Liu Weidong's Operation Notes | Learn content operations from Sohu

Before writing, I would like to share with you a book I recently read - "Beyond the Portal, Sohu New Media Operation Manual". This book was written by Mr. Wu Chenguang, current vice president of Yidian Zixun and former editor-in-chief of Southern Weekend and Sohu.com. This book uses a large number of rich cases to tell how Sohu combines the professionalism and dedication of its own news media to publish content and conduct news reporting on its portal website in the era of new media and mobile Internet .

Although Mr. Wu's name is well-known in the Internet industry, as a rookie in the industry like me, I have never heard of it before. It was not until the beginning of 2015, when the industry began to circulate the book "Sohu News Editing and Reporting Standards", which was hailed as the "blue book for new media practitioners", that I first learned about the name of Mr. Wu Chenguang and his glorious experience of moving from CCTV to famous media such as Southern Weekend and China Newsweek to the editor-in-chief of Sohu.com.

Since the "Sohu News Editing and Reporting Standards" is Sohu's internal work manual, in order to obtain it, I even made friends with some Internet colleagues working at Sohu with a "slightly purposeful" approach. Until one day, by chance, I also added Mr. Wu Chenguang's WeChat. For this, I couldn't contain my excitement and sincerely asked him:

After I got the book, I felt like I had found a treasure. I spent a week on the subway to finish reading it. After finishing it, I sighed:

Why do I strongly recommend this book to everyone? One very important point is that this book provides extremely professional and standardized guidance for our operations , especially content operations. As we all know, in the Internet age, the core principles for retaining users are nothing more than three points: service, social interaction , and content. And this content includes all aspects, text, video, audio, games and so on. As far as I know, most operations workers start their careers as editors, community operators, Weibo operators, WeChat operators , and other similar content operations positions. If content is the foundation of Internet development, then content operation is the cornerstone of operation work.

But unfortunately, most colleagues doing content operations (including WeChat and Weibo operations) think of this job as being a bit simple and boring, and gradually become tired of it. For example, if I open an article from a WeChat public account now, I will find it full of typos, incoherent sentences, and chaotic layout; if I open a portal website, I will find clickbait titles rampant, vulgar and eye-catching content everywhere, and a lot of insults in the comment section; if I open an information app, I will find repetitive content and slow updates, so I can only uninstall it in the end. The disregard and short-sightedness for content operations have also caused many products to have a weak foundation at the bottom, resulting in a large number of user losses. So, when many CEOs, product managers , and operation directors discuss every day what is PGC or UGC and how to write heartfelt copy , I might as well suggest that everyone calm down first, like the editors of Sohu.com in the book, write every word, edit every sentence, post every picture, publish every piece of content, and follow the two most important principles of content operation.

Content operations, especially large-scale content operations, are essentially labor-intensive work. Take the products I operate as an example. In addition to products and operations, another very important reason for the gap between us and our competitors is the lack of people. Our competitors have a team of nearly 100 people dedicated to content, while our team has only 10 people. Among these 10 people, only three are focused on content operations, and the rest are part-time. But anyone who has worked in content operations knows that finding content sources, negotiating authorization, editing, illustrating, and publishing are all extremely time-consuming processes. There is actually no better way except to optimize the backend system. However, Wu Chenguang and the Sohu team explored and sought breakthroughs in the process, which greatly improved efficiency.

In the early days of Sohu, the content operation team was divided into mobile group and PC group, and the two groups were further subdivided into news group, social group, military group, etc. This type of grouping seems clear at first glance, but in actual operation it not only wastes manpower but also often results in content conflicts.

First of all, the waste of manpower is like tracking a hot social news. The PC news group and the mobile news group are actually tracking the same thing and looking for the same source, but it wastes the manpower of two groups. In the final process of publishing content, conflicts often occur between the PC and mobile terminals due to lack of coordination. For example, the PC version published the content "Putin, the foundation of the Russian nation's strength", while the mobile version published the content "Russian opponents: Putin is more "dictatorial" than Stalin." It is bound to be puzzling to readers that the same media outlet publishes content with different stances. In addition, this process consumes huge time and communication costs.

Later, with the promotion of Sohu Vice President Wang Xin, Wu Chenguang carried out continuous reforms and balanced the interests of all parties over a period of two years (it can be seen that operational optimization is always a long process), and finally completed a content distribution system that was like a "central kitchen."

Specifically, a content team similar to a "central kitchen" will first collect and select a large amount of content sources, then roughly process them and distribute them to various content groups. Each content group will make detailed edits to the distributed content and finally publish them on both mobile and PC terminals. This will not only greatly save manpower and reduce repetitive work, but will also make Sohu's content operation system like an assembly line, with everyone focusing on the same thing: those responsible for finding content focus on content mining, and those responsible for editing focus on editing, so that they can do their job to the utmost and greatly improve the quality of content.

Compared with our team, the problems we face are actually more serious than those of Sohu. There are only a small number of people, and everyone, in addition to their own work, is responsible for the content operation of a section. They are responsible for finding content, as well as editing, entering, and publishing. Everyone's workflow has to be transferred to multiple platforms, which results in a large workload, a long cycle, but very little output. If we learn from Sohu's "central kitchen" system and divide the team into groups to shorten everyone's work cycle, with some groups responsible for finding content, some responsible for editing, and some responsible for unified publishing, would the effect be better?

In addition to establishing and optimizing the content distribution process, Wu Chenguang also established Sohu's emergency incident handling plan, live broadcast reporting process, etc. The specific details are not listed here. These process-based systems are exactly what are missing in the operations teams of many Internet companies. Without a process, operations will be chaotic, and without a process, quality will be unstable, which is also contrary to the core principle of content operations:

Going in the opposite direction. This shows how important it is to establish a process for content operations.

I have always believed that operators should have a multifaceted personality: they should have the courage to think and act, yet also the calmness and meticulousness. Copy and paste other people's content without correcting typos; like to use all kinds of eye-catching headlines; never consider the user's reading experience when formatting; always select content to meet KPIs. Having done all of the above, I don't believe he will become an excellent operator. Because excellent operators must be extremely serious and meticulous, striving to make every detail perfect.

Of course, although the extremely professional Sohu team is unlikely to make the low-level mistakes mentioned above, Wu Chenguang has put forward higher requirements for their refinement of content operations.

The following is Wu Chenguang’s analysis of the modifications to some of the Sohu team’s brilliant titles. (Sohu does not allow clickbait titles. The main reason is that when users click on the main text through the title, they will find that there is a big gap between the original content and the title, which affects the reading experience.) This also shows the beauty of details of Sohu's content team from the side.

The above is excerpted from "Beyond the Portal - Sohu New Media Operation Manual"

Let’s take a look at Sohu News’ push guidelines.

The above is excerpted from "Beyond the Portal - Sohu New Media Operation Manual"

After reading this, compare your own operations to see if you are as meticulous as them or better than them.

At least I haven't done it yet.

There is too much content in this book that is worth my repeated reading and thinking, but what impressed me most is Teacher Wu Chenguang's working methods and professional attitude.

This must have been a period of passion, and I could feel it even through the book. Even if it is doing seemingly simple writing work or seemingly boring content operations. But there is still a lot of room for you to develop and build your passion.

Finally, ask yourself again,

Is our content really perfect?

At least I haven't yet.

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The author of this article @刘玮冬 is compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion). Reprinting this article must be approved by Top Promotion , and please attach the link to this article!