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The internet provides everyone and every brand with the shortest and most convenient path to connect with consumers. As long as you have enough brilliance, appeal, charisma, or even gimmicks, you can quickly gather a group of followers. If you can manage these communities, you may find opportunities for new brands in a highly competitive new business world.
Luo Yonghao's Smartisan phone has sparked intense controversy. In a nearly saturated smartphone market, someone with no connection to the industry barged in. Some worry it may be a flash in the pan, while others are moved to tears of excitement.
From Lei Jun's Xiaomi, to Luo Zhenyu's "Logic Thinking," to Luo Yonghao's Smartisan phone, although it is still too early to discuss their success, these new cases herald a new business era. Some call it internet thinking, others call it the rise of the underdog. I believe this is an era of community economy, different from the industrial era.
In the new era of community economy, social media is bound to continuously change how companies market products and how consumers interact with businesses. The key is how you keep up with these changes.
Social media platforms like Weibo, WeChat, Momo, Qzone, and Mobile QQ have rapidly risen in popularity over the past two years. They are not just tools for chatting, entertainment, or killing time; in fact, social media has completely overturned business and consumer behavior. Instant messaging connects thousands of people, not only affecting social life but also driving massive socio-economic changes, completely transforming the communication and interaction between consumers and businesses.
Social media is powerful; it can quickly strengthen or destroy a brand overnight, whether for individuals or companies. For individual users, social media allows easy communication with the outside world. At the same time, the large social circles formed by many individuals create an efficient recommendation mechanism, replacing search engines, helping users quickly find good products and useful information.
Better to make mistakes on social media than to stay out of it! The new era of community economy has arrived.
For businesses, as individual users (potential consumers) become increasingly dependent on social media, traditional advertising is less effective than online review mechanisms in persuading consumers. Marketing messages directly targeting consumers are gradually losing effectiveness. Many successful companies now view social networking sites as large focus groups and tools for rapid communication with consumers.
Regarding the community economy, "Logic Thinking" should be the earliest definer and practitioner. Especially its recruitment of paying members twice within four months, collecting nearly 10 million yuan in membership fees, became a celebrated story, making people marvel at the power of community commerce. Lao Luo even called internet communities the core driving force of future business.
Is community really that powerful? What role will it play in future business?
1. Fan-Based Community Management
What is the difference between fans and consumers?
Fans are maintained by emotional bonds; fan behavior goes beyond consumption itself. Therefore, brands must either turn fans into consumers or turn consumers into fans. Starting with Apple, Steve Jobs's Apple fans are a typical example of fan connection.
Xiaomi also created its brand through emotional and value identification with fans. Luo Yonghao's Smartisan phone targets essentially his loyal fan base. His logic is that even if the phone is priced above 3,000 yuan, fans with the same sentiment and aesthetics will recognize its value.
Regardless of the phone's future, at least it can be a niche phone for Luo's fans. In marketing, his cost of acquiring users can be lower. In the future, he needs to continue exploring fans' related needs and value. This is the new business rule of the community era: use communities to define users, manage communities to explore extended needs based on core products. This differs from the industrial era's product-first approach: define the product, then find the consumer group, then manage users.
2. The Era of Co-Creation with Users
In the industrial era, companies emphasized "manufacturing," which is a company-centric business model. In the internet age, consumers want to participate in "creation," thus entering a new era of user "intelligent manufacturing" of products.
The characteristic of this era is that companies should never think they know all user needs; instead, let users participate in providing needs, even invite users to help solve consumption needs. Companies need to set up "complaint communities" and "innovation communities" for consumers and know how to use the content from these communities for innovation. These communities are places to discover consumer pain points.
For example, Volkswagen once established a platform called "People's Car Project." From 2011 to the end of May 2013, it had 14 million user visits and contributed 250,000 car ideas. These ideas were things R&D staff couldn't think of, but through this platform, they could gain many car requirements.
3. Crowdfunding Commerce Open to All
"Crowdfunding" has been hot since last year. Through the internet, crowdfunding discovers and gathers originally scattered consumers and investors, creating a new ecosystem for creative, innovative, and personalized products. For example, Alibaba partnered with Guohua Life Insurance to launch "Entertainment Treasure," allowing film and game enthusiasts to invest with small amounts. Essentially, it's a financial product, but in model, it's a crowdfunded entertainment fund. Crowdfunding is a product of personalization, customization, and fragmentation, changing the role of consumers, making fans and communities potential promoters and investors of innovative business. This is a new community commerce.
4. Contextual Marketing Triggering Users
Smart homes, mobile terminals, wearable devices, big data, real-time sensors, etc., are all connecting with users in various dimensions. This connection often exists in specific consumer contexts. Often, marketing must have a matching context to touch consumers. New technology developments make it easy to capture these contexts anytime, such as wearable devices, mobile internet, and connections with any advertising screen or terminal.
For example, in an office building scenario, if you can quickly obtain coupons from brand stores or retail terminals via mobile Wi-Fi, or local consumption details, you might go shopping in the surrounding business district during lunch break. Or you might shop on an e-commerce platform due to a QR code on the office screen. If marketing cannot make consumers feel the scene or be moved by it, it becomes forced and crude advertising. Observing user scenarios and creating new ones can bring new communication opportunities.
5. Real-Time Customer Service
Today, every company must respond in real-time to consumer needs expressed. Mobile internet technology has led to an explosion of real-time consumer needs, and companies will also change service forms, such as WeChat customer service and social CRM.
For example, China Merchants Bank launched WeChat customer service in March 2013. By linking credit cards with the bank's WeChat client, users can check limits, view bills, and make mobile repayments through the "micro customer service." In July 2013, CMB upgraded its WeChat platform, launching the first "WeChat Bank" with a new concept, expanding services from single credit card services to a comprehensive platform integrating debit and credit card services. Another example: China Southern Airlines' WeChat account can provide boarding pass services. Such real-time services bring users a new experience.
6. User Collaboration Breaking Boundaries
Although all companies talk about big data and even build various big data management centers and systems, "big data silos" have become a new problem. User data and backend data, online and offline data, social media data and offline retail data, membership card data and WeChat fan data, etc., all need coordination. Only by centering on users and breaking organizational and departmental boundaries to achieve comprehensive user collaboration can companies truly make big data valuable. However, breaking boundaries is a huge challenge for many companies due to internal culture. In the future, user collaboration interfaces are an inevitable change for innovation and marketing.
How Are Internet Communities Formed?
In the PC internet era, there were also communities, but they were more in the form of forums rather than communities, such as Tianya Club or Baidu Tieba. In the PC era, the internet was a tool, and online time was limited by hardware. But in the mobile era, mobile terminals are part of our bodies, extensions of our limbs and thoughts, allowing us to be online almost anytime, anywhere. This characteristic of mobile internet has a disruptive impact on traditional interpersonal relationships—not just changing but dissolving them.
This phenomenon in the mobile internet era is more like "atavism." Simply put, our interpersonal relationships are returning to traditional village times. Your circle of friends may be thousands of miles apart, but they are basically your friends or friends of friends, meaning they are connected through some bond. This is similar to village relationships: even if not very familiar, tracing back, they are somewhat related. In such a village, there are lazy people, capable people, blacksmiths, pawnshops, rice shops. The blacksmith knows when your plow will break, the rice shop knows when you'll run out of grain. Credit and borrowing are not problems. This is trust built on community. Think about it: doesn't your circle of friends have similar characteristics?
What Is the Difference Between Community and Forum?
Many people talk about communities and forums, but not many understand the difference.
Forum: Take Li Yuchun's Tieba as an example. Everyone likes Li Yuchun, so they hang out in her Tieba, but fans may not necessarily know each other. That's a forum.
Community: In a 500-person WeChat group like Xingyi Society, although members may not have met, they can basically be classified as friends of friends. That's a community.
Another example: Hangzhou's WeChat V Car Team. There are entry barriers, no mutual interests, high coordination, and distributed management, showing high efficiency. This is also a community.
What Is the Basis for Forming a Community?
Clay Shirky has explained this clearly in "Here Comes Everybody."
- Common goals or principles, commonly called tone or style. People are effectively separated by principles and tone, basically bringing the right people together. This is what Xingyi Society is doing, and it's the foundation. 2) Efficient coordination tools. This is why communities were hard to establish in the PC era. Real-time tools like WeChat and Weibo make coordination very easy. 3) Unified action. Because of the first two reasons, unified action becomes easier, and this unified action in turn promotes the stability of the community.
Does Every Brand Need Its Own Community?
Definitely. The key point is that not all users can become community members. As mentioned, communities are an "atavism" in the internet age, a modern version of village economy. Villages naturally have limited members. Starbucks has 33 million fans, but these fans can form different communities around a specific store or specific principle, but these 33 million people are not one big community. Similarly, Zhenhe Island has many tribes; tribes are communities, but Zhenhe Island itself is not.
Luo Yonghao, Luo Zhenyu, Xingyi Society, including Zhenhe Island and Building B 12, whether individuals or public accounts, have unconsciously formed their own attitudes and propositions. This attitude and proposition is the charismatic personality. Fans gather because they identify with it. A product with a distinctive style is also shaping its own charismatic personality, whether it's Apple, Smartisan, Meizu, or Roseonly's flowers, or Nanshizhao's Wenzhou specialties.
With mobile internet deconstructing media, because everyone is media, people and things with charismatic personalities stand out easily in this era. So, in the mobile internet era, attitude is also productivity.
Mobile internet is bringing another huge new opportunity, which I call the "social dividend era." In this era, whoever understands social interaction and communication can seize business opportunities. Regardless of how Diao Ye, Huang Taiji, or Elephant Condoms end up, they are indeed people who understand mobile internet social interaction well.
A very important feature of business in the mobile internet era is "market as conversation." We must speak human language and treat users as friends. This process is social interaction. If you can do this well, you can succeed in the social dividend era.
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