Community operations misunderstood by traffic thinking!

I have recently been looking for a job opportunity after the new year. I looked through the job openings on recruitment websites or the topics in career discussion communities, and I found something unfortunate - most community operation jobs are misunderstood.

I have previously written an article titled "Why I Say WeChat Is Not a Good Social Product", in which I said that the most frequently used social software in China is WeChat (a social tool for acquaintances), so the "social operation" work in the market can almost be said to be "WeChat group operation". In other words, it is a low-value customer service job that "requires a lot of manpower". (Let me make it clear that I do not think customer service is a worthless job, quite the opposite.)

My first job was working on a SaaS enterprise collaboration tool (similar to Alibaba’s DingTalk), with our headquarters in South Korea and expansion into the Taiwanese market. At that time, the main job of the boss in Taiwan was "customer service" and the purpose was "customer success". By having in-depth contact with real users, they could explore the long-term value of users and improve retention, repurchase, and recommendations.

At that time, I understood for the first time that "user value" is created. It is a combination of marketing, psychology and game theory (thinking from the user's perspective).

And I was very lucky that my first boss at work was the one who personally contacted users and helped me turn each user into a super user. We also successfully opened up the Taiwan market, turning losses into profits, and from unfamiliar customers to spontaneous customers. The experience of more than two years has made me understand what true "user orientation" is, rather than the "traffic orientation" of most domestic Internet brands. Not to mention how many bosses are now sitting in their offices shouting about growth without actually interacting with users...

01 WeChat group operation = inefficient diligence

Since I started writing the community series, I would go to Maimai or other workplace-related communities to see how people discuss the community.

It turns out that the social networking skills that everyone is discussing are nothing more than:

• Send red envelopes and draw prizes
• Interaction starts after 8pm
• Report lost products in the morning and evening
• ...and many other operating skills limited to WeChat groups

In addition, I also found a lot of courses called "Community", which are roughly: "Well-known community operation experts will take you to practice for 10 days and gain 100,000 users" and "Only 9.9 yuan to learn how to do fission through WeChat groups"

Based on my current observations, a day’s work in (misunderstood) community operations is:

1. When I got to the company, I sent a morning report to 100 user groups.
2. Select the product link and post it in the group
3. Respond to user questions one by one
4. Kick, pull, kick, pull
5. Planning a check-in event, which will be launched next week
6. Send red envelopes to encourage everyone to click on the link

I wonder if you have discovered it?

If you think about it carefully, you will find that the above "SOP routines" are highly repetitive, require almost no brainpower, and even most of the actions can be replaced by machines in the future?

Viewing the community with traffic thinking, low technical and ideological content

why is that?

Under the constraints of "WeChat Groups", most brands use the inefficient diligence of traffic thinking to cover up their strategic laziness.

First of all, there are product limitations. The inherent nature of "group chat" will give people a kind of "immediacy pressure". The content cannot be settled and is easily interrupted. Secondly, based on the acquaintance nature of WeChat, it is not suitable for the extension of emotional trust. It is easy for a group to have a lot of people, but they are just strangers. This is like when there is a department store promotion, you do have something in common with the people around you! It is a group, but most of them just have the mentality of "grabbing good things" rather than participating.

Due to product limitations, forcibly adding a bunch of strangers to a WeChat group can easily lead to a dead group. The marginal cost is also getting higher and higher, so that the current "community operation" can only use manpower to cover up strategic laziness, use a large number of people to fight for traffic , and constantly open groups, water groups, and then let the groups die.

This is something I find very unfortunate, especially when I see many people online bragging about how their communities have expanded by thousands of people, and that their products have user communities of hundreds of thousands. But how many of them are effective users? How much involvement do they have in promoting your brand? How much business conversion is there? How many users can you mobilize?

I don’t know how many of these questions can be answered. The operation of WeChat groups based on traffic thinking is probably rogue.

02 Real community work?

1. Brand is not about traffic, but about building real relationships with users

Perhaps due to the large population base in China, there are still some traffic dividends remaining. However, according to the 2019 Internet report, the year-on-year growth in personal Internet time and Internet users in the country has been less than 5%. Believe me, the traffic game is about to burst. Looking at this year’s Internet winter and the warning signs of slowing growth, do you still believe that traffic is the brand? Can traffic bring about business conversion?

A true community manager is one who changes the traffic mindset into a people-oriented mindset, focusing on connecting people and building real relationships between brands and users.

2. Three core areas of operations

Regarding the position of "operation", I believe it is composed of three essences : "humanity", "marketing" and "business" .

Good operations can help us establish a correct understanding of the world.

Although I still don't understand why the "operation positions have to be broken down so finely" in China, which has caused operations students to have very fragmented thinking, high internal collaboration costs, and the inability to develop a systematic problem-solving approach.

As a result, those who work in content operations don't want to manage users, those who work in user operations don't want to manage channels, those who work in channel operations don't want to manage activities, and those who work in activity operations don't want to manage content... It also adds a potential crisis to operations positions: "working mentality" - just do my job well, I don't want to care about anything else, which is another thing I think is a pity.

Let me first explain two common operations positions related to "people" in overseas or Taiwan. For the detailed differences between Social Media and Community, please refer to the first article in the Community series.

3. Social Media Manager

Use specific social media platforms as channels to provide "high-quality and stable output" with the goal of effective user growth. Through comprehensive data tracking and optimization, we can understand the user preferences and habits of our own brand, continuously refine conversion and efficiency, and formulate brand content strategies, mainly dealing with "content issues."

But how much data can you obtain from operating WeChat groups? The user behavior of most WeChat groups cannot be tracked because they are separated from your product and you can only roughly estimate the data, so even the strategy is often unfounded.

4. Community Manager

Finally, we come to the main point of this article.

There have been more books, discussions and job requirements for "Community Managers" overseas in the past six months than in the past ten years combined.

The job of Social Media is to deal with content issues, and its goal is to get out there and spread trust; the job of Community is to deal with the " people issues " that connect users and brands, and its goal is stickiness, empowering users, and brand participation.

Why are overseas brands in urgent need of such talents? Because the traffic dividend has passed.

Brands have discovered that in terms of human nature, people are not just looking for products, but also looking for a shared identity and a sense of belonging. They want to contribute to things they care about and be a part of them. In this era of relative material abundance, our spiritual pursuits are higher.

We also found that in business, we need to manage users’ LTV (Lifetime Value) > CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) . Only these users can bring long-tail stable profits and even speak out to defend your brand.

To run a good community, you must have insight into human nature and observe behavior from data; you must know how to use refined marketing methods to give users immersion, unforgettable peak experience and topicality; you must also have a business mindset, understand your own brand and business model, understand the concepts of cost and process, and whether the community can bring about a reduction in marginal operating costs and convert them into economies of scale?

These are the skills that operations positions need to learn most.

03 What kind of company is suitable for operating a real community?

Let me first briefly talk about three levels: brand value, product layout, and long-tail business.

1. Brand value: Having a value that can make society better

“Although we seem to be connected in the Internet age, we are actually isolated islands that long to be needed and connected.”

Those of us who have studied management are familiar with Maslow's pyramid of needs, but in recent years, more and more papers have pointed out that people's needs should not be a pyramid model, where people's needs are satisfied in order from the bottom up, but everyone needs self-realization. The pyramid has been misused by management science until now, and it can even be said that it is used by business owners as a basis for exploiting employees. (I’ll write an article about this later)

I still believe that human nature is good. In society, we all hope to be useful and valuable. If your brand culture values ​​can make people or society better, this is the driving force for building a good community.

2. Product layout: online data and offline gatherings

Data is a treasure that allows us to understand our users from a behavioral perspective. Don’t give the data to other third-party platforms.

In addition, if you really do not have the product capabilities to create your own product ecosystem and allow users to leave behavioral footprints, then at least you should make a good layout for offline gatherings. A professional community manager can perceive real needs and human nature through interpersonal interactions. (Look at lululemon)

The trust and real connection between users and brands are often accumulated through real meetings and collaborations over and over again.

3. Long-tail business: retention, repurchase and promotion (long-term user value)

If your business model is mainly low-frequency product services that rely on user retention to generate value, such as high-value services or products, or purchase behaviors that require a series of evaluations (B2B SaaS), which all require a high degree of trust and repeat purchase capabilities, then it is beneficial to start a real community.

In other words, if you are an advertising revenue platform that mainly relies on traffic to make profits, then there is really no need to operate a community. But how many platforms have such huge traffic that can survive on advertising?

Except for a few leading companies in China, others who want to play with traffic and adopt a pure advertising monetization model may be playing with fire.

In fact, we can use an analogy: Why do famous universities in the world have such good communities? (Alumni Association)

Because they know that they are a long-tail business, they set up a brand value culture and opened up the product layout. You will find that every graduate from a prestigious university will participate in brand building voluntarily and without pay.

Finally, let me give you a few more examples.

Let’s look at domestic brands from the perspective of brand value, product layout, and long-tail business.

Keep has all three. With good slogans and cultural values ​​(self-discipline gives me freedom), the company has its own online data and owns offline Keepland stores. Its business model also follows the long-tail retention value direction. Although it was a tool software in the past, it definitely has the potential to develop into a community ecosystem!

I have also been looking forward to having our own sports brand that can create a sports ecosystem in China, bring more health and self-discipline to the entire society, and even go overseas to become an international brand! Export cultural values ​​​​outward!

It’s a pity that Keep, who has a lot of good cards in his hand, may not have this plan? Lululemon used its "self-growth" community ecosystem to successfully enter the domestic market even without the support of online products, and has now become the third largest sports brand in the world.

I know that Keep has had many super users over the years who have changed their lives through exercise and self-discipline, but they are gradually lost due to the lack of an alumni management mechanism. This is like a school that only cares about recruiting students but forgets about its alumni. The brand can only stay at its most prosperous period at the beginning.

Another example is the Duoduo App, which I believe is the next brand that will be well positioned to develop a community ecosystem.

Whether it is the large amount of behavioral data accumulated in the past products, the developing Knowledge City (user content community), or the University (offline layout throughout the brand value of lifelong learning), as well as the 2019 New Year's Eve speech, for the first time empowering users to hold New Year's Eve speech gatherings in various cities (the last 56 cities, more than 8,500 super users across the country participated in the event)

It can almost be said that the three levels of the community are fully satisfied, and it can be seen that the operation team is operating the brand in a "school" way rather than with a traffic mindset, which is worthy of appreciation and admiration.

In the coming era, when the value of real connections between people will be magnified, how many brands will die because of traffic thinking, and how many brands will emerge because of their focus on the long-term value of users? I am afraid and looking forward to it.

In short, I hope every community worker can find his or her own stage.

I also hope that every operations student can develop humanity, marketing and business thinking in their career development. These are our irreplaceable abilities.

We’ll all be better off in 2020, right?

Author: Hou Zhixun (Lei Meng)

Source: Hou Zhixun (Raymond)