Re-understanding the value of Weibo "field"

In my opinion, the collective carnival of domestic products triggered by the Li Jiaqi incident is a microcosm of Weibo's free and open discussion ecology.

In fact, there have been many recent events that have gone viral and have unique value, proving the "potential energy" of Weibo as a national platform, such as Huawei, BYD, Luckin Coffee, etc.

From this series of phenomena, we can actually see a long-underestimated differentiated value of Weibo - field.

Before explaining the value of the Weibo "field", let's start with the book "The Tipping Point". In this book, the author Gladwell proposed three laws for detonating popularity - "the law of key figures", "the law of content adhesion" and "the law of environmental power".

Simply put, if an author wants to create a trend, the following three factors are the key - "people", "content" and "place".

"Field" refers to the environment, the atmosphere, and the underlying temperament of a platform.

In its long evolution process, Weibo has formed a unique atmosphere of discussion and communication, which is a unique "field". It is both a square for national discussion and a site for brand marketing.

As a brand, facing the unique "field" of Weibo, we must improve our marketing ideas and methods on the premise of deeply understanding its underlying logic, so that our brand can "go on stage", "be present" and "not be stage-shy" on the Weibo platform.

1. Weibo’s “field”: a “square” that amplifies the volume of voice

Let's continue to talk about the recent hot events -

On September 9, #机圈王峰# became a hot topic. The story behind this is that OPPO’s new phones collided with Huawei’s Mate series new phones twice in terms of timing.

Obviously, compared with Huawei's new phone, which has the special meaning of being reborn from the ashes, OPPO is not more popular in discussion.

However, due to OPPO's long-term operation on Weibo, it has also formed a good reputation and a large fan base, so entertaining topics such as #机圈王峰# were born and quickly became a hot topic on Weibo.

Under this topic, there is sympathy and ridicule, but no sarcasm or ridicule.

Judging from the battle report released by OPPO later, OPPO also reaped great rewards from the entertaining and heated discussions in the digital circle, and the sales volume of Find N3 Flip even broke the historical record.

Let’s take a look at the Maotai x Luckin sauce latte that went viral a few days ago. I sorted out the timeline of its discussion on Weibo:

From September 4th to September 7th, related discussions were on the hot search list many times, from the main topic #瑞幸酱香拉铁# to #瑞幸客服回复問題的口口口買可以車#.

From #Luckin Coffee releases raw material production record video# to #Luckin Coffee’s ordering system suspected to crash#.

From the #Silence of Two Generations in a Cup of Coffee# to the #Mixue Bingcheng Wuliangye#

The fermentation of Maotai sauce-flavor on Weibo is like a scene from a drama, which can be fully unfolded from different angles, from playing with memes to interpretations, from single to multiple. Weibo, a naturally lively "field", can allow commercial hotspots to ferment, discuss and spread to the greatest extent.

Taobao Hot Search News Spokesperson Shen Fangjun once said:

"The hot topics on Weibo are like a series, because they follow the trend of an event and reflect the different concerns and emotions of users."

These two examples are a microcosm of how brands fully leverage the value of Weibo's "discussion platform" to amplify their own voice.

We say that Weibo is a social media, but generally speaking, in the eyes of many practitioners and brands, people pay more attention to the media attributes of Weibo in their minds, and intentionally or unintentionally ignore the social and community aspects of Weibo.

A typical Weibo user's follow list usually includes various big Vs, small and medium-sized vertical Vs, as well as friends and ordinary netizens who frequently interact. Such a diverse structure allows Weibo users to form a sufficiently open discussion path and space.

Compared with other platforms, Weibo is a free outlet for expression, and it naturally conforms to the very instinctive "watching" characteristic of our human nature.

At the same time, Weibo also provides a form of participation with a low enough threshold, such as forwarding, fast forwarding, commenting, liking, participating in topics... These buttons allow Weibo users to have a sense of participation when consuming content that is difficult to obtain on other platforms.

Traditionally, people think that Weibo is a weak relationship platform, but in my opinion, Weibo is actually a gradient relationship platform from strong to weak.

A few netizens who frequently interact with each other are of course a strong relationship, but for many die-hard fans of big Vs, are the relationships between them weak?

I don’t think so.

The strong feelings of die-hard fans may be stronger than real relationships in reality, and big Vs can also gain enough feedback from interacting with die-hard fans.

Their relationship is actually one of providing emotional value to each other, which is no longer a weak relationship in the traditional sense.

In fact, with the closure of Tianya and the decline of Tieba, Weibo has become an extremely scarce discussion space left on the Chinese Internet. This unique "field" actually, in a sense, brings together the characteristics and attributes of products such as Twitter, Tieba, Tianya, Douban, Xiaohongshu, and Instagram.

Today's Weibo has in fact become a national square. This square is large enough and of course it has music performances, news loudspeakers, and speakers who command the attention of hundreds of people.

But it is more like groups of people who gather together in threes or fives, talking and laughing. These people have similar interests and some have very close relationships, while others are relatively loose. But what they have in common is that they are not closed, love to discuss, are highly involved, and have clear likes and dislikes. Good things spread easily from person to person, and bad news spreads faster than anywhere else.

Therefore, for brands, when they come to the Weibo square, it is not enough to just distribute flyers, but they also need to set up a stage, open pop-up stores, give out trial packages, issue recruitment notices, and sponsor a lively stage. In short, they have to have fun.

BYD, Ideal Auto, OPPO, Xiaomi, Pechoin, Alipay, Ele.me, miHoYo, and the former Durex are all brands that know how to play, and brands that know how to play are indeed easy to spread from person to person on Weibo.

For brands, there are actually many ways to play on Weibo. Below we will focus on Weibo’s UGC gameplay and the logic behind it.

Weibo is not only a content consumption platform, but also a content production platform. As a naturally light content, the production threshold of Weibo is very low, and Weibo users are also happy to express their views, opinions and insights.

Therefore, as long as the brand guides and mobilizes them in an appropriate manner, fans will be very enthusiastic about participating in the co-creation of brand content.

What is more important is that these UGC contents themselves will be amplified twice under the dissemination mechanism of Weibo. The core logic of the Weibo dissemination mechanism is that when a Weibo post is forwarded 100 times, it is no longer just one Weibo post, but directly becomes 100 Weibo posts.

In this sense, Weibo can become an amplifier of brand content.

MiHoYo is very good at using this kind of gameplay. When Honkai Impact 3rd Horizon 3 was launched, the game officials first invited quite a number of professional painters to draw works of different characters, and then released low-threshold participation tasks through Weibo Star Selection.

This ultimately sparked enthusiastic participation from game fans, generating a large number of game guides, original short comics, and Cos content, helping the game become a hot topic eight times and generating more than 460,000 discussions in the super topic.

Games are also content products. From the above example, we can see that the game company miHoYo truly understands content.

So, how can we better leverage the value of Weibo as a discussion forum?

From a cognitive perspective, we must deeply understand the value of Weibo as a "discussion forum."

Zuckerberg launched Threads to fight against the vortex of Twitter. Although the data was impressive at the beginning, it was soon drowned out and had no chance to affect the foundation of Twitter. The same is true for Weibo. It has been 14 years since its birth. Countless competitors claiming to be "Weibo killers" have emerged, but without exception, they have disappeared quietly.

I believe the core of this is the unique “field” value formed by Weibo’s communication and interaction mechanism, which enables every Weibo user to have a sense of participation in free discussions within their own relationship chain. This sense of participation allows brands to maximize their marketing value on Weibo.

From an operational perspective, I think making full use of Weibo’s official marketing products can achieve twice the result with half the effort.

Weibo's commercialization system has gradually formed a mature system during years of evolution. It has a delivery system that takes into account both brand advertising and performance advertising, as well as products such as hot spot companions, star-selected tasks, and micro-tasks that amplify the value of content. Brands can freely choose according to their own product characteristics and marketing rhythm.

2. Weibo’s “Field” – A Brand-Personalized “Operation Field”

In fact, when we look back at history, we will find that the “brand personalization” on the Internet itself started with Weibo.

In Internet products before Weibo, whether it was a news website like a portal, an instant messaging tool like QQ, a search engine or a BBS, the brand's presence was actually very weak except for direct hard advertising.

At that time, brands did not have a concrete role on the Internet.

It wasn’t until the birth of Weibo that brands discovered an opportunity to interact directly with fans. Looking back at the data recorded in my book “Weibo Marketing: Moving Your Business to Weibo” written 12 years ago - as of November 10, 2011, a total of 54,362 companies had joined Weibo, and Weibo had just been around for two years at that time.

For the first time, brands and companies collectively interacted directly with fans through equal dialogue. In the process, countless classic cases like the one on Durex’s official Weibo were born.

Companies and brands quickly learned the ropes. They stopped being pretentious, serious, and solemn.

For the first time on the Internet, they interacted with every fan who had contact with the brand in a personalized way and with lively attitudes, just like ordinary people happily chatting with each other.

Brands started playing with it for the first time, and it lasted for 14 years.

In fact, we can also explain from the perspective of Weibo products why brands’ personalized operations on Weibo create a natural sense of closeness.

The core logic behind this is that the way Weibo organizes content is centered on people. When we read a Weibo post, the first thing we see is not the content itself, but who posted it. This greatly increases the weight of the account itself.

When a brand enters Weibo, it naturally inherits the weight of the account itself. Users will seamlessly and naturally regard the brand as a living person no different from ordinary users, and the sense of distance disappears in an instant.

The @ symbol looks simple, but it makes the originally cold brand account instantly become extremely lively.

On other platforms, there are also official brands that have lowered their profile, but compared with Weibo, users can still feel an unspeakable sense of distance.

Today we can still see countless brands thriving on Weibo in a personalized way——

When Geely Galaxy was launched on the market, they interacted with each other with posters paying tribute to each other, becoming rivals in the automotive industry and making fans sigh that the interaction between domestic cars finally had the style of BBA.

BYD’s video “Together is Chinese Cars” and its interaction with other brands made users who are used to brands competing secretly exclaim that the pattern is grand, and this kind of scene is actually not seen on other platforms.

In fact, the participation of entrepreneurs themselves is also an important way to personalize the operation of Weibo brand.

Lei Jun, who launches new phones and gives annual speeches on Weibo, Li Xiang, who is called the "King of Weibo" by netizens, Shu Congxuan, chairman of Lao Xiangji, who has been arguing with his own official Weibo, and Zhou Yan, deputy general manager of Wuling Brand Division, who works on Weibo...all communicate with their users at close range on Weibo, and together with their official Weibo accounts, they form a complete personalized operation matrix.

Some official Weibo accounts, in addition to the real owners, even have some cute mascots posted on Weibo.

For example, in addition to the official Weibo account @Ele.me, Are You Ele.me also has a mascot account @我就是饿小宝呀, which works in perfect harmony with the official Weibo account "你唱我和地", and is a very eye-catching presence in Ele.me's free meal event, which has a lot of buzz on Weibo.

That’s right, this is an era where brands collectively act cute, an era where brands bend down and communicate with consumers on an equal footing. Whether in terms of product mechanism or interactive atmosphere, Weibo is a battlefield that brands cannot avoid in their personalized operations.

3. Weibo’s “field”: a “public opinion correction field” that turns passivity into initiative

Weibo is a barometer and amplifier of national sentiment.

That’s right, good news spreads fast on Weibo, and rumors and negative public opinion spread just as fast on Weibo, or even faster.

Many brands choose not to operate on Weibo for fear of negative public opinion. This is actually burying their heads in the sand, and will instead lose an important "field" for correcting public opinion.

For brands, as long as they have a deep understanding of the properties of Weibo's "communication field", they can in turn make full use of Weibo to correct and clarify rumors and negative public opinion, thereby turning danger into safety.

Let’s understand the logic behind this -

In fact, any brand, once it has been called a brand, must have accumulated its own fan base. To continue to maintain the popularity and sustainability of the brand, it is very important to organize these fans, and Weibo is a very important position for organizing fans.

When a brand organizes its fans, these fans become the brand’s social assets.

They now have a platform to release their pride and joy in the brand, and they will naturally and unconsciously safeguard the interests of the brand.

For example, when a brand is indeed subjected to malicious attacks, unfair treatment, or fabricated rumors, the brand's loyal fans will instinctively come out to refute and clarify.

But it must be emphasized that their rebuttals and clarifications also require ammunition. At this time, if the official can stand up in time and state the facts from a professional perspective, it will greatly reduce the cost of support for brand fans.

Indeed, as the public opinion environment becomes increasingly complex today, any brand will inevitably face various public opinion pressures to a certain extent.

Once a rumor appears, even if Weibo has an official system to combat it, the inherent properties of Weibo as a communication platform determine that there is always a certain probability that the rumor will be spread quickly by the public who do not know the truth.

At this time, if the brand has a relevant account matrix and business foundation on Weibo, it can refute the rumors in the first time and offset the negative impact of the rumors.

Operation and investment in Weibo is actually an investment for a brand, and it is a process of accumulating assets in the brand account.

To a certain extent, those unexpected public opinions can be seen as a short-term run on brand assets. If the balance in the brand account is not sufficient, once a run occurs, the brand is at risk of collapsing in an instant.

Why have Ideal, NIO, Xpeng and BYD all opened legal department accounts on Weibo?

Judging from the content they released, in addition to the relevant rights protection in the legal sense, another important part is to dispel rumors and clarify, and to promptly block the spread of false information. Ideal Auto clarified and dispelled the false information related to remote car locking in its official Weibo.

Pang Donglai released an 8-page investigation report on disputes between employees and customers on Weibo. It was as rigorous as a thesis and full of humanity, successfully maintaining Pang Donglai's long-standing warm and honest image.

Preparation is the key to success. Without preparation, there will be failure. Now that Tencent has opened an official account on Weibo, brand marketers must realize the value of Weibo as an important "public opinion correction platform."

Brand building is a process of continuous accumulation, which requires both offense and defense, and Weibo is the most important defensive high ground for brand public opinion management.

Conclusion

To truly unleash the value of Weibo’s “stage”, brands need to “take the stage”, “be present” and “not be stage-shy”.

"Taking the stage" means taking the initiative to go to Weibo to shape the brand through sincere and warm content and genuine interactions; "being present" means using appropriate methods to transform the potential energy of hot spots into kinetic energy of the brand; and "not being stage-shy" means mastering the ability to proactively correct mistakes in a complex public opinion environment.

Indeed, building a brand is not something that can be achieved overnight, nor is it something that can be solved by entering a certain number of live broadcast rooms or posting a certain number of notes.

Instead, it requires long-term communication with users and delivering mental results. With the help of Weibo "scene", topics and events, brands can grasp consumer emotions, resonate with users and create long-term value.

A few years ago, there was an explosive article titled "Stop Updating on Weibo, WeChat and Douyin" that caused heated discussion. In my opinion, although Weibo as a platform has experienced ups and downs and multiple iterations, the popular celebrities and brands on Weibo have also changed several times.

But Weibo itself is still a unique "field" on the Chinese Internet. Judging from the many brands that have emerged on Weibo in the past few years, Weibo, which has been around for 14 years, still has irreplaceable value.

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About the author: Wei Xi, the producer of the public account "Wei Xi Zhi Bei", a science and technology columnist, specializes in writing long articles and focuses on analyzing the underlying logic of the Internet and social sciences;