Groundswell

What is the most important thing to a social media application? Technologies? Cool design styles? No, it is the relationships. Technologies change rapidly, which also are not the point that we should focus on. First, what is groundswell? 

Groundswell is "A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations". ( Groundswell, Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff ) So how to use groundswell to build your brand successfully? The principle is "concentrate on the relationships, not the technologies". But if you ignore the groundswell, it surely would crush your brand.


For example, Acfun, which is the earliest living comments anime video site in China, but this company went bankrupt two days ago. 
The tragedy of Acfun could be a perfect example to explain the significance of groundswell.

Living Comments:
a feature that allows users to leave
real-time comments while watching videos,
similar to Twitch chat


Firstly, relationships. "In groundswell, relationships are everything"(Groundswell, Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff ). Acfun did not build a close relationship with users. The creator of Acfun wanted to create a website only for people who really love anime, so they could share interesting video and communicate with each other by living comments at the website. In order to maintain this goal, the sign-up process of Acfun for new users was extremely hard, you could only be invited to sign-up or buy an account with high price from others. According to this difficult sign-up system, many people gave up to sign up to become a membership, but you could not leave comments if you did not sign up. Although many users were using Acfun, but they had never been involved in this community, they had no relationships with Acfun at all.

Secondly, they did not value the creator type users, and they did not hear the sound from users. In Acfun, memberships could upload videos, musics and articles to share with each other, and some memberships would upload their own original videos, which were popular and attractive to other users. And besides, many original videos contained user's commendation to Acfun. It was a great opportunity for Acfun to use these creators to propagate and promote its brand, unfortunately, Acfun missed it. Due to the incomplete system, these original videos needed to be reviewed for a long time, even couple days, then they still had huge possibility to be rejected. This bad system was criticized by many users, but Acfun still did not handle on it. This behavior decreased the passion of creators, many of them gave up to upload their original things on Acfun. 


R.I.P Acfun
2007-2018
Thirdly, the "five objectives that companies can pursue in the groundswell" are "Listening", "Talking", "Energizing", "Supporting" and "Embracing" (Groundswell, Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff ). But Acfun obviously did not have clear objectives, they did not spread messages about themselves, they did not integrate creator type users into their business, they even might did not understand users. From my perspective, Those behaviors are big mistakes of Acfun's strategies and huge lacking of their objectives.

Comments

  1. Danni YueFebruary 5, 2018 at 9:35 AM

    It's so sad to hear the news. I am not a user of Acfun, but I am a user of a similar website -- Bilibili.com. As a new user of Bilibili.com, I still remember how hard it was to get an account for Bilibili.com a few years ago. They only release a few invite numbers on some special festivals.It's kind of a proud for people to have an account for Bilibili as it was too rare. This kind of way of running creates a friendly atmosphere for anime fans. However, it cannot catch up with the trend of groundswell. Luckily, Bilibili changed their way of running. Otherwise, they may share the same ending of Acfun.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mengxin MaFebruary 5, 2018 at 9:33 PM

      Yeah, I'm an Acfun user before, but I'm a Bilibili user now, it's all because the mistake and unfriendly system of Acfun's Strategies. But I have to say it's so sad to see that ending of the most earliest anime website in China

      Delete
  2. Huizhong YangFebruary 5, 2018 at 4:21 PM

    Actually, I don’t know the difference between Bilibili and Acfun... I only use Bilibili because I can have access to interesting animations like “食戬之神” ... though I cannot make comments, I still happy about it haha

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mengxin MaFebruary 5, 2018 at 9:37 PM

      Bilibili is founded by Yi Xu, who is one of the founders of Acfun, but Bilibili is the most popular anime video website in China now! I enjoy it too!

      Delete
  3. Qi Liu (Lance)February 6, 2018 at 11:43 AM

    Hey Mengxin,

    I watched some video on Bilibili before, but I am not a active user so please correct me if I am wrong. I've heard from my friends that the biggest advantage of using Bilibili is that you don't have to pay any money to get access to any TV shows, anime or anything that has a copyright protection. So would the copyright owner allow Bilibili to do that? From my acknowledge, when signing a contract with Chinese video website (such as iQIY, Tencent Video) many US and Japanese company have made it a necessity that any of their TV series, anime or shows shall not be access freely (which means you have to subscribe and pay a monthly/weekly fee at the first place). So how is Bilibili handle such a problem?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mengxin MaFebruary 7, 2018 at 1:26 AM

      Great question! That's also an important reason why Acfun went down but Bilibili went big. At first, Acfun did not have the copyright of these anime or any other videos, so Acfun was sued by many companies, then Acfun had to put off these videos, which made Acfun lost many users. But this event became a good case study for Bilibili, Bilibili bought the copyright of anime and other videos from many Japanese companies, so now all of these videos you can find in Bilibili are all legal. And just like you said, you do not need to pay any money to get access to these videos(and no advertisement, btw), but you can pay some money to get a membership, which can get extra 1080P 60FPS version of these videos and more functions!

      Delete

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