Text: Niu Enkun.
Editor's note:With the structuring of consumption and further segmentation of the market, "circle" has become a commercial hot word in the Internet era, especially for products with strong social attributes. Using the lever of the circle layer to leverage the entire social network has become a new topic for today's enterprise marketing promotion. This journal will combine the case analysis in simple terms, start from the underlying logic, interpret the latest development of circle marketing, and bring detailed guidance. This is the fifth and final article in this series.
A social product usually establishes social reputation first, and then gradually breaks the circle and spreads through the mobilization of social resources to form a mass influence.
How is social word-of-mouth built?We must first understand what rules of social word-of-mouth are to follow, and after understanding the rules of social word-of-mouth, we can grasp the order and rhythm of promotion, and establish a set of strategy system to break the circle.
Build a C-side feedback loop
Start in small circles and gradually zoom in. If it is disseminated on a large scale in the public domain from the beginning, the probability of receiving the information will be reduced due to the large circle, and it will be difficult to form a feedback effect. Therefore, it is important to start with a small circle, so that a positive cycle can be formed within the circle very quickly. The development process of social WOM follows the law of the S-curve, which is slow at first, fast in the middle, and then slow again.
After understanding the rules of social word-of-mouth, the next step is to build a feedback loop at the C-end circle. This refers to a circle where several people begin to say the same message, and then other people begin to participate in the transmission, and because of the repeated transmission of these several people, the psychological threshold of other people is reached, and so other people also begin to repeat the transmission. As the number of people spreading is increasing and the number of repetitions is increasing, people's dependence on this message is getting higher and higher, and more people reach the psychological threshold, which in turn causes more repetition, so as to form a positive feedback of geometric progression. This is the most efficient way to disseminate.
After breaking through a small circle, it is necessary to move on to the next stage in time and carry out three circles of penetration. You can find several of the same circles, and they should belong to a slightly larger circle. When more than three such small circles receive this information, feedback will be formed in this large circle, and a positive cycle will be formed in more small circles.
By analogy, as long as you cross three levels of circles, a piece of information will form a positive feedback in the whole society, and then the information will spread by itself. It is important to note that in a small circle, we need to choose which nodes to do for the initial propagation. These nodes have a natural desire to connect with other nodes to spread information, and you empower it to satisfy its desires, so the feedback is enhanced.
Multi-circle linkage diffusion information flow, each circle receives external information, strengthens discussion within the circle, forms opinions and exchanges with the outer circle. In the midst of the uproar, the flow of multi-circle information accelerates, presenting multi-dimensional characteristics, and finally forming turbulence. Information is often not directly addressed to the general audience, but rather through the intermediary link of opinion leaders, which is understood and interpreted personally, and then flows to the less active majority of the population.
The brand information roughly goes through the popular process of KOL (key opinion leader) influence, KOC (key opinion consumer) launch, big C (consumer) imitation, and general C following the trend, and KOL and KOC act as a secondary communication hub in the communication process, playing the role of intermediary, filtering, and gatekeeping.
KOL endorsement + KOC mobilization
People who have a strong desire to express themselves and have more information are likely to become KOLs, their opinions are likely to become dominant opinions, and others will be conquered by superior opinions and become imitators. The increase in the number of imitators, in turn, strengthens the dominant opinion, making it tend to be highly consistent and form a strong opinion.
Strong opinions are the levers of mass infection. Mass infection refers to the process in which a certain idea, emotion or behavior spreads unusually quickly among a population under the influence of a suggestion mechanism. The speed of emotional contagion mainly depends on the excitement of the group, the self-control ability of the members, and the strength of the instinctive response to external stimuli. After the process of group contagion, one emotion, one point of view, will quickly dominate the whole group, and there is a tendency to immediately turn the implied idea into action.
In addition to selling goods and disseminating goods, it is difficult to normalize Internet celebrities, as long as it is not normalized, the practice cannot be popularized and replicated. The KOC has an ant colony effect, which can be organized with the help of social **. The actions of the ant colony are flexible and can be quickly adjusted to changes, and the actions of the ant colony are organized and do not require top-down management to organize and coordinate the task in an orderly manner. The mobile Internet provides a variety of information for the ant soldiers, connects a wide range of people, and provides low-cost and high-efficiency tools for organization and mobilization, division of labor and cooperation, and quickly transforms online speech into offline collective action, which forms the ant colony effect.
The logic of the platform is the elephant Internet celebrity, and the offline logic is the ant soldier. The Internet has brought about a fundamental change in the mechanism of social mobilization, which may begin with organizations and groups that do not have a fixed form. In particular, the emergence of social ** has prompted a redistribution of social mobilization capacity, and the silent majority of users can be mobilized.
Expand the scale of social mobilization, mobilize the originally weak and large number of ordinary users in the shortest possible time, create an emotional atmosphere, strengthen the position of the participants, the original unknown users in the common appeal to promote the coming together, the position has been strengthened, the emotions have been expressed, the emotions have been released, the original users who did not care much have been encouraged, began to participate in it to a greater extent, and gained the perception and cognition of being in it.
With the help of the circle, especially the trigger mechanism of social **, social mobilization, it is easy to form spontaneous mobilization, self-organization of the ant colony effect, if you can grasp the operation mechanism of the ant colony effect, insight into information and user emotions, when the first piece of outbreak, you can make a judgment on the user's actions and, you can switch to the next stage in time.
Empower small B to operate the "three circles".
Little B's social relations are divided into three circles. When he interacts with people from different circles, he will adopt different rules of exchange.
First, let's look at the inner circle. The inner circle refers to our family members as well as the people we trust the most. Our relationship with these people is one that is long-lasting and stable. This relationship is maintained by frequent emotional exchanges. So, it follows the principle of emotionality.
Second, look at the outer ring. The outer circle refers to people we know but are not close to. We maintain this relationship in accordance with the principle of fairness. For example, if the merchant gives me a reasonable price, I will go next timeIf he cheats a customer, then our trading relationship will be broken. The outer circle is not emotional, it follows the principle of instrumentality.
There is also a layer between the outer circle and the inner circle, which is the circle of acquaintances, including good friends or people who are close to each other. Acquaintances are the most special and worthy of study in Chinese relations. It follows the principle of hybridity, mixing the relationship between emotionality and instrumentality.
An important reason why the circle is a circle, rather than a gradually decaying gravitational field, is that there must be a considerable closure between the circles: for the center, the people in a circle must have some kind of closed qualification or status, and the people in the outer circle must obtain this qualification or status if they want to enter the inner circle. In the classic "differential order pattern", this name is blood relationship, and the kinship of blood relationship determines the intimacy of other relationships. The blood relationship is naturally closed, and it is extremely difficult to enter the inner circle from the outer circle layer or from the inner circle layer to the outer circle layer.
In modern society, various non-blood relationships, such as instrumental relationships and emotional relationships, have gradually become important and have acquired a status independent of blood relations, and extremely intimate relationships can develop between two people even if they are not related by blood. Since non-blood ties are not closed, people can strengthen their relationships with each other by increasing emotional interactions and interest interactions, or they can alienate each other by reducing interactions. In this case, the boundaries of the circle are fluid, and the network of relationships around the individual is structurally more like an open, gradually decaying gravitational field than a "rock-throwing wave".
What friends and partners need is an emotional connection, and the lower the cost of the connection, the smaller the barrier, the wider the scope, and the easier it is to meet the emotional needs, so the emotional connection needs to be homogeneous. In the social collaborative relationship such as innovation, challenge, and investment, heterogeneous team composition can form a better complementary relationshipFrom the perspective of the network, the establishment of cooperation between the two with high differences also takes the initiative to fill the "structural hole" in the collaborative network, which is conducive to a better flow of information between networks.
Elevate themed activities to social movements
In the social era, a topic with a hashtag is likely to develop into a social movement that sweeps the whole world. A good hashtag campaign will add a lot of points to people's social communication and marketing, which can increase the message or brand, mobilize the enthusiasm of users to participate, and collect user feedback in a timely manner. Label activism has the characteristics of rapid and efficient, strong topicality, strong emotional interaction, and uncertain diffusion range, which is easy to produce group behavior and ferment and upgrade into a first-class piece.
Strong association is the recommendation of grass between acquaintances, relying on interpersonal word-of-mouth recommendation and communication, and social ** helps people constantly break social barriers and provide people with references for external information. Social networking drives the prosperity of the circle, and people are more and more inclined to obtain some kind of recognition in the circle and share consumer interests and preferences together.
People trust professionals and folk experts more, and they are like grass planters, bringing a wide space for the dissemination of products and opinions. In addition to social interaction, the grass planted should also be able to ignite people's emotions, no matter what the content, there are commonalities, good to look at, sound fun, contagious and high emotional saturation, can trigger people's emotional ignition. Only by provoking people's emotions can a large number of ** be aroused.
The behavior of social network people is contagious and is divided into information effect and network effect.
The herd effect and information waterfall that we were familiar with before all belong to the information effect. In the information effect, social networks are weak. The social relations in the network effect have strong ties and influence each other. Network effects can be further divided into unilateral network effects and cross-border network effects. In the actual social network, it is a unilateral network effect from one point of view, and it may also be a cross-border network effect from another point of view. For example, WeChat, from the perspective of the people who use it, belongs to the unilateral network effect;However, from the operator's point of view, advertisers on one side and WeChat users on the other side also belong to the cross-border network effect.
Building a feedback loop is the lever to find a breakthrough in the small circle, KOL endorsement and KOC mobilization are the double levers to form a large circle, empowering the small B is a multi-lever to break the inner circle, and raising the theme activity to a social movement is the process of finding the big lever of the society. The four hurdles of product breakthrough are also a set of strategy systems for leveraged combinations.
Author: Niu Enkun, chairman of Liangjian Consulting, founder of the circle deep division system.