In recent years, one of the dialogue scenarios and questions I have faced the most has always been this-
Q: What is your job?
A: I operate in the Internet circle.
Again: what is an operation? What exactly does operation do?
……
This problem is so much experienced that for a while my scalp tingles whenever I hear it. The most important thing is that you will find that trying to answer the question "what is operation" is not always easy. If you want to make this question clear, you can almost write a book.
By the way, we have to add a premise. The operation we are discussing here refers specifically to the operation of websites and products in the Internet environment.
So, let's answer the easier and more practical question first - what exactly will operations do?
From a basic level, the work to be concerned and involved in operations usually includes the following three aspects - new, retention, and promotion.
The so-called pull new, is to bring new users to your product. There can be various means and ways to bring in new users, it can be planning and creating a topic and event with dissemination, it can be advertising, it can be an activity on the site, or it can be through Weibo and WeChat. ...Thus, at the pull level, an operation may involve one or more of the above means.
Let’s look at retention. The so-called retention is to ensure that users are finally willing to stay and play with you after being pulled to your products and sites through various operational means. The indicator corresponding to retention is called retention rate, which can be further subdivided into next-day retention, 7-day retention, and so on. The most tragic situation for a product is that it spends a lot of money and resources to bring in users in groups, only to find that user retention is pitifully low.
There are also various ways to improve retention. You can pretend to be a cute girl to chat with your users, and you can create a batch of unscrupulous activities or tasks to let your users come up and have fun I'm very happy, and you can also create a large number of dry and interesting content for your users to watch.
The last is to promote activities, that is, "promote users to be active". To be more common, is to make your users willing to play with you more frequently and more happily. In layman's terms, it means that users can play "higher, cooler and more lasting" with you on the basis of the existing ones. There are also many things that can be done here, including but not limited to building user models, silent user recall, creation and improvement of user incentive systems... and so on.
After simply talking about such a little thing, can you get a more specific understanding of "what does the operation actually do"?
In my opinion, a qualified operation should be able to handle at least some of the specific links mentioned above. A good operation should be able to make the above-mentioned parts can be smoothly connected in series to form a freely retractable whole. The operation of an NB can go beyond the above, starting from a certain node in the operation, to redefine the form, logic and operation model of the entire product.
The role that operations can play may be as simple as a customer service, or it may be extremely important, directly determining the life and death of a product. And, most importantly, the operation is often the person closest to the user, so the operation has unlimited possibilities.
So you find that, fundamentally, operations are and need to be a chore. A good operation must have an understanding of the N fields mentioned above, and be proficient in at least one or two fields.
So, run this thing, play it well, you will make yourself and the environment around you have unlimited possibilities and fun. And if you don't play well, you will just be a shriveled runaway, and you will be caught in the N complicated affairs all day long and it is difficult to escape.
So you should now understand what operations are. But how to grow into an advanced operation, what are the homework that needs to be done?
Let's take a look at the answer to this question by Zhihu user @刘 hammer.
(Maybe some of my friends have read this answer from Brother Sledgehammer, which was posted by Brother Bird’s notes before, but Brother Sledgehammer has updated it this time. After reading it again, I still think it’s very reasonable. If you haven’t seen it, you need to watch it. Once you have seen it, you need to review it again.)
1. What is operation?
In a broad sense, all manual interventions around website products are called operations. So in a way, I think that Internet product companies only have 3 business units: product, technology, operations. The concept of product operation means operation, but maybe your company or product is mainly based on products and supplemented by operations, so there is no need to dismantle a lot of people to do operations at this time, so it is collectively referred to as product operations.
To be more specific, I divide operations into market operations, user operations, content operations, community operations, and business operations.
Market operation: Use Marketing as a means to intervene in a series of product promotion, exposure, marketing and other behaviors in a cost-free way. It is more common in products that require a certain amount of money, but money and market behavior are not the same. There are market behaviors that do not spend money, and there are other means of operating money. This is often the main operating method of some companies that are close to money, because only those who are close to money and have a complete profit model will continue to expand their investment in market operations.
User operation: A human-centered operation method, commonly seen in the UGC community, is an operation method that is close to users, unites users, and guides users. You will find that website operators are very willing to communicate with users, joke, chat, gossip, and sometimes you can't tell whether it is a user or an official staff member, such as Zhihu, Zhou Yuan, Huang Jixin, Cheng Yuan, ourdearamy....In the early stage of a product, the active use and intervention of operators themselves is very important.
Content operation: There are two approaches. One is to process the high-quality content generated by users in the UGC community through editing, integration, optimization, etc., and disseminate it with other means. This is often done in conjunction with user operations. For example, you answer a question on Zhihu, and the answer is very exciting. Zhihu students will take your answer and other people's answers and organize them, and then use Weibo, daily, and weekly. This is a content-centric operation.
Another is that some media products, such as The Paper, such as Titanium Media, 36kr, are also operated with excellent content as the core. The difference from the former is that there are many components of editing, arranging, and writing by themselves, not necessarily from to users. (Of course, many students who answered questions on Zhihu were angry that their articles were plagiarized, reprinted without attribution, etc., but in fact, for those students who do content operations, plagiarism is part of their work, so you don’t need to care. I understand very well You, so this article welcomes plagiarism, welcome to reprint, no signature is required, but it is updated frequently, please remember to reprint it)
Community operation: In the early years, I put community operation and user operation together and talked to others, but later I found out that this is actually a bit problematic, because the operation for UGC users is completely different from the operation for ordinary community content consumers. type of work. So take it out on its own. Community operation refers to intervention activities for community consumers, such as doing an event on the whole site, drawing a lottery, voting, and reprinting some good articles to the community to spark discussions.. all count. This kind of work to the extreme is to constantly fan the flames in the community, cause everyone to spray each other, and activate the entire community. (Interested students can study nga's "Splash Fighter Arena". This model has also been cited by many other forums or communities in recent years, and the effect is quite good.)
Business operation: This type of method is more common in some business B2B products, which are divided into BD and sales. Sales is to sell products directly, BD is more of some cooperation of mutual benefit. These are all means, the purpose is to get users, and then keep them. Many enterprise-level products use this mode of operation as the main means, such as BAT's cloud service products, or attracting merchants to settle in, and attracting enterprise teams to use this method.
In terms of operations, or the growth of operators, we must first understand the role of product technology operations in an Internet product.
Product: figure things out
Technique: Get things out of the way
Operation: put things to work
Strictly speaking, products and operations also have different positioning and boundaries because of different companies, which varies from person to person. Different products have different emphasis in these three areas. For example, taking BAT as an example, Baidu focuses on technology, Tencent focuses on products, and Alibaba focuses on operation. These are all common concepts in the minds of the public. To some extent, they are related to the company's initial business and core business. Of course, the company is big to a certain extent, and other parts are also very strong, and it will not be bad there. However, some small companies still have early focus.
2. What is the operation to do?
But when it comes to operations, I think the core psychological quality of all students who are doing operations is:
Don't force products and technologies. If they make a piece of shit, you can turn over the flowers and let people eat them and give them a good rating. Consciousness and ability.
Whether you are a junior editor, a Weibo account manager, or an operations director, coo, what you care about most, you can only get a little bit of users from the beginning to the end, and then keep them. All the work you do must revolve around this, and any work (including the work of your team members) must directly or indirectly be part of this purpose, responsible for the results of the data.
It looks simple, but it's actually not that simple. For example, all the operation students, ask yourself, what work you have done in the last month, which work has a clear "data result" for this purpose, and which work does not. If the proportion of work without data results is too high, you need to reflect on your work. And this one, and then dismantled, can be dismantled into the following four core links.
1. Find where the user is
User portraits, surveys, demand analysis, etc. Yes, you need to understand your product, even if it is a piece of shit)
2. Get users at an acceptable cost and let them use your product
Market launch, channel expansion, business cooperation, content editing, social media planning activities, etc., spending money without spending money is all for this purpose. Sometimes it is better to spend money to hire a professional to do something by yourself. people do.
3. Let users continue to use your product
User operation, community operation
4. Keep in touch with users when the product is not in use
Recall, Weibo and WeChat operation, feedback, and business cooperation with other products.
3. The upward trajectory of operations
In my opinion, there is no strict watershed between junior and senior operations. To a certain extent, if you are only responsible for a sub-project of one of the above four links (such as Weibo operation specialist, WeChat operation specialist, content editor, community event planning, etc.), it can be defined as Primary operation. Often the primary operation is in 2-3-4. 1. You only need to understand and implement it, and you have not yet reached the point of participating in decision-making. At this time, you are an executor, and you need to do it in a down-to-earth manner. To be honest, at this stage, your work is calculated in units of days, and the substitutability is very strong. I have seen the recruitment data of Lagou, which is generally between 5-8K. This work is worth the price.
And when you do better and better, understand the link you are in more and more deeply, and start to gradually cover the scope of your ability to the entire link, you are already considered an intermediate operation. You may not care about market launch, only about retention, or even about retention, only about repeat purchases/sticky user UGC. To put it bluntly, you, as the manager of a certain link in the entire product business chain, have formed a certain level that cannot be bypassed, which is also your value. At this time, you are worth between 8-15K. Unless you are in the core part of the enterprise, you still have some alternatives. This is the time to start measuring your work in weeks.
Then when you are doing it, your ability is getting bigger and bigger, your vision is getting bigger and bigger, and you start to figure out how to go upstream and downstream.
For example, if you are a marketing manager, you have already begun to consider whether the traffic you have drawn will stay, and you will take the initiative to cooperate with community operators to do some activities, or you are a community operations manager, and you plan a UGC event in a community, and then take the initiative to coordinate Marketers are going to spread these wonderful UGCs to the outer circle. You are constantly expanding the scope of your abilities. At this stage, you have already advanced to advanced operations, with larger vision and more resources, and you need to lay out the layout. Start to calculate in units of months or even longer. Any of your decisions will affect the operation status for a long time afterward. The greater the risk, the greater the responsibility.
The core purpose I mentioned earlier actually has two levels, 1 is to promote new, 2 is to retain, if you break through from 1 to 2, or from 2 to 1, and you do a good job, you can start to control the field, according to The different needs of the product at different stages, to pay attention to where the breakthrough should be made first in the entire operation link at different stages, and use the overall consideration to reasonably allocate resources, whether it is money or manpower, in your eyes, it is a resource that can be allocated. When considering the gains and losses of one city and one place, and consider the problem with a relatively long time line. You already have the ability to be a director of operations, and the next step is the COO. Some coo companies also need to consider investor relations, PR, the deployment of various vendors, and large-scale business cooperation, but these have already 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 cultivating in one of the fields of "pulling new" and "retaining the old", the longer you work deeply and the deeper you work, the harder it is for you to jump out. understand another field. Because the values and ways of thinking here are completely different. Because users are completely different, it took you a long time to understand how unfamiliar users think and how they would start using your product step by step, while you need to spend almost the same amount of time to understand your familiar users What features do they have and how they will be used continuously.
Let me give an extreme example, such as Baidu's Phoenix Nest system (the background of the search promotion). If your purpose is to attract new users, you need to make users have such a cognition: "It is reliable to advertise in Baidu", you may have to spend a lot of time instilling with users "simple, easy to operate, large traffic, Help you make money" these points, this is the focus of the new operation. At this time, in the user's mind, your competitors are Tencent Guangdiantong, Weibo Fantong, portal vote banner, and offline advertising system. And because your users are too "stupid" to understand your points very quickly, you need to sell hard, come to your door, hold various meetings, do case promotion, etc., advertise in various places, and paint walls.
And if your purpose is to make people who have already started to use Phoenix Nest to spend more money, then not only do you need to make users feel good about you, but you also need to let users feel that he is here too. I've seen too many people use the Phoenix Nest and then throw it away. At this time, your thinking dimension has become, how can I let users make more money from Phoenix Nest, and continue to increase investment in balbla. Then you need technical guidance, care about the user's account status, and provide more and better tools. Your competitors or interference items at this time have become internal factors such as sales, customer service, or products, technology, etc. in the previous stage.
via: Huang's world, Zhihu