How to build a community operation system based on business logic?

 As a means of operation, communities can be said to be almost unlimited in all industries and product attributes. For example, communities can be applied in the cold start phase of almost all products, such as the operation of old customers in e-commerce operations, the operation of moderators and expert users in community operations, the operation of lecturers and seed users in online education products.

In the current discussion on communities , there are many discussions on how communities are changing our business models from the perspective of macro models and era changes, as well as discussions on how good and effective community means are from a micro perspective. In fact, these arguments are not wrong and they all make sense, but all of these arguments are based on the premise that the community can be perfectly operated , that is, the ideal state of the community. However, in actual applications, the community cannot function in the way people expect because there are too many factors that affect it.

I read Clay Shirky's "Cognitive Surplus" and "The Future is Wet" (also known as: The Age of Everyone) in college. I have to say that Clay Shirky is one of the greatest thinkers in the field of the Internet. Cognitive surplus has been transformative for the development of the Internet. Whether it is Facebook, Weibo, or Moments, it is the power of cognitive surplus that has driven their development. Cognitive surplus also plays a particularly obvious role in community operations. Everyone can use their free time to share their knowledge and insights. Moreover, the community form itself is also a practice of the organizational form of the "Everyone Era" in "The Future is Wet". The community is no longer a centralized organization, and the organizational power of free organizations has been fully exerted. Based on love, justice, common interests and experiences, people can transcend the limitations of traditional society and flexibly and effectively use new social tools such as instant messaging, mobile phones, blogs and Wikipedia to connect with each other, share, cooperate and even take collective action. Isn’t this Clay Shirky’s most accurate definition of community? Now when I read Clay Shirky's book "The Future is Wet" again, I realized that it is the best example of community cognition.

Of course, the power of the community is strong, but the reality is cruel. The development of the times allows it to continuously release its influence, but this is an overall thinking about the community form under ideal conditions. Just like what Lei Jun said, "If you stand on the right vent, even a pig can fly", but this does not mean that all pigs can fly. Communities are currently very popular, but that does not mean that all communities can be operated. In fact, more than 90% of the communities in China are not actually called communities, or they are all unsuccessful.

Li Jiaoshou once wrote an article titled "Why you have read so many books but still lack insights". I would like to explain here why you have read so many articles on community management but still cannot manage a community well. This is your fault, but it’s not your fault either. What should I do if everyone who wants to create a community thinks that my community is not active? How can I make my group active? What activities do I need to do? How can we interact in the group to make everyone active? In fact, what I want to say is that even if you are given hundreds of methods, you may still not be able to operate a community well! Because you only consider it from the single point of community operation, and don’t think systematically about why your group is not active? Sometimes, if you are heading in the wrong direction, no matter how hard you try, it will be useless. If you don't find the root cause of the problem and just treat the symptoms, then this problem will recur frequently. Community operation is no exception. Can we consider from the root, how should I operate my community well? If we want to build a community, can you think clearly about the root cause instead of blindly following the trend?

Why do you want to build a community?

I think this is a question that everyone who is working on a community must consider. Have you thought clearly about why you want to build a community?

Brother Chao believes that we should think clearly about why we should build a community? Three aspects need to be considered:

Background: What was the background in which you considered building a community? This background not only refers to the entire industry background, but also includes the stage and current status of your company. Do you have what it takes to build a community? Can building a community bring value to your business? For feelings? That's all bullshit! Consider survival first, then development, and finally feelings~

Purpose: What is the purpose of your community? If you haven’t thought this through clearly, please don’t start a community! What’s the point of blindly creating hundreds of WeChat groups and tens of thousands of zombie fans?

You need to consider the following aspects when creating a community:

1. From the perspective of product attributes : From once in a lifetime to forever, the starting point here is whether you are serving a one-night stand customer or a long-term customer? For long-term customers, the purpose of building a community is to maintain a continuous relationship with customers, encourage them to continue purchasing or purchase value-added services and spread word-of-mouth based on this.

2. Customer value determination: discover growth points of customer value. If a company wants to build a community, it must first think about what value can be tapped from existing customers and new customers with similar attributes to existing customers? What kind of effect can it produce? Do you want them to become your seed users and form a marketing funnel, or to participate in your product iteration?

3. Model innovation determination: There are now many companies specializing in communities, hoping to discover new resources and opportunities through community operations. For example, Zhenghe Island focuses on being the first high-end network and value sharing platform in China's business community. Based on this community operation, it combines the community's resources and networks to launch website/client information, "Decision Reference", "Daily Recommendation" mobile newspaper, "micro-portal" for enterprises to see the world and other services. In addition, Zhenghe Magnetic Capital was incubated based on these networks and resources.

From the current perspective, most companies establish communities based on the first two purposes. Of course, there are also quite a few companies that don’t know why they want to build a community. They just think that they need to do everything they can to attract a group of users. However, most of them are useless.

Goal: This is thought around the purpose of the community. In the previous article, "This may be the most down-to-earth and clear-minded method of writing an operation plan ! 》As mentioned in the article, understanding the background is to better clarify the purpose of your doing this thing, the purpose is to clarify the direction of your doing this thing, and the goal is to measure the effect and value of your doing this thing. If we establish our own community based on a certain purpose, then we need to set corresponding goals, such as how many people should we limit the community to? What level of activity is considered effective in a community? How much quantifiable value can this community bring to us?

Have you done a good job in the top-level design of the community?

Have you made overall plans for all aspects, levels and elements of community operations from a global perspective? Are you prepared to concentrate effective resources to achieve your goals efficiently and quickly?

We can divide the top-level design of the community into three levels:

Concept level. It mainly refers to the community's vision, mission and values. Whether the main ideas or values ​​of your community can attract more people to join and make them identify with them is the key to the start of community operations. For example, I should be considered to have joined the Operations Research Society relatively early, and have participated in several member recruitment activities of the Operations Research Society. The main purpose of the Operation Research Society is to gather a group of operation practitioners and enthusiasts to jointly discuss operation topics and new ways of playing. The philosophy of the Operation Research Society is: do not let operators grow in loneliness. “At that time, I felt that I couldn’t stay alone at my workstation forever, and I needed to meet some great people, so I joined the Operations Research Club.” This was the original idea of ​​Operations Research Club member Shi Yu (Head of Design Group) when he joined the Operations Research Club (excerpted from “Operation Club 2.0 Recruitment: Getting Better Together”). I think many people who work in operations will agree with this idea and feel deeply about it. The role of ideological identification is very important, so companies must do a good job in conceptual design when building communities.

Planning level. I am in "Is community useless? That’s because you don’t understand community! ” (also known as “Teaching you a comprehensive understanding of the community from the perspectives of Tao, Fa, Shu, and Qi”) mentions that our understanding of the community cannot just stay at the operational level. We need to have a comprehensive understanding from the four levels of Tao, Fa, Shu, and Qi.

We need to understand at the level of Tao that the essence of a community is to establish connections: connecting people with people, people with information, and people with goods;

We need to understand the three keys to a successful community from a methodological perspective: information, interaction, and relationship chains. The planning of the community needs to be considered from these three perspectives. What valuable content can we provide for this community? How do we promote full interaction among members of this community, and secondly, build community relationship chains. The second half of this article will further explain and extend this.

Similarly, we also need to consider the five elements of community operation from a technical perspective: temples, monks, scriptures, precepts, and affairs. For a detailed explanation of these five elements, please refer to the previous article "Is Community Useless? That’s because you don’t understand community! 》

Finally, we need to choose auxiliary tools for community operation at the device level. I will not go into details here.

Development level. There is no order without rules, especially relatively liberal organizations such as communities need certain rules to constrain them. Of course, these rules cannot be too strict and harsh, otherwise it will easily lead to community tyranny. The institutional level mainly stipulates what our community can and cannot do? If we are a community for communication and learning, it is absolutely not allowed for everyone to discuss politics all day long, make anti-party remarks, or become a camp for a group of old drivers to exchange pornographic content. There is no absolute freedom at any time. We need to communicate freely around the topics advocated by the community under the premise of complying with certain guidelines. When a group is filled with advertisements every day, especially when there are links to micro-business or pornographic content, it basically means that the community is dead.

What factors make up a complete community?

I have said a lot before, now it’s time to talk about the specific content of the community. I guess not many readers can read this, and those who can continue reading must be true fans. I cannot give detailed ideas on building a community operation system because this is just an article. So I have combined the previous articles and some recent thoughts on community practice to summarize several key elements of community building: people, information, interaction, mechanism and carrier.

people . The temple is small and there are no monks, the wind sweeps the floor; the sky is high and the moon is shining like a lamp in front of the Buddha. There are no monks in the small temple, so the wind can only sweep the floor; there is a Buddha in the sky, who always uses the bright moon as a lamp. A temple has no artistic conception without monks; a community has no artistic conception or value without people. Because the essence of a community is connecting people, people are the key carriers. For community operation, we need an open source mechanism to ensure the continuous participation of community members.

information . This is the prerequisite for the community to be able to maintain itself. Whether the community has good content is the most direct reflection of the community’s value. The information here not only includes learning content, resource information, network information, product information, channel information, etc., which can be collectively referred to as information. Looking at the current domestic communities that are doing well, they are all able to provide relatively high-quality content. For example, the "Internet +" learning community for traditional entrepreneurs that we have previously participated in operating has a very complete content operation system and supply mechanism, such as the sharing of special series courses every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In addition, the Operation Research Club mentioned above, in addition to the spontaneous discussions and exchanges on operation methods within the community, has fixed topic discussions every Tuesday and operation work sharing every Thursday. In the future, I believe that the Operation Research Society will provide more valuable information, such as job search information for operations personnel, information on operations resource docking and communication, etc.

Interaction. The essence of a community is to connect people with each other, people with information, and people with goods. The key to connecting people is communication and interaction between people. If a community merely displays information content and allows members to interact and communicate every day, then what is the difference between it and the media? Interaction is the key to an active community!

mechanism. Earlier, we mentioned open source in the "people" factor, and here we need a cost-saving mechanism. Under the open source mechanism, as members continue to join the community, what kind of mechanism do we need to ensure the activity of community members, generate value and achieve transformation? This is an issue that the community mechanism needs to consider. This mechanism includes thresholds, constraints, incentives, elimination , etc.

1. Threshold . Communities without barriers to entry are the most difficult to operate and the easiest to die. A good community is not one that can be entered casually. A community without any threshold is bound to lead to a mixed bag of community users. It is also easy for one bad apple to spoil the whole barrel. So what are the common community entry barriers?

• Payment : This is the most direct way;
• Targeted invitation : for example, using an invitation code;
• Condition filtering : Implement a strict review mechanism, such as requiring the chairman and general manager of the company;
• Level privileges : For example, you can only join if your account level or membership level reaches certain conditions;
• Product purchase : You can join by purchasing a certain amount of products, a typical example is Hangke Commune;

2. Constraints: The constraints here include the aforementioned institutional norms, as well as the behavior guidance mechanism during community operations, that is, the means or measures we use to achieve certain behaviors among community members.

3. Motivation: People are all profit-seeking. They all have arrogance, greed, vanity, voyeurism, lust, laziness and other psychological characteristics, which are also the concentrated expression of human nature. In the process of community operation, all incentive mechanisms can be set around these six weaknesses of human nature.

4. Elimination: If there is something in, there must be something out. This is the key to ensuring the activity of the community and extending its life cycle. Generally speaking, when the activity of our community drops to our preset bottom line, we need to conduct a round of recruiting new members and eliminating silent users. This time often brings a climax of activity to the community.

Carrier: The carrier is relatively clear, and we have mentioned it a lot before. It is the position and tools required for community operation, so there is no need to elaborate on it here.

What is the business logic of the community?

We can sort out the basic business logic when doing anything. Based on the business logic, we can clearly formulate corresponding methods and strategies. Here we take the business logic of Tianma Gang community as an example:

The initiator of Tianmabang is Analysys, and the users of the community are the bosses of traditional small and medium-sized enterprises. Analysys mainly outputs learning content, and Bangqin is the beneficiary of the learning content. There are several key points in this business logic:

· Definition of roles of initiators and community members

· Establishment of community operation goals

· Understand the superficial and core needs of community users

What kind of content does Analysys, the initiator of the community, need to provide to meet the needs of community users?

· UGC of community users and its role in initiators of UGC of community users

How do community users and community initiators generate two-way interaction and feedback?

How can we realize and meet the core needs of entrepreneurs?

Based on this thinking, we have sorted out the business logic within the Tianma Gang community as follows:

How to build a community operation system based on business logic?

The construction of the community's operating system is based on the community's business logic. Based on the sorting out of the community's basic business logic and combining the five elements that a complete community needs to include: people, information, interaction, mechanism and carrier, we can successfully build the community's operating system! Generally at this time the leader will ask you to write a community operation plan, so for the writing of the plan, please refer to the previous article "This may be the most down-to-earth and clearest way to write an operation plan! 》given ideas.

We still take the Tianma Gang community as an example to build the community's operating system based on the community's basic business logic:

In the process of building the Tianshe group operation system, we need to pay attention to the following key points:

• Ensure the smooth operation of Tianmabang's basic business logic
• Establishment of a fixed mechanism for community open source and cost reduction
• Ensure the probability of the most critical user behavior occurring
• Establishing a user retention mechanism

Death of community!

Regarding the death of the community, in the historical article "If you haven’t thought these through, please don’t say you want to build a community! The article lists five ways a community can die. Here are a few simple examples:

• Way to die 1: Treat the community as a container for accepting users
• Way to die 2: Value is exhausted and users cannot be given a reason to stay
• Death Method 3: Community guarantees that those who are unjustly punished will be abandoned
• Way to die 4: Advertising and marketing, bombardment, users are annoyed
• Death 5: End of the life cycle, natural death of the community

Regardless of the means of operation, the experience of others can provide guidance and reference for thinking, but the final practice still depends on ourselves. This requires us to realize and understand it ourselves during the community operation process.

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