Research on mobile internet for blue-collar workers: shy but unrestrained

In "Ordinary World", Sun Shaoping never forgets to study when he is working and his extraordinary knowledge wins him love. In reality, not all workers are called Sun Shaoping; there are many training institutions at the factory gate, but it does not mean that blue-collar workers are easy to learn. From the first day I worked as a product manager, I was taught not to daydream, and the premise of making a good product is to play the role of a novice well.

First of all, blue-collar workers in the manufacturing industry are not called blue-collar workers in their own industry (factory employees have criticized me for this unprofessional term). They are called general workers, and the official name is young workers. However, in order to cater to the past cognition of the Internet, the term "blue-collar workers" is still used throughout the article.

Blue-collar workers are one of the groups with the least number of mobile Internet applications. The most frequently used applications are QQ and WiFi Master Key, and the other application with high installation volume is WeChat. The application with the biggest difference in installation volume from our perception is video apps, not because there is no traffic, but because the network speed is slow.

1. Serious information island problem and its causes

Looking at the different vertical user groups of Internet products, blue-collar workers are even more blank. The connection between people and people, and between people and society are very weak. Each blue-collar individual is like an information island floating on the water. The direct result is an endless stream of social scams, the most well-known of which is the recruitment of black intermediaries.

The reasons for the formation of information islands can be divided into three major points:

First, the pain of China's manufacturing industry cannot be erased. Because it is at the bottom of the world's factory industry chain, blue-collar workers are mainly people with three lows, and this class of users shows psychological immaturity. To give a simple example, one of the biggest changes for students entering college from high school is that there is frequent communication between individuals in college, such as club activities, professional competitions, and academic exchanges. Therefore, when entering society from college, this group of people will have a highly tolerant learning mentality. In contrast, the blue-collar group lacks the awareness of active communication.

Secondly, the blue-collar service industry has an unavoidable responsibility. Driven by the profit-seeking nature of businessmen, the service industry must maintain the information island of blue-collar individuals so that it can use its own information monopoly advantage to trade information or goods. For example, the old-fashioned blue-collar recruitment.

Third, the "closed-door" policy of most factories has created the biggest obstacle to the flow of information among blue-collar workers. Objectively, it is a closed living environment; subjectively, factory managers do not encourage employees to contact people or things outside the factory to prevent employee turnover from causing factory production to stagnate. This is a demand for economic development, and we cannot simply comment on right or wrong. From a positive perspective, it can ensure the normal operation of the manufacturing industry, a huge economic machine, and can also increase the blue-collar workers' vigilance against the society outside the factory and reduce social scams.

From society to industry, and then to enterprises, blue-collar information islands are a problem that spans all dimensions of society and is a social phenomenon worthy of attention after left-behind children.

2. The need for information and interpersonal relationships

1. Information needs

So, do blue-collar individuals have no need to obtain information?

Let's take an example. I have a friend who works in factory recruitment. When he introduces the factory to new employees, he always only leaves the office landline number. Why? Because this phone number will be flooded with calls. Employees have a huge demand for information about local work and life in the factory. They don't read the exquisite introduction brochures produced by the factory. They would rather make a dozen calls to the human resources office for consultation, or find "old hands" who have been in the factory for one or two years to learn more.

In the blue-collar community, we have classified information types into four categories:

First, the local work and life in the factory mentioned in the above example, such as dormitory allocation, canteen distribution, and overtime. Its product is in the form of a question-and-answer community. For example, Foxconn, the world's largest factory, has a question-and-answer community within the factory. At this information level, the social needs of blue-collar workers and students are very similar. There are a large number of people with the same identity in the local community. Due to the high overlap of their life trajectories, the types of community information they are eager to obtain are basically the same. As a supplement to real life, on the Internet, every school has a post bar, forum, public account, and college class QQ group, while the factory only has a factory bar where advertisements are bred, or a post bar for the goods it produces.

Second, they post selfies and flood the screen with photos. This has nothing to do with occupation, it is a typical social trait of the post-90s generation.

Third, emotional entanglements. For white-collar workers and students, emotional topics are personal privacy and rarely appear in the circle of friends or campus communities. Try to explain it from the characteristics of the group we surveyed. Among blue-collar workers who use the Internet, more than 70% are under 30 years old, and most of them are single. This is the main audience for emotional topics. Because they have nothing, they yearn for it and enjoy the pleasure of voyeurism.

Blue-collar individuals in love spend up to six hours after get off work chatting on QQ or on the phone with their opposite-sex partners, which means "you are my whole world"; so once the relationship goes wrong and their personal space is in a vacuum, they are more likely to feel sad and depressed, and this is the main initiator of relationship topics.

They hit it off immediately and formed a trend of emotional exchange.

Fourth, they are keen on talking about salary, overtime, and job changes. Compared with white-collar workers, the salary standard of blue-collar workers is very transparent. The problem encountered in finding a job is whether the salary and benefits can be fulfilled, so there are many people who directly post photos of their salary slips. "Showing" means showing off, showing off higher salaries and more overtime hours. White-collar workers hate overtime in the workplace because they work hard and get no pay; but blue-collar workers think that "a good factory is one that works more overtime", either by the hour or by the piece, and the output of labor is quantified as monetary income (there are also marginal counterexamples, such as the "Sanhe God" in Shenzhen, who works as a temporary worker and has longer rest time than working).

Known online data shows that the average blue-collar worker changes jobs twice a year. In most cases, blue-collar workers resign automatically (without going through the resignation process), which shows that they do not have a strong social identity with their work and the factory, which in turn proves the lack of communication between blue-collar colleagues. Therefore, once a blue-collar individual has the idea of ​​changing jobs, he will easily make it public in the social circle, which is very different from the social interaction of white-collar workers. In order to reduce employee turnover and improve their social identity, large factories will even set up psychological counseling departments to establish communication channels and organize collective activities.

2. Interpersonal Relationships

While exchanging information, blue-collar workers' demands for interpersonal relationships are manifested in three categories:

First, the desire for friendship. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the most frequently used social software for blue-collar workers is QQ, so let’s analyze their QQ usage behavior. Their QQ friends are usually their junior high and high school classmates from their hometown, so they want to expand their circle of friends and make local friends. They will search for QQ groups in the same factory, city, or street to join. Why don’t blue-collar workers get to know their colleagues and develop friends in real life, but search online?

First, let's look at campus social interaction. Between people, there are student organizations such as clubs, classes, and hometown associations as bridges. The solid structure of these bridges is not the school's rules and regulations, but the collective identity derived from student organizations, which ensures stable relationship connections and easily forms friendship chains.

However, most factories do not have such an organization. Conventional blue-collar organizations, such as production departments and production lines, are guaranteed by monetary interests. Collective identity is particularly weak, and even class confrontation is formed, which makes the will of blue-collar individuals even looser. In reality, the spontaneous channels that blue-collar users think of, such as factory Q groups, are also driven by the interests of the blue-collar service industry. One type of group has more advertisers than real blue-collar workers, and the other type serves a certain vertical tertiary industry with the most lucrative profits. Therefore, it is still a long way to achieve reliable friendships.

Second, socializing with the opposite sex. Our team has a saying to describe blue-collar workers: "shy in reality, unrestrained in (Internet) communities." Of course, simple and rough dating is not a social characteristic unique to blue-collar workers, but an inevitable characteristic of stranger socializing. But the difference is that you will not date strangers who are colleagues, because you are worried about the power of social networks, and because of your awe of the company's social identity. Just like changing jobs easily, dating colleagues is not a big deal.

However, if the blue-collar workers are successful in dating, the probability of them becoming a couple is particularly high. In our community, it is common to see couples showing off their affection, meeting their parents, and getting married quickly.

Third, look for fellow villagers. This type of interpersonal relationship has two sides. Some factories have employees from all over the country, while in other factories, most of the employees are fellow villagers. For example, in the factories in the Pearl River Delta, the people who are most likely to form the fellow villager effect are people from Hunan and people from third-tier cities in Guangdong. Most of the fellow villager relationship chains have been formed before entering the factory, that is, introducing fellow villagers to work; it is difficult to form after entering the factory. As mentioned above, there is no organization and lack of communication.

3. Blue-collar social solutions

"Social networking is so bad, how can we talk about blue-collar social networking?"

I would like to start with a question from a friend and answer it properly.

The first point is to start with the first type of information that blue-collar workers desire, provide local work and life information (PGC), and promote blue-collar communication and production content (UGC). After the content is produced, the blue-collar community will become a "community" for blue-collar workers. This bridge will connect new employees and old hands in the factory, allowing blue-collar workers to move from a mechanical life and a three-point-one-line life status to the possibility of entering the "college age" and information explosion.

Therefore, the first step is to establish a community based on factories. The most basic understanding of "local" by users is "the factory". As an extension of the factory's human resources department, the community replaces the rigid factory brochures with the vivid image of "factory experts". After covering the mainstream information, the long-tail information is supplemented through the question-and-answer community.

Then, we expand from the same factory community to LBS communities within a certain geographical range. The same factory may have factory areas in different geographical locations. There are villages and adjacent factories near each factory area, and corresponding services such as retail, catering, rental, leisure, beauty, and hotels are generated. Blue-collar users rely on these service industries, but they are full of insecurity about first-time consumption (even more so for promotions). Therefore, the community is moving closer to the "local recommendation" model. In addition to factory information exchange, there is a greater opportunity to achieve the exchange of blue-collar life information.

Next, we will dig deeper into the needs of interest tags and move offline roller skating associations, bicycle clubs, Internet cafe game teams, and charity event organizations into the community. On the one hand, we can seize the fragmented time of users' interests, and on the other hand, it will help to accumulate higher-quality content and meet the higher-level Maslow needs of community users. Interest tags focus on the mid-term development of the community, starting with manual operation and gradually transitioning to a combination of manual and automated operations.

The second point is to shape blue-collar talents through content creation.

First, cultivate opinion leaders. People desire respect at a higher level than social needs. Because of the mundane nature of their work, blue-collar workers especially desire respect from the community.

Let me tell you a little story. Our blue-collar community has a function for posting long posts, with no word count requirement, to serve the operation of PGC. Considering the high threshold for users to input long posts on their mobile phones, it was not open to users. After the function was launched, many early seed users discovered PGC long posts and asked the editor to open the permission. Compared with white-collar workers who use their fragmented time to surf the Internet, blue-collar workers are more willing to spend a long time typing on their mobile phones. They were also loyal users of WAP2.0 time.

However, due to the characteristics of the "three lows" group, it is easy to guide blue-collar workers to create content, but it takes a lot of effort to produce valuable content. The direction of operation intervention is to develop the imaginary input box into a question-and-answer question or even a multiple-choice question. (It is only the operation direction, not the product form) Once the flag is raised, people will follow and the operation will be worry-free. Therefore, the community is most suitable to adopt the relationship chain form of Weibo attention.

Secondly, create stars and spread through the star effect. If leaders are the sowers of community culture, stars are the disseminators of community brands; the connotation of leaders is self-generated, and the halo of stars is given by the platform. From any of the information aggregation dimensions mentioned in the first point, if you find the stars and halo of this dimension, you can detonate it at low cost and in a short time, and involve a large number of users in the community.

Let's tell another little story. In advertising, data shows that the more beautiful the girl in the material is (please don't question the aesthetic standards), the higher the click-through rate is. To use an unscientific explanation, it mainly depends on temperament, the temperament of blue-collar workers. So we have been trying to integrate into the lives of blue-collar workers, eating stone pot fish at the factory gate and watching migrant workers in the night market. Let's play a game and mix the photos of white-collar girls and blue-collar girls together. I can probably tell them apart.

Third, strengthen the social identity of blue-collar workers and make the community an ideological social university. Rather than saying this is a means, it is better to say that this is a product vision. First, let blue-collar workers feel the goodwill from others and the community's recognition to promote their recognition of the community. In terms of operational means, give blue-collar individuals a variety of positive feedback, just like the game uses rich and shocking audio-visual effects. Information feedback comes in a variety of forms: likes, comments, rewards, etc., with diverse sources: platform honors, points rewards, user recognition, and appropriate content: only blue-collar workers understand blue-collar workers.

Then, after users have a great time in the community, they use the community as a medium to improve the blue-collar relationship chain in all dimensions and build an information bridge between blue-collar workers, enterprises and even society. Therefore, after the community grows, it must establish cooperation with blue-collar enterprises to seamlessly connect with the information needs of blue-collar factories, such as access to major corporate announcements and psychological counseling.

Conclusion

So, the problem is huge, and the practitioner is small. I am a very lazy person, probably because of this, I worked in the Internet industry, and made an app called Big Mouth with my friends: spend less effort to make the world of some people a little better. Maybe this community is just a pile of heads now, but one day it will rise from the ground and become a building.