Actual combat: how to operate Internet products well?

Broadly speaking, all manual interventions around website products are called operations. So to some extent, I think Internet products companies only have three business departments: products, technology and operation.

The concept of product operation is = operation, but maybe your company or product is product-oriented, supplemented by operation, so there is no need to tear down many people to operate at this time, so it is collectively called product operation.

In detail, I divide the operation into market operation, user operation, content operation, community operation and commercial operation.

Market operation:

With marketing as a means, a series of interventions such as publicity, exposure and marketing are carried out on products by spending money without spending money. It is common in products that need to spend money to a certain extent, but spending money is not the same as market behavior, including both market behavior without spending money and other operating means of spending money.

This is often the main operation method for some enterprises to get close to capital, because only by getting close to capital can a complete profit model continuously expand the investment in market operation.

User action:

People-centered operation means, common in UGC community, is an operation mode that is close to users, unites users and guides users. During the performance, you will find that website operators are very willing to communicate, tease, chat and gossip with users. Sometimes you can't tell whether this is a user or an official. Zhihu, for example, is one of them. Kelly Y Zhou, Huang Jixin, Chengyuan, our dear Amy ... In the early stage of a product, the active use and intervention of operators is very important.

Content operation:

There are two ways to do this. One is to process the high-quality content generated by users through editing, integration and optimization, and spread it in UGC community. This is usually done together with the user's operation. For example, if you answer a question in Zhihu and the answer is wonderful, Zhihu students will sort out your answer and others' answers, and then spread it through Weibo, daily newspapers and weekly magazines. This is a content-centric operation.

Another is that some media products, such as newspapers, such as titanium media, 36kr, are also operated with excellent content as the core. Different from the former, many components are edited, sorted and written by themselves, not necessarily from users.

Community operation:

In the early years, I told others about community operation and user operation together. Later, I found that this is actually a bit problematic, because the operation for UGC users and the operation for ordinary community consumers are also two completely different jobs. So I took it out alone.

Community operation refers to the intervention activities of community consumers, such as doing a whole-station activity, drawing a lottery, voting and reprinting some good articles to trigger community discussion. This extreme work is to constantly fan the flames in the community, causing everyone to spray each other and enliven the whole community.

(Interested students can study nga's "Jet Fighter Arena", which has been quoted by many other forums or communities in recent years, and the effect is quite good)

Business operation:

This method is common in some business B2B products, which can be divided into BD and sales. Sales is the direct selling of products, while BD is more of a mutually beneficial cooperation. These are all means to acquire users and then retain them. Many enterprise-level products are mainly based on this mode of operation, such as BAT's cloud service products, or pull merchants to settle in and pull enterprise teams to use them.

Around the operation, or the growth of operators, we must first understand what role product technology operation plays in an Internet product.

Product: Think things through.

Technology: Take things out.

Operation: Make the best use of everything.

Strictly speaking, products and operations vary from company to company, and their positioning and boundaries vary from person to person. Different products have different emphases in these three areas. Take BAT as an example, Baidu emphasizes technology, Tencent emphasizes products, and Ali emphasizes operation. These are common concepts in the public mind, which are related to the company's initial business and what its core business is to some extent. Of course, the company is large to a certain extent, and other parts are also strong, so it is impossible to get there. But some small companies still have pre-emphasis.

Second, what should the operation do?

But back to the operation, I think the core psychological quality of all students who do operation is:

Don't insist on products and technology, but have the consciousness and ability to turn flowers over and make people praise them.

Whether you are a junior editor, a Weibo account manager, an operations director or a coo, you can only care about one thing from beginning to end:

Get users and keep them.

Everything you do should be closely centered around this point, and any work (including the work of your team members) must directly or indirectly point to a part of this purpose and be responsible for the data results.

It seems simple, but it is not. For example, operators ask themselves what they have done in the last month, what work has a clear "data result" and what work has not. If there is too much work without data results, you need to reflect on your own work.

And this, taken apart again, can be broken down into the following four core links:

1. Find out where the user is.

User portrait, survey, demand analysis, etc. Yes, you need to know your product, even if it is a piece of shit.

2. Get users at an acceptable cost and let them use your products.

Marketing, channel expansion, business cooperation, content editing, social media planning activities, etc. , all spend money for this. Sometimes it is better to pay professionals to do things for a week.

3. Let users continue to use your product.

User operation, community operation.

4. Keep in touch with users when not using the product.

Recall, Weibo WeChat operation, feedback, business cooperation with other products.

Third, the upward trajectory.

In my opinion, there is no strict watershed between primary operation and advanced operation.

To some extent, if you are only responsible for a sub-project of one of the above four links (such as Weibo Operations Commissioner, WeChat Operations Commissioner, content editing, community activity planning, etc.). ), which can be defined as a primary operation.

Often the primary operation is 2-3-4, 1, and you only need to understand and implement it, but you haven't reached the point of participating in decision-making. At this time, you are an executor, so just do it in a down-to-earth manner.

To tell the truth, your work at this stage is calculated in days, which is very replaceable. I have seen the recruitment data of Lagou, which is generally between 5k and 8 K. This job is worth it.

And when you do better and better, understand your own links more and more deeply, and begin to gradually cover your own abilities to the whole link, you are already an intermediate operation. You may not care about the market launch, but only care about retention, even retention, and only care about repeated purchases/sticky users UGC.

To put it bluntly, as the manager of a certain link in the whole product business chain, you have formed a certain level that cannot be bypassed, which is also your value. At this time your value is between 8- 15K. Unless you are the core of the enterprise, you can still be replaced. At this time, start thinking about the effect of your work in a few weeks.

Then when you are doing it, your ability is getting bigger and bigger, your vision is getting bigger and bigger, and you begin to wonder how to go upstream and downstream.

For example, if you are a marketing manager, you have begun to consider whether the traffic you pulled can stay and actively start to cooperate with community operators to do some activities, or if you are a community operation manager, you plan a UGC activity in a community, and then actively coordinate the marketers to spread these wonderful UGC to the outer circle, and you are constantly expanding your capabilities.

At this stage, you have advanced to advanced operations, with a broader vision and more resources. The bureaus that need to be deployed start to be calculated on a monthly basis or even longer. Any decision you make will affect the operation for a long time. The greater the risk, the greater the responsibility.

The core purpose I mentioned earlier actually has two levels: 1 is innovation and 2 is retention. If you break through from 1 to 2, or from 2 to 1, and both of them are good, you can start to control the field. According to the different needs of products, pay attention to where the whole operation link should break through first at different stages, and fully consider the reasonable proportion of resources. No matter whether you have the initial ability to be an operation director, the next step is the chief operating officer. Some coo companies have to consider investor relations, PR, the deployment of various vender, and large-scale business cooperation, but these have entered the company rather than just product-level operations.

And this layer is also the most difficult to break through. The bottleneck is that if you have been deeply involved in one of the fields of "innovation" and "conservatism" before, the deeper you dig, the harder it is for you to jump out and learn about the other field.

Because values and ways of thinking are completely different. Because users are completely different, it will take you n long time to understand how strange users think and how they start to use your product step by step, and you need to spend almost as much time to understand what characteristics your familiar users have and how to continue to use them.

Let me give you an extreme example, such as Baidu's HIVE BOX system (that is, the background of search promotion).

If your purpose is to attract new users, you need to let users know that "advertising in Baidu is reliable", and you may have to spend a lot of time instilling in users the point of "simplicity, easy operation, large traffic and helping you make money", which is the focus of Racine's operation.

At this time, in the minds of users, your competitors are Tencent Broadcom, Weibo Fantong, Portal Merchants Banner and below-the-line System. And because your users are too "stupid" to understand your point quickly, you need to sell them to death, go to the door, hold various meetings, do case promotion and so on. And advertise in various places and paint the walls.

And if your goal is to make people who have already started using HIVE BOX spend more money, you need to make users not only feel good about you, but also feel that he is here. I've seen too many people use the phoenix nest, but they can't get used to it and then abandon it.

At this time, your thinking dimension becomes, how can I make users earn more money from HIVE BOX and continue to increase their investment in balbla? Then you need technical guidance, care about the user's account status and provide more and better tools. At this time, your competitors or distractions become internal factors such as sales, customer service, or products and technology.

These two things are actually mutually exclusive, because from the perspective of innovation, you are not afraid to hurt users, because users don't know you, so there is no harm. In the latter case, you may want to hurt users and make a game and balance between users and your interests. In layman's terms, it's like telling you that this person is too bad at first, you have to cut him, and then telling you that this person is too good and you have to save him.

Most people get confused when they get here, and as a result, they can't cut people when they save people, so they worry too much.

Only by understanding, can we really get through the second pulse of Ren Du and be a high-level operator.

It's like two sides of * *. You must not think that you only need to look at one side, and your development will stop at an operation manager with an annual income of no more than 200,000. Once you break through, there will be an uncapped position waiting for you. Even if you don't have product ability and technical ability, you can be a very NB COO and lead a team to be responsible for innovation or conservatism.

I have seen countless people die here. An UGC community product starts advertising when there is nothing, or a product with great experience can't inspire users' praise in time, so it is used as a market weapon to spread money. As a result, it was quickly dried up by the big factory. There are countless such cases.

Do the right thing at the right time, not everything.

Fourth, the operator summary

I think the career development curve of operation is stepped, which is different from the smooth rising curve of products or technologies. When you are free, you can refer to the salary of websites such as hunting and hiring, and the operation span is very large. 1-3 years after graduation, don't envy the high starting salary of programmers. See how many positions and people an architect with an annual salary of 700,000 to 800,000 can have.

Operation is a job with low barriers to entry. Low entry threshold means a large population base, so the competition will be fierce. Every level has to accumulate time or money. Operation is most like fighting. You were a soldier from the beginning, then you gradually became a veteran, began to command a small class, then commanded a company, battalion, regiment ...100000 people, and finally a general. When you become a general, your victory is bought with your life. Some people have to be sacrificed and some people have to be abandoned. .....

The same is true for operations. The success of every enterprise is based on a large number of people who have no career development, no promotion opportunities, no accumulation, and are doing jobs without growth day after day. Your decision was successful, your enterprise was successful, your salary went up together, new business was developed together, your decision was wrong, and you wasted countless people's precious years.

If a product is regarded as an air route, the product is the direction, and it is guaranteed to fly to the destination. Technology is the foundation and cannot be guaranteed. But when a company's products have been basically finalized and started to take off, only strong operation can make the products fly higher and faster, and get rid of competitors who copy your products and learn your technology.

Because in an enterprise, the closest thing to users is operation.