Dangdang.com has finally come into the public eye again, this time thanks to an open letter.

Although the open letter was short, Dangdang.com got the attention and traffic it wished for. This can be said to be a rare public relations "raid" case in the Internet industry recently.

Let's not talk about facts, but operations. How did Dangdang's open letter successfully gain the attention of the public and the media by leveraging its power? What can other companies learn from Dangdang's public relations operations? These are all worth learning for the public relations department of every Internet company.

You and I have no destiny, it's all thanks to my public relations

On July 6, the Huawei-Peking University Professor Chen Chunhua incident was trending on major platforms, and Dangdang.com also sent out an open letter on the same day. It must be said that the PR team is very efficient. Generally speaking, the release of such emergency PR articles that are not negative news requires a complex process, and Dangdang.com's speed is worth learning.

Let's first briefly review the hot topic of Dangdang.com's "freeloading". Previously, there were tens of thousands of marketing articles and videos on the Internet, repeatedly exaggerating Peking University Professor Chen Chunhua's identity as "Huawei's military advisor", "Huawei's naval commander", and "Huawei's second brain". As a result, on July 6, Huawei and Professor Chen Chunhua simultaneously issued articles to distance themselves from each other, causing an uproar in public opinion.

Dangdang.com’s open letter went from the Huawei-Professor Chen Chunhua incident to Toutiao and Douyin helping the evil to sell pirated books, which is a bit ridiculous. This traffic “stealing” is not very smart. Because Professor Chen Chunhua’s team allowed the Internet to be filled with tens of thousands of rumor marketing articles, it is obviously not for pirates to use this to divert traffic and infringe their own copyrights. So the underlying logic of Dangdang.com’s open letter is actually somewhat untenable.

"Riding on the hot spot" requires a certain angle of entry. If it is highly consistent with the hot spot, it will be "silent and subtle". Otherwise, it will be called "scam" and will only cause resentment.

Although Dangdang.com’s public relations operation this time is suspected of being a “scam”, ordinary people who are not so familiar with the Huawei-Professor Chen Chunhua incident may not notice anything unusual, which can be described as a minor flaw in a flawless jade.

Next, let’s take a look at the language used by Dangdang’s public relations team in their open letter and the core messages they conveyed.

At the beginning of the open letter, Dangdang.com did not use polite words, but went straight to the point, directly calling out ByteDance and its founder Zhang Yiming, saying bluntly: "You are no good!"

Dangdang.com characterized the incident between Huawei and Professor Chen Chunhua as "individual self-media's attempt to divert traffic to sell pirated books." As mentioned above, this argument is actually untenable, but Dangdang.com chose "not to argue" and made a direct conclusion, which was a very smart move.

Next comes the real part. Dangdang.com used the "Spring and Autumn style" to "openly praise" and secretly criticize Toutiao and Douyin in its text. On the surface, it seemed to praise ByteDance's platform for "having an impressive algorithm and an excellent team", but in fact it pointed out that Toutiao and Douyin "did evil", "aided evil", and "only cared about traffic", and became the "magic fingers" of pirated book dealers.

Of course, the ultimate purpose of the corporate open letter is naturally marketing. Accusing ByteDance of assisting piracy is to highlight that Dangdang.com only sells genuine books. Dangdang, which has "sold books for more than 20 years" and "focused on promoting reading", has been "flooded with pirated books on Toutiao and Douyin."

This set of public relations rhetoric is perfect. By taking a politically correct approach of promoting culture and combating piracy, Dangdang.com is naturally invincible.

At the end of the open letter, Dangdang.com pointed out the main theme: "Think of reading, think of books, think of Dangdang."

PR Code: The Devil is in the Details

In fact, the literal operation of Dangdang.com's open letter is relatively routine. What is more worth learning for friends in the public relations industry are some details and public relations logic at the thinking level.

For example, the open letter includes popular terms such as Huawei and Chen Chunhua, as well as keywords such as ByteDance, Toutiao, Douyin, algorithm, and traffic. It also contains gossip materials such as calling out to Internet tycoon Zhang Yiming, and advocates for promoting culture and combating piracy. It also emphasizes the authenticity of products on its own platform by "stepping on" Toutiao's platform for condoning pirated books. It can be said to be an example of public relations copywriting.

For example, the opening of the open letter to "ByteDance and respected Chairman Zhang Yiming" was an intentional design. Because friends who follow the technology industry should have noticed that Zhang Yiming has long since resigned as chairman and CEO of ByteDance.

However, the open letter still wrote this at the beginning. It was certainly not because Dangdang’s public relations made a mistake, but because Zhang Yiming himself has his own traffic and attracts attention.

In addition, compared with facts, public relations language should focus more on the creation of "personality".

For example, although the open letter sharply accused Bytedance's Toutiao and Douyin of encouraging piracy, in fact, it is not easy to eliminate piracy in the book e-commerce industry. In reality, Dangdang.com also has the problem of selling pirated books.

Just last year, Dangdang.com was sued by a publisher for pirated books. Information published on the China Judgment Documents website shows that China Finance and Economics Publishing House sued, claiming that Tianjin Boyuantu Books Co., Ltd. sold pirated books of the books involved in the case in the "Boyuantu Books Store" opened on Dangdang.com, infringing its exclusive publishing rights.

However, Dangdang.com stated that "the authentic guarantee is made by Boyuantu Company, not a promise made by our company."

Coincidentally, in February this year, a user bought pirated books on Dangdang.com. The book "Chinese History for Children" sold on the Dangdang.com platform "Arce'teryx Book Store" was of poor printing quality and even had a lot of typos, with "Gou Jian" printed as "Ju Jian".

Such cases are not isolated cases at Dangdang. If you search for "Dangdang piracy" on the Black Cat Complaint Platform, you can see 73 similar complaints.

With a simple search, it is not difficult to find that Dangdang.com still has many problems that are complained by users.

For example, some users received genuine books, but they were second-hand. A user ordered a book called "The Secret of Life" on Dangdang.com, and the next day received a message from a mobile phone number saying that "the book is out of print and scarce"... "the book we have now is 90% new"... "shipping is arranged as normal."

In addition, Dangdang.com's logistics are often complained by users:

Some students' postgraduate entrance examination books were crumpled by logistics:

Even hardcover books worth thousands of dollars have crude packaging, with broken boxes, cracked plastic covers, and knocked corners common:

Although Dangdang.com itself has some problems, this does not affect the PR department from writing an excellent promotional copy. Compared with the reach of PR and marketing itself, users who are willing and motivated to explore the truth are always rare. With the help of this open letter, Dangdang.com was able to reverse past suspicions of piracy and logistics defects and appear in front of the public as a copyright guardian. This is the charm of PR.

Why does Dangdang.com need this open letter?

The reason why Dangdang's public relations team worked at full capacity to create a hot topic with an open letter may be that Dangdang is being marginalized among e-commerce platforms and Internet companies, which has given Dangdang a sense of crisis.

As a company that benefited from the early dividends of the domestic Internet, Dangdang.com has witnessed the entire process of the domestic e-commerce platform from scratch to excellence.

Dangdang.com was founded by Li Guoqing and Yu Yu in 1999 as a "husband-and-wife shop". Riding on the domestic Internet, Dangdang developed very smoothly and received multiple rounds of investment.

In 2004, the sales accounted for more than 40% of online book retail sales. In the same year, Dangdang rejected Amazon's acquisition offer. The couple had their eyes set on the stars and the ocean.

In 2005, the annual sales reached 440 million yuan, and Dangdang's turnover at that time was more than 14 times that of JD.com.

In 2010, Dangdang went public in the United States. That year, Dangdang.com became China's largest online bookstore, with annual book sales exceeding 10 billion yuan, accounting for more than 50% of the domestic online book retail market share and a market value of 2.6 billion US dollars.

How big was Dangdang.com’s influence at that time?

Do you remember that last year Alibaba was administratively punished and fined 18.2 billion yuan for implementing the "choose one of two" monopoly behavior?

In an interview, Li Guoqing said bluntly: "In fact, Dangdang.com was the first to take the lead in the "Choose One of Two" policy," which shows Dangdang.com's monopoly position in the book e-commerce industry at that time.

However, with the entry of JD.com and Tmall, especially JD.com’s announcement in 2010 that every book would be 20% cheaper than its competitors, Dangdang began to become increasingly passive. Due to long-term losses, Dangdang had to delist in 2016.

Of course, Dangdang.com has also expanded its product categories beyond books, trying to penetrate into the business turf of JD.com and Taobao from behind, but with little success.

For example, when searching for "iPhone" on JD.com, the number of product reviews that comes first is over 4 million; while when searching for "iPhone" on Dangdang, the number of product reviews that rank first in terms of sales volume is in the single digit, which is truly appalling.

In the main battlefield of book e-commerce, Dangdang.com has been unable to cope with the pressure from JD.com and Taobao. It is even more exhausted under the dimensionality reduction attack from ByteDance with short videos, live broadcasts and interest-based e-commerce. The "Dangdang" brand has lost its former glory.

Clues can also be seen from the data disclosure. In 2016 and 2017, Dangdang.com actively announced the annual book sales situation, but in recent years, it has never mentioned the specific scale of sales, and instead only announced customer data and the sales situation of individual books. The reason for this change is self-evident.

Also interesting is that Dangdang.com mentioned many times in its official 2021 report card the rise of live streaming and short videos, and the positive changes that have been brought to the book market. It also emphasized that Dangdang.com has conducted nearly 60,000 live broadcasts on new media channels such as Douyin, Bilibili, and WeChat, gaining more than 1 billion exposures.

So why did Dangdang diss the short video and live broadcast platforms that have opened up a broader market for itself? Some netizens believe that this may be related to the divorce between Li Guoqing and Yu Yu.

In fact, Dangdang.com was not completely invisible on the Internet in the past two years. It was just that it came into the public eye many times because of the discord between the boss and the boss's wife and the farce of the breakup of the husband-and-wife store.

For example, Yu Yu and her son cheated Li Guoqing out of his shares and kicked him out of Dangdang.com;

Li Guoqing went on a show to accuse Yu Yu of what she had done in recent years. He even threw a teacup in anger, scaring the host.

Afterwards, Yu Yu was unwilling to be dissed for no reason, so she personally left a long post on Li Guoqing's WeChat Moments to fight back, accusing Li Guoqing of homosexuality, syphilis, domestic violence, and divorce over the years;

Li Guoqing led five burly men into Dangdang's office area, stole dozens of official seals and left, saying that he would always wear the official seals on his belt. This frightened Yu Yu's board of directors and quickly issued a statement saying that all the stolen official seals would be invalidated immediately.

In the end, Li Guoqing, who once mocked Luo Yonghao for selling goods through live streaming, started selling wine through live streaming at the age of 57. When asked, "Is Dangdang still yours?", Li Guoqing stood up and showed the audience the Dangdang official seal fixed on his belt.

Netizens believe that Dangdang.com’s targeting of Toutiao and Douyin this time may be related to Li Guoqing’s repeated exposure of their private affairs during live broadcasts.

Dangdang.com really needs a positive marketing event. There is no doubt that this open letter, which took advantage of the Huawei hot list event, successfully attracted the attention of the majority of netizens. Relying on superb public relations skills and in-depth marketing details, it continued to establish its own corporate "personality" on the Internet that promotes culture, supports copyright protection, and opposes the spread of piracy. At the same time, it once again deeply bound Dangdang and reading in the minds of users. It has to be said that this wave of operations by Dangdang.com is quite skillful and worthy of learning from other corporate public relations departments.

Author: Severn

Editor: Wu Tong

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As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.