The application of gamification thinking in community operations!

In the previous article "What is the specific value of community to enterprise", I described the value of community to enterprise. But how to operate it really leaves everyone at a loss.

Many companies are still at the stage of violently forming groups and competing in scale. The implementation of things ultimately depends on people to push them forward, and the entire market is looking for talents in community operations.

On the surface, this shortage of staff is caused by the fact that the industry is too new and there is no ready-made talent, but the underlying reason is the lack of a good environment for community operations.

What is the root cause of the current community operation problems?

If you want to solve the problem, you must first analyze the cause. What exactly is the reason for this situation?

Managers' thinking is still result-oriented. The short path should focus on result orientation, while the long path should focus more on process management.

The completion of a traditional job transaction is the end of the relationship

In the past, the relationship between companies and users would end once the transaction was completed, so the work would have a clear project cycle, which could be long or short. For example, I will issue the sales order next month, and I will complete the design requirements of the client within two months. Therefore, more emphasis is placed on result management, shortening the path and improving efficiency.

The completion of transactions in community operations is the beginning of service

For community operation, the relationship only begins when the transaction is completed, and there is no obvious project cycle. Therefore, the path of community operation work is infinitely long, and there is no end to the script. If you manage based on the results, you will directly turn operations into sales.

Therefore, community operations focus more on process management, especially in the early stages. The general thinking of managers now is: Don’t tell me about the process, I just want to see the results.

Good community operation must be based on interest, and the power of managers has limited effect on this

Previous jobs all had a service cycle, but community operations require long-term interactions with users. How can the previous service be sustained?

However, in community operation and management, it is difficult for companies to set clear indicators. Community operation is a delicate job that involves so many details that you simply cannot give clear instructions to your employees on what to do. And these details are so crucial.

The main force in the workplace now is a group of post-90s with strong individuality, so if you really want your employees to do a good job in community operations, you must make them truly like this job.

The power can require employees to do things with simple paths and clear goals, but it cannot require others to like something, especially when facing the post-90s generation.

To summarize the characteristics of community operations:

• Long cycle, process-focused
• Only if you like this can you really run the community well

We can find that the game happens to meet these two characteristics (large-scale games). So how do we apply gamification thinking to work and make employees’ work interesting? We must first understand gamification thinking.

What is Gamification Thinking?

Why do we always look forward to getting off work when we are working, but can play games all night long and never get tired of it, even if the games do not bring us any material rewards.

Parents used to often say that if you put the energy you put into playing games into studying, you would have been admitted to Tsinghua University or Peking University long ago. After work, your boss will point at you and say, if you had put as much energy into work as you do playing games, you would have been a top sales person long ago.

The book "Gamified Thinking: The New Force to Change the Future of Business" defines gamified thinking as: getting fun in a planned and directed way.

In community operations, my definition of gamification thinking is: to let employees experience the fun of operations in a way that has direction and path, and to let users experience the fun of the community to realize commercial value.

There are three core elements of gamification thinking: incentive system, meaningful choices, and feedback system.

There are four stages to do a good job in community operation

I have always believed that running a good community requires going through four stages:

The first stage: First, you must be a good user and use the community to solve your own work and life problems. If the community is really valuable, let yourself benefit first;

The second stage: Be a good manager, use gamification thinking to solve the company's employee management problems, and truly activate employees. Without a good management system, even the best ideas will be killed, and even the best experts will be restricted.

The third stage: Use gamification thinking to create a community tool to solve employees’ learning and growth problems. Users need to learn and grow through the communities created by the company, and employees also have such needs. Why not use the communities to improve their employees' business capabilities first? When employees benefit from the community first, they can naturally pass on this value to users;

Stage 4: Once you have completed all the previous steps, use gamification thinking to create tools such as communities to achieve your business goals. If the employees are managed like this, what about the picky users? Therefore, gamification thinking is more necessary when operating users.

Those who go straight to the fourth step without achieving the first three steps are typical speculators who do nothing but hype concepts. There are many such people. In the current atmosphere of quick success and instant benefits, community operation workers lack a healthy environment.

Stages of application of gamification thinking in community operations

Only when managers use gamification thinking to change their management model and stimulate employees' interest in work can they provide a good environment for community operations. Without a good institutional environment, nothing can be achieved.

There is no need to elaborate on the first stage. Today, we will focus on how gamification thinking can solve the problems in the second stage of community operation based on actual cases.

Company background: A company providing financial services, with main businesses: training, mergers and acquisitions, and matching of funds and high-quality assets. Sales model: mainly telephone marketing and new media marketing. The sales team has more than 200 people, and operations is a separate department. Because this traditional sales model is too heavy, they strive to transform and open up a new traffic entrance such as the social network, and use the social network to serve their users well. They gave this important task to the people in the operations department. However, the traditional sales model cannot be broken away from for the time being.

Who will be responsible for playing community-operated games?

Is it appropriate to separate sales and operations positions?

The first thing we need to solve is who is suitable to be responsible for community operation. Often, many companies, like the above case, completely separate the sales and operations positions, and community operations are handled by dedicated people.

The foundation of good community operation lies in understanding your users first, and then serving your users online and offline at the lowest cost, and finally achieving the goal of commercial conversion.

Sales people deal with users for a long time and they know their users best but lack operational thinking, while operations people have been locked up in offices for a long time working behind closed doors.

The embarrassing situation of operators

Community operators currently have no directly quantifiable outputs, especially at this exploratory stage. There is such a chain of contempt within the company. Sales people speak based on results. Since operations don't have a clear output, many people think that operations people are just eating free meals.

This leads to a result that the operations staff have no say or decision-making power, and many things do not get support from others.

This will result in low collaborative efficiency. The community is essentially just a tool, and at certain times it is a sales tool, so how can sales be separated from the community?

What is the significance of sales and operations position integration?

So I generally suggest that when a company is doing community operations, sales also need to participate collaboratively. There are several ways. Either the operations staff works in sales first and then transfers to other positions, or the sales staff also have to participate in operations.

Because when you are doing community operations, you can also promote sales. Different methods determine different management assessment systems, and the specific methods will not be discussed in detail for the time being.

Successful games require players to make meaningful choices

A successful game is one that allows players to make meaningful choices on a continuous basis with some autonomy. When managing employees, meaningful choices require three things:

• Have clear goals;
• These choices are voluntary for employees;
• There is a path to doing these things.

Only when the goal is clear can we avoid blind actions

Playing games requires clear goals, just like playing ball. Although the movements have to be cool, the purpose must be to win the final game.

The company's community operation goals:

1. Self-built traffic channel course sales conversion;
2. Improve brand communication efforts;
3. Serve users well and continuously collect feedback to facilitate course development and iteration;
4. Facilitate the connection between mergers and acquisitions and high-quality financial assets;
5. Achieve the above four goals with the lowest cost.

If there is no clear goal, the result in the later stage will be endless meetings, and you will either do nothing all day or be busy all day.

The voluntary choice is the prerequisite for generating endogenous motivation

A game system that rewards but lacks room for autonomy can quickly become boring and depriving for participants, so it’s important to give players the power to make their own choices. Just like playing basketball, tactics cannot be involved in every round, and players also need a certain degree of autonomy in their choices.

Often some community operation staff become mere executors, and many managers completely ignore the process of involving executors in program planning. Employees with ideas can accept challenging tasks, but find it difficult to accept a task that lacks autonomy.

Some managers may say, we were brainstorming together, and I asked him to come up with ideas. This kind of brainstorming is often conducted within a framework set by you. Employees need full participation rather than just half-participation, unless you are a mature company. Otherwise, a series of subsequent problems will eventually pile up on you.

I previously worked with a client to operate a community, and the manager told me that you should use the WeChat open class as a sales tool to attract potential customers for conversion. You should quickly think about how to operate it to achieve conversion. You are very good at community operation, so it’s time to demonstrate your value. As soon as I heard this layman's talk, I left the next day because I knew there would be no way to continue the communication.

There must be a path to do these things, and the early stage focuses on process management

When you first start playing basketball, your coach won’t tell you to beat your opponent right away. Instead, it teaches you to practice the most basic skills such as dribbling, shooting, positioning, fake moves, and defense first. When on the court, the coach will not just say things like "we have to kill the opponent" which are goals that everyone knows, but will draw up various offensive and defensive tactics for the team and direct the players' movements on the sidelines. If you are just told to beat your opponent right from the start without providing you with any path, you will be beaten like a dog. Then the game will become boring to you and you will just stop playing it.

When doing community operations, some companies will directly tell their employees how many sales conversions they need to achieve through their operational activities. Then I don’t know what this KPI is based on. Now the employees fell into anxiety, and finally those who were in charge of community operations simply transformed into salesmen.

During the exploratory stage, it is especially necessary to break down goals and manage paths. Doing a good job in path management does not mean that there are no assessment indicators, but that the focus of the indicators is different. How to break it down specifically?

In the early stage, you can focus on the following indicators: the number of user information, the completeness of user information, the thinking ability score of event planning, the score of user understanding, etc. When entering the mature stage, some indicators such as the number of new users, conversion rate , and repurchase rate will be slowly introduced.

In short, when you, as a manager, simply and roughly throw some difficult tasks to your employees that only care about the results and not the path, then your employees may disgust you by procrastinating, perfunctory, complaining, spreading negative energy, cheating, and resigning. Times have changed. People born in the 90s are quite willful. You have to be aware of this.

How to motivate employees to work like playing games

People may be perfunctory at work, but few people will be perfunctory when playing games. They will devote 100% of their attention to the game, even if there is a sexy girlfriend lying next to them. The incentive system is the prerequisite for starting any game. To design a good incentive system, you must first grasp the motivation of employees.

There are two types of motivation: extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation.

Feeling like you have to do something is called extrinsic motivation.

It’s just like what a joke says, the purpose of going to work is to make money. Don’t talk to me about ideals, my ideal is not to work. Nowadays, most employees rely on external motivations such as salary and promotion to support their daily work.

It is difficult to truly activate your employees by relying solely on extrinsic motivation. There are so many details in community operation that you can’t ask for them all.

Community operations should stimulate employees’ intrinsic motivation

The impulse to do something is called "intrinsic motivation", so if you really want your employees to do a good job in community operations, you have to stimulate their intrinsic motivation and make them feel that doing this is like playing a game. Based on the case, let’s talk about what we should do to satisfy employees’ intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation comes from several factors:

• Desire to experience success and be recognized;
• A desire to connect with society;
• You can achieve your goals while working.

User recognition is the driving force behind endogenous motivation

Traditional community operation is simply a miscellaneous job, organizing some online and offline activities, managing users, and sometimes being pulled over to work on a public account. Anyway, you have to do whatever the company arranges. This kind of work is neither fulfilling nor fun.

The greatest success experience of community operation comes from the recognition of users. If you want to gain recognition from users, you must truly design online and offline activities and corresponding functional products around users that can capture their needs (the specific steps need to be written separately).

Stimulate employees' social needs and make community operations compatible with life

Humans are also social animals. When you operate users, you are building social relationships, which is also a natural advantage of community operation work. Therefore, this need of people who like socializing will be greatly satisfied, and in the end your job to some extent is about socializing with your friends.

Turn your own problems into topics for the community, and solve your own problems while working

Community operation requires learning and topics. When you are operating a user community, you can also bring in various problems of your own, turn your problems into common problems for everyone, and mobilize everyone to solve them together. In this way, you can truly accomplish your work while also achieving your own goals.

In short, employees need to know what this matter means to them, and how it will help them now and in the future. When you can form such cognition when operating a community, it will naturally generate endogenous motivation and the operation will become very interesting.

Of course, not every employee has such ability and awareness, so the company needs to slowly guide (brainwash) and cultivate them.

Timely feedback builds trust

Timely feedback is a commitment

The feedback system allows players to recognize an objective result. Real-time feedback is a promise to players that the goal is definitely achievable, and it gives people the motivation to continue playing.

In addition, the feedback of information also gives users a sense of accomplishment and surprise, which improves their intrinsic motivation. When you play a game and make a choice and nothing happens, then the game is simply unplayable.

Ignoring feedback will cost you authority, credibility, and the fun of your game.

In the management process of a company, the importance of feedback is often overlooked.

For example, the company asks you to come up with a plan in a hurry. After you make the plan and hand it over to your leader, there is no follow-up. No one says whether it is good or bad, let alone implement it.

This problem is not just about community operations, but a common problem. The result is that employees lose their sense of accomplishment in their work and their work enthusiasm is dampened. The company has lost its authority, and everyone will think that you are just pretending to make any decision you make in the future.

I participated in a company training before. The trainees were divided into several groups. As long as they actively participated in class, each group could earn points, and finally they could get prizes based on the points ranking. But when the training was over, I found that the matter had been left unresolved. The best was not selected according to the previous rules, and no final feedback was given. If you continue like this, no one will care about what activities you want to organize in the future.

In short, whether it is company management or customer management, timely and effective feedback can establish full trust and make the game more interesting.

Everyone is rushing to explore how to quickly realize the commercial value of the community, but few people are seriously analyzing the adjustments in management models brought about by changes in the attributes of the community industry, and few people are concerned about what kind of environment companies should provide for community operation employees to motivate them.

The next article will talk about the third stage of community operation, how to use gamification thinking to build a learning community for internal employees.