". IJML is an LBS service similar to street check-in, but it records the location and situation where the user just made love. You can view Make Love photos of other people nearby in the app or on the web.

The above is to satisfy people's desire to peep and curiosity. Let’s take a look at which products are designed to protect user privacy. If you don't want your photos to be commented on or seen by strangers or non-friends, you can protect your privacy through settings. This feature is also available in Moments, and many colleagues choose to post photos in groups when they are on vacation or traveling during weekdays. Let’s look at a feature that has a very good reputation: Sina Weibo’s Quiet Follow, which is a good combination of people’s desire to follow someone but not want to be discovered by the other person. I remember that our RTX had a feature called Secret Love, where you could click to like someone.

How to face human nature operation happily

The above are the five human points that I shared with you today. We face up to human weaknesses and meet users’ spiritual, material, convenience and other multi-level needs with the help of product functions and operation levels. Lust: combined with lbs, combined with like-minded social behaviors, users' original and rigid need to make friends Vanity: the love of beauty and showing off, user classification strategy Greed: give them more than expected. Let users feel that they have earned a lot of money. Laziness: don’t think, lower the threshold, and let users operate conveniently, lightly, and simply. Peeping: humanized functions that leave no traces.

The multifaceted nature of human nature: Of course, in addition to the five relatively dark sides of human nature, human nature also has many beautiful sides, such as justice, compassion, gratitude, and love.

Let’s take a look at the products that have changed the way people live:

The future will definitely belong to humans, robots, and everyone here. We look forward to more humane product operations and a better future!