Red-fire Sina tries to take the road of social network

Sources say Sina Weibo is changing to Facebook pages. The latest internal test version, and the past is the biggest and most direct difference, is the two-column system changed into three columns. From the interface, you can see that the booming development of social media for more than a year is trying to change to social networks.

Social media vs. networking

Conceptually, social media (social media, if you want to be symmetrical, you can call it a social medium) and a social network (social receptacle) are two intersecting but different things. The former weight information, biased media attribute, belong to interest atlas. The latter is the most important one, which favors the network attribute and belongs to the graph. I use the following figure to indicate:

The intersection of them is that the users are "actors", rather than simply information receivers (audiences). Such actions include a simple "forwarding" or "sharing", as well as a slightly more complex piece of original and commentary. But their differences are also obvious.

Take Weibo as an example, the user is the user, first of all, the information is satisfied. Some netizens have a radical belief that, with Weibo, I don't have to look at any other media. Although this is a bit exaggerated, but the information brought about by micro-blogging is evident (similar, I have never seen: with everyone/happy, I do not have to see the other media). Beyond enough information satisfaction, users begin to use tools such as letters to communicate and form a social network. Although I am short of data, from experience, the social interaction between users, compared to the individual news information acquisition, the proportion should be very low.

In fact, everyone is different from happiness. In contrast, happiness is more like an interest map than a relational one, because it has always been the game's staple: People gather together to steal food and grab parking spaces, apparently out of interest. And when a game tired of playing, interest dropped, happy users began to leave. Of course, there is no need to worry about a media-like interest map such as Weibo. Under the sun, which day there is no news?

In this sense, Sina Weibo does have a hard time getting users to be bored in a wide range of terms (short-term boredom is possible). In particular, in recent years, a large number of events have been on the microblog first burst, the interest map of the position is more solid. So there is no strong reason for Twitter to shift to social networks simply from the user's point of view.

Reasons for Change

But for operators, change is necessary and imminent.

Social networking is a better place than social media: the understanding of the user. Take Facebook and Twitter for example, and you can see the difference: the users on F don't bother to introduce themselves, and a few of the users on T are unreliable. For users to do a better understanding, not to better serve the user, but is: better customer service (advertisers).

Sina Weibo since its launch, attracted enough traffic and users, but the entire Sina company's advertising revenue does not see a rise. I have mentioned in the past, the reason why the gateway to do Weibo Sina performance The best reason is: Sina is a doom. The seven-digit giants, with the smallest number of revenues in absolute numbers, are also at the top of the crisis. Its crisis is that the online advertising model it relies on is becoming a "traditional advertisement".

To break the situation, Sina has been involved in social services, picking up Weibo. Media Scroll mentioned that the first design of the service is very heavy, very similar to the social network, Sina has cut off a large number of peripheral applications to launch a light service: micro-blog. It doesn't matter to me. The real core is that Sina operates media with resources and experience, and doing social media is the best choice, not a social network.

But social media or media, advertising mode or "traditional advertising": Show class. Due to the lack of adequate understanding of users, Sina is difficult to pick users, forming an advertising audience. For the Sina Portal, and then add a sales display advertising position, the commercial significance can be big to go? Moreover, this position, in fact, little advertising.

Theoretically, the user can be judged by the user's attention, the published information, and the tweets that are forwarded. But this kind of semantic excavation is very technical requirements, coupled with the difficulty of Chinese participle, this approach belongs to the distant water. Operators need users to actively "confess" that they are male or female, which year is born, which university graduate, at present where a job, dwelling in which city, what topic of interest, what kind of popular, love to listen to what love to eat what love to see, if possible, the best credit card number are handed out.

Even Twitter, the ancestor of the microblog, is not as satisfying as business. Because for the advertisement, the user (audience) namely the product, the user's information is more detailed, the product description is clearer, the more easy obtains the advertisement advocate's favor (broadly speaking, as the entrance of the electronic commerce, is also the advertisement model). From this point of view, Weibo is not much more qualitative than the portal.

Another reason for change, though not too important, needs to be mentioned: the market needs new concepts. In a day when the concept of switching extremely fast Internet territory, Weibo is a "traditional" concept. For the capital market, Twitter is not as good as Facebook. If Sina Weibo is to split up separately, Facebook is clearly more valued than Twitter.

The operability of the change

Now let's see how the future changes.

In theory, it's also possible to sell LV bags--It's all about renting a booth. But I think, even if there is a LV bag in the market to sell there, it is estimated that 90% 9 of people think it is a fake. This is the problem of consumer situations. The same is the case with Internet users. For an already stereotyped website, there is a flow of users, not equal to do everything.

Portal camp, in the network news, blogs, micro-blog, the important reason for success is that this has been a "media" route, the previous phase of the operation of the accumulation of resources and experience, can be used in the next stage. Take Sina as an example, the blog is based on celebrity strategic achievements, micro-Bo is also the case, and Sohu to catch up, or want to make force in this. But it is clear that the relationship between social networks and celebrities is small. People do want to see Nicholas Tse's gossip and want to hear about people around them and even how they say it, but I'm afraid a lot of people are not interested in socializing with them (in turn, the odds are slim).

Gathering a lot of users ' attention doesn't mean that they interact on it. Social media has a long way to turn to social networks-a question of operational capacity.

For a long time, the internet has strong product thinking, but ignores the importance of operation. In fact, the winning of any kind of network service is the victory of the operation, not the product. It is not a difficult thing to imitate a product, but to operate according to the product and adjust the product according to the actual operation. Sina has the "Sina Way" and "pull celebrities" to prove its media operating ability, it has the ability to run social networks?

Hard to say, at least in the past there is no evidence that Sina understands the human nature of ordinary users, so as to please ordinary users. And this hand, one is Tencent's strength. In a sense, the media resort to rationality, social appeal to the emotional, is indeed a different story.

Sina has been playing micro-blogging two times since the start, can speak of a real key to the mouth. Sina has chosen to transform itself into a social network, thereby acquiring more user information, and ultimately changing the business model of revenue-dependent advertising. The success of this step is unknown.