Internet Business Thinking

Chapter 18 WeChat—"Spoiler" or "Successor" in the Mobile Era? (4)
On Taobao, pricing is very easy.Products on Taobao are not particularly scarce, never seen, difficult to find and difficult to price products.In China, if you want to take advantage of these online and offline products and charge buyers and sellers service fees, it is tantamount to asking for a dead end.Therefore, Taobao regards advertising as one of the main sources of income.The markets of eBay and Taobao are different. How to tap value in the local market determines their different strategies.

For the same reason, for example, Tencent's WeChat is very successful in China, but the development of WeChat in the European and American markets will be very difficult.Take text messaging for example. Now, from Europe to China, text messaging is a very important means of communication for users.However, users in the United States and Mexico rarely send text messages, which is very different from users in China and Europe.

Precision marketing cannot touch data privacy
In the past, everyone used computers to surf the Internet and use computers to access all networks.Now, we can receive all the information with our mobile phones.In China, the reason why many application models can be successfully developed is because the access point of most models is the mobile phone—after leaving home, the mobile phone must be carried with you.If all needs are integrated on the mobile phone, including sending text messages, sending photos, sending voices, viewing photos, posting, etc., can be done together, this is a very large and powerful platform.

In the era of mobile Internet, how to solve people's worries about data privacy leakage?In fact, this is a question of how to define it.In fact, many consumers worry about this aspect.To give an example, if an auto insurance company wants to track your car, it needs to install a tracker. The tracker can monitor the condition of the car, and can decide whether the car insurance rate is high or low according to the monitoring condition of the car. Violating privacy laws, tracking all the places this car owner goes in a day, which violates people's privacy.

Looking at mobile phones again, every mobile phone will leak the data of the owner at any point in time, so the mobile phone can reflect the private life of the owner.In fact, compared with auto insurance companies adding trackers to cars, the issue of mobile phone privacy leakage is more important.How to look at this problem?Why is there such a change in the entire data precision marketing industry?In fact, whether it's a tracker or a cell phone, it all depends on whether people benefit from using it.Nobody wants to use it if there is no benefit to it.If everyone doesn't use mobile phones, the mobile platform is actually useless for the company.

At present, users are caught in such a dilemma: on the one hand, they are worried about their privacy being violated, and on the other hand, they love this platform because they can benefit.Regarding this issue, we should think more deeply and establish a comprehensive privacy protection law. For example, there is such a framework in the United States. Once companies exploit this loophole, they will pay a high cost.Therefore, both the platform provider and the user should use the platform in a more rational and sensible way.

"Success with users" is a false proposition
Many people don't know that the most successful commercialized social media is South Korea's Samsung, which is far more mature than the United States. In fact, South Korea's Samsung has gone earlier and further than Facebook.It allows us to see that there is no necessary connection between the number of users and the degree of commercialization.

Online games, especially those based on mobile phones, can refer to successful models like Angry Birds.There are some very idle time periods in the mission of the mobile phone. During this time period, you can play some games, which are not particularly brain-intensive and very interesting.In the United States, this relatively simple game has grown very fast.And some very complex social platform-based, social-based games didn't develop very well.Because users need to enter the social network and also need to buy some game currency.So instead of developing a game based on social circles, we can develop a game like Angry Birds that users can play with confidence after a one-time purchase.

As of May 2012, Facebook had about 5 million users.Its customer base is not small.However, in the United States, it is a big challenge to implement Facebook-based advertising. Many companies advertise on Facebook, and the traffic and transaction volume are not very high at the beginning. Therefore, everyone is now thinking: Don't keep investing in advertising on Facebook. In 9, General Motors of the United States stopped spending 2012 million yuan in advertising on Facebook because the advertising effect through Facebook was not good.Therefore, advertising on social platforms is like advertising on a real gathering of friends. You have to think carefully about how to establish a close relationship between users and brands in such a social atmosphere.

Twitter is China's equivalent of Weibo, and its customer base is also quite large, but its advertising situation is more difficult.Because on Twitter, everyone likes to talk in a hurry. If the content of advertisements and Weibo posts are directly embedded, it will be very unpopular. Therefore, the difficulty of implantation will become greater and greater, and the effect will be very poor.

Online Business Tips
Why did eBay defeat China, but Taobao succeeded?
Before Taobao was founded, eBay (eBay) had already entered the Chinese market, but it did not survive in China.But Taobao succeeded.There are two reasons for this.

The first reason is cultural.Because the current China has a very good entrepreneurial mechanism, under this entrepreneurial mechanism, millions or tens of millions of small and medium-sized retailers hope to start businesses online, and the timely appearance of Taobao just meets their needs.Therefore, a large number of e-commerce entrepreneurs have gathered on the Taobao platform.This cannot happen in Western markets.In Western markets, sellers mainly deal directly with customers.It can be seen that different cultural differences are a very important reason.

The second reason is that Taobao provides a comprehensive platform.The Chinese market has developed very fast in the past 30 to [-] years, and the development of small and medium-sized enterprises has also promoted the development of the entire Chinese market.It is unreasonable and uneconomical for SMEs to open a store and then to invest in logistics facilities.And Taobao is a natural and best platform, which provides a platform and channel that can achieve high flow and high transaction volume.In addition, the link of physical logistics and transportation will not cause major troubles for both parties to the transaction, because labor costs in China are relatively low.

(Section [-]) Yixin: Replace WeChat like WeChat replaces Weibo

Marketing tools are not terrible, as long as the user experience is good, they are still valuable.Since WeChat denies that it is a marketing tool, it is very likely to develop into a QQ-like platform in the future, where work and life are inseparable; then Yixin simply provides a business application, which becomes a marketing tool for merchants and corporate users, and is fully satisfied with the user experience. Kung fu, not necessarily a bad idea.

In August 2013, the Yixin product jointly launched by China Telecom and NetEase was officially launched, which attracted a lot of attention.On the first day of its release, the product ranked third in the app list of the Apple Store and first in the social list, surpassing WeChat and Weibo.In this naked competition, if WeChat goes to the left, then Yixin must go to the right to win the market and win users.

It is gratifying that, from the analysis and comparison of the following aspects, the development trend of Yixin may be approaching this direction.

First of all, the communication function of WeChat is weak, and the communication function of Yixin is strong.In essence, neither WeChat nor Yixin can deny the fundamental attribute of "communication and social tools".However, WeChat can't get around the operator, so it has scruples or is restricted by voice and information transmission.Yixin is not the case. In addition to the clearer voice than WeChat, users can also send free text messages to contacts in the mobile phone address book, regardless of whether the other party has Yixin installed or not, and there is no restriction on which operator.Users can also send voice messages to other contacts (mobile phone and fixed line) for free, and the receiver can directly answer the message content, and there is no restriction on the operator.Although the current arrival rate of free text messages and free voice messages sent by Yixin is still very low, if it continues to improve, it must be said to be a bright spot.

Secondly, WeChat is positioned as a non-marketing tool, while Yixin is not shy about marketing and simply uses it as a business application.For the sake of user experience, WeChat has repeatedly declared that it is not a marketing tool in public, and has repeatedly blocked public accounts that are considered to have traces of marketing.After a large number of merchants and corporate users are familiar with the operation of public accounts, WeChat version 5.0 rigidly divides public accounts into subscription accounts and service accounts. The purpose is to limit group messaging and weaken the power of self-media.The style of its industry boss is fully exposed.The author believes that marketing tools are not terrible, as long as the user experience is good, they are still valuable.Since WeChat denies that it is a marketing tool, it is expected that it will very likely develop into a platform like QQ in the future, where work and life are inseparable.At present, Yixin has officially launched a public account. It is easier to recommend and add friends, the scope of sharing in the circle of friends is wider, and the maximum number of people in the group is 100. It is more open and more suitable as a marketing tool.

Again, WeChat is private and Yixin is open.The content in the circle of friends shared by WeChat can only be seen by friends in the circle, while Yixin's circle of friends is very transparent. Even if they are not friends, they can still see each other's comments and have a conversation with each other.WeChat's public account has many restrictions, the content to read is limited, and the function to push is also limited. The custom menu has been criticized as a regression of the interactive experience.In addition, the WeChat operation interface has more four-level and five-level pages, which is very complicated to operate, while the Yixin interface is simple and clear, and the operation is extremely easy to use.Users need to consider traffic when using WeChat, but users don’t have to worry too much about traffic when using Yixin.After Yixin went online, some netizens complained that the response to the phone message was too slow, you can add friends without the consent of the other party, and as long as you know the other party’s number, you can send text messages and messages at will. The user’s privacy is not guaranteed, which breeds vicious marketing. etc.

In this regard, the author would like to say that we can treat new things with a tolerant attitude.There cannot be an absolute monopoly in the market. From the perspective of game theory, it is definitely a good thing for the development of China's mobile Internet that Yixin challenges WeChat and Alibaba to launch "Lailian".At the same time, I also hope that Yixin can have a better user experience and make the mobile Internet life of Chinese netizens more colorful!

(End of this chapter)