As of October 6, 2016, I have followed a total of 116 subscription accounts on WeChat, including 23 topped the list of "only 3 to 4 subscription accounts that will be opened every day in the near future. In the era of fierce competition among self-media, how to gather and promote target groups more effectively through operations and realize commercial monetization of knowledge is a proposition worth thinking about.

Today I will dig out the "Notesman" with you.

Last week, the knowledge-entrepreneurship self-media "Notesman" received 4 million angel financing in about one year after it went online, with a valuation of 40 million. During the capital winter period, "Notes" broke through the siege with more innovative operational strategies among many self-media armies. This article will analyze the operational strategies of "Notes" from content production, content distribution, user operation and business model .

"Notesman" product form disassembly

Li Jiaoshou once proposed that "self-media is a product", which means that self-media should be regarded as a product for design and operation. Here we borrow his concept to disassemble the product form of "Notesman".

"Notesman" product form disassembly

What operating strategies does Notes adopt?

1. Unique content production mechanism

(1) Clear user positioning, "One-hand content" production mechanism of "UGC+PGC"

"Notesman" at the beginning of his growth relatively clarified the audience "first-hand notes that CEOs aged 1 to 6 years old are reading". Typical labels of this type of people are: practitioners, high educational background, love to study, willing to invest time and money in knowledge, etc.

Unlike the content output model of "original" or "screening and reprinting and aggregation" of other public accounts, the content of Notes is fundamentally derived from the "screening and reprocessing" of the content of salons, conferences, guest speeches and other activities across the country by note experts. When Notes release notes, in addition to sorting out the key points of the speech content, it will also assist with introduction, audio, issues that need to be thought about before reading, important concept notes, and selected links to related content.

Such content production has three major benefits for Notes . First, it is conducive to ensuring the diverse themes of the content source, the sustainable content and the quality of the content are guaranteed. Usually, professional guests from all over the country undertake the main content native tasks. The invited guests are usually more capable in the industry and have foresight and insight into the industry they are in. Second, through the screening, sorting and reprocessing of knowledge, the value-added content is achieved, allowing users to quickly master the key points of half an hour or even one hour of speech content within 5-15 minutes, effectively saving users time and gaining gains, and in line with the thinking of Internet product production and communication.

However, overly relying on guest speeches from various events, and not introducing other content innovations based on the reprocessing and dissemination of various speech content, it is very likely that other potential competitors will be at a competitive disadvantage when they appear and master more guest resources . Assuming that the organizer of the event and the guests unite to carry out a vertical note processing and publish it for the purpose of publicity and promotion, this may also become a headache for Notes. At that time, Notesman needs to be able to establish a lasting partnership with the speakers. Further assumptions, assuming that Notes and Guests can establish direct docking cooperation, then the guest’s useful information can be directly output from Notes and Multi-platforms. So what differentiated competitive advantages can the notes made by Notes and the article output of these industry heroes on some industry websites? Judging from the current situation, the situation is not ideal unless it is said that Notes can buy the copyright of original works in the industry heroes regarding "entrepreneurship" and other directions for exclusive distribution, and even said that with Internet entrepreneurship as the direction, a community training community will be gradually established.

(2) Extend vertical fields to increase user coverage

Initially, Notes mainly collected live notes related to Internet thinking and methodology. Later, in order to expand its audience, it gradually extended vertically from the Internet field to the "TMT" (Technology, Media & Telecommunications), namely the fields of technology, media and communications. This adjustment is in line with the development trend, but because Notes are currently mainly published on WeChat public platforms, they can only use guest names and other channels as keyword indexes in the WeChat backend, so there is considerable inconvenience for the classification and accurate search of speech content . At the same time, the demand for diverse content will naturally increase the demand for note experts, and non-commercial contractual community recruitment and management will also become a major challenge for Notes to expand the scale.

2. Content distribution: Multi-platform across channels and attach importance to brand cooperation

Mainly based on WeChat platform, cross-media entry

At present, Notes mainly distributes content through WeChat platform, and also joins multiple social media platforms such as Baidu Baijia, Portal and other platforms. At the same time, we cooperate with more organizations in the entrepreneurship field, including Chaos Research Society, Zhenghe Island, Entrepreneurship Network, Dark Horse Camp, Micro-chain and other institutions. According to reports, App and Himalaya FM, which have promoted knowledge payment to become a hot topic this year, are already negotiating cooperation with "Notes". The entry of cross-media platforms is conducive to helping self-media alleviate the problem of traffic import.

But it should be noted that although Notes He claims to have followed 150,000 fans, according to the recent data of the new list, the WeChat official account of "Note Hero" is estimated to have about 44,000 active fans. As for how other platforms fill the remaining 116,000 fans, I will keep a wait-and-see attitude.

According to common sense, after ensuring high-quality and stable output of content, traffic will also keep up accordingly, and it is conceivable that traffic keeps up with the commercial space. However, objectively speaking, although the relatively stable and high-quality content output is guaranteed, the current operation status of the two microscopes of Notes is not very ideal, and the interaction is not active. The reason behind this is that notes tend to be personalized, low-frequency, and non-rigid needs. The team has not done enough in social media communication. Weibo and WeChat are more of a "notification" platform for outputting notes, and related community management, event interaction, creative operation, etc. are relatively lagging behind.

3. User operation: Strive to achieve accurate user precipitation

Notes’ user operations mainly include two major directions, and the distribution is the producers and consumers of notes, and the two overlap in a certain range.

(1) Note Producer: Take reward interaction

"Notesman" adopts a level management system and reward interaction for note experts to promote their accumulation and precipitation. First of all, note experts are divided into different levels according to their performance, including internships, regional groups, and senior experts. The severity of tasks received at each level is different from the corresponding rights. Each note expert will add points based on the number, quality, speed, number of readings completed, and the number of points will be increased step by step. In the future, these tasks and points statistics will be automated.

(2) Notes Consumer: KOL potential energy is strong, offline activities are active

In terms of management of note-taking consumers, by positioning notes such as Internet entrepreneurship and thinking, "Note-know" has attracted industry opinion leaders such as Zhang Yiming, Zhou Hang, and Xiao Ma Song to subscribe. The potential of these KOL users will help expand the influence of "Note-know" in the notes consumer user group. At the same time, Notes focuses on combining offline activities, reaching cooperation with many brands, and holding public speaking speeches on their own, making the lectures IP.

It is worth noting that Notes seem to pay attention to the creation of user values ​​from user positioning to related training. For example, by positioning "CEOs aged 1 to 6", the content consumer groups are clearly divided, giving target users a very tempting "identity attribute". This is also a bit more interesting.

4. Commercial monetization

In terms of commercial monetization, Notes has adopted a strategy similar to Luoji Siwei, namely member community management, audio, related book sales, peripheral products , etc. Taking member management as an example, firstly, there are 1,800 yuan, 5,800 yuan and 50,000 yuan each year in the division. Paid members can participate in the offline salon organized by Notes for free and get internal notes for all salons. In addition, members can also have resource matching opportunities, that is, the growth camp of Chuangyebang gives ten quotas to the Notes Hero members to directly enter the final review.

Speaking of peripheral products (actually Notebooks for Notes), the official statement said that he did not intend to rely on selling peripheral products for profit, but hoped to obtain more user data through this method. Personally, I am skeptical about this way of obtaining data, and this also exposes the user management difficulties encountered during cross-platform promotion of self-media, that is, the specific presentation and exploration of the target user portrait.

Talk about the operational thoughts of Notes and knowledge self-media

Zhang Xiaolong put forward the beautiful vision of "everyone is a media". The beauty of this vision lies in lowering the threshold for media voices and everyone pours in, which will encourage content diversification, but it will not have much effect on improving the overall quality of content dissemination. At the same time, the WeChat official account platform does not provide traffic assistance, and in order to take care of WeChat user experience, the opening rate of subscription accounts placed in the folding bar becomes lower, etc. Moreover, with the popularity and commercial monetization of self-media such as "Ten Points Reading", Gogoboi, and Serious Gossip, the living space of ordinary self-media will continue to shrink seriously. Ultimately, self-media that can solve user needs and continuously output quality content can win users in the war, and the activity of users will be closely related to whether the self-media operation team can solve user needs, and will be closely related to education, life services, social networking, business, etc. Such self-media operations need to be completed by an individual with rich operation and promotion experience or influentiality, or even by a team .

Currently, there are roughly four types of self-media that "survives":

The first category is represented by "Luoji Siwei", with distinct IP characteristics and mainly related to personal brands as media;

One type is a media platform represented by "Ten Points Reading", which mainly reproduces and aggregates high-quality content;

One type is to organize and comment on existing phenomena and materials, such as "serious gossip";

Another category is "Note Warrior", whose development path was defined as social media from the beginning, and the content takes the form of UGC (main) + PGC.

The success of Notes is that it recreates UGC knowledge value based on elements such as education, social networking and business, and effectively solves two major problems of traditional self-media : one, how to continuously produce high-quality and valuable content; two, how to alleviate the aesthetic fatigue of fans. After solving the problem of content production, "Notes" used KOL potential energy and value transmission to distribute content on the multimedia platform, and started operations lightly. To sum up, Notes are worth learning from by other knowledge self-media in content production, user operation, etc.

At the same time, other shortcomings of Noteman are still worthy of the team's attention . First of all, with the continuous deepening of development, the stock of notes has increased. The promotion of social media based on WeChat public accounts is not conducive to classification, presentation, precise distribution and accurate search for people in different fields and majors . Second, from the perspective of demand, note sharing is not a rigid and high-frequency requirement. The existence of traditional notes is more for personalized personal understanding and growth. Now, "personalized notes of note masters" serve the "all other users" of Notes. Will there be any conflicts in demand? Third, copyright issues , this is a major challenge that the Notes Team has not yet faced but may encounter in the future. Who exactly does the copyright belong to the reproduction and sorted notes of the live speech? The current common saying is that based on the principles of sharing and dissemination of the Internet, these useful information are shared by everyone. However, Mao Mao Mao Mao believes that even the copyright of notes that have been "screened and digested" should still belong to the speaker himself, so the organizer and disseminate notes should be recognized by the speaker himself. Notes have been recognized by guests before the notes are spread, but the rewards received by Notes released by Notes are notes. This subsidizes the wisdom output of notes, but the speakers do not seem to take too much into account. In the long run, if they are not handled properly, it is easy to cause disputes.

However, if Notes He solves the copyright issues and cooperates with event organizers, he may have a resource advantage in entrepreneurship in the same field. Other issues such as recruitment and management of note experts, how to differentiate with competitors in the same field in the future, how to do a good job in internal management and external management of entrepreneurial communities , etc., all need to calm down and think further.

Text/Mao Mao Mao Ha