text / Wang Buliu (WeChat official account: Wang Buliu)
We have joined many WeChat groups, such as relative groups, work groups, neighbor groups, classmate groups, shopping groups, etc. Whether it is free or paid, we will find this phenomenon:
Most WeChat groups were extremely lively when they first formed. In a while, there were thousands of WeChat messages, and then the group gradually became deserted, and occasionally messages were emitted, or advertisements.
such groups are like a wave in the sea, and soon disappear without a trace.
birds of a feather flock together, and people are divided into groups. The essence of the community is to let a group of people with the same interests gather together to communicate. on the Internet, its form can be a forum, a QQ group, or a WeChat group.
Can a community last for a long time depends on its values and what culture looks like? That is, the "community culture" that is nothing but can be truly felt.
If we want to explicitly embody "community culture", we can think:
In this community, what is considered to be more important? What is more recognized? On the other hand, what is this community absolutely intolerable? What are you despised or even despised in this community?
As long as it is a community that is "worthy of your participation" and "worth of your investment", it must have values, and it is precisely because you agree with that value that you will stay there. Otherwise, let alone the unit group, even the family group may withdraw.
In order to help friends discuss and learn English together, on May 28, 2021, we decided to create an English learning WeChat group.
Our general principle of doing things is: What is the meaning or purpose of doing this? What are the measures to achieve this?
After careful consideration, we believe that the mission of creating the group should be "three months to develop the habit of reading in English."
Explain this sentence.
- Develop English reading habits : Through the activity design in the group, you will be encouraged to read English magazines. In addition, with the encouragement and support of group members, you will eliminate your fear of English and gradually adapt to English reading.
- 3 months : We often hear various challenges 100-day plans. This habit can basically be formed through a period of deliberate practice.
has determined this mission, so what name is the WeChat group?
Before answering this question, let’s do a small experiment first, compare the following AB expressions, which one do you think is more likely to cause positive changes to others:
- Office reminder
A: Carry for the environment, everyone has their responsibility!
B: After eating the food, please throw it away. - bathroom public service advertising
A: Protect the earth and save water!
B: Please turn the faucet tightly after use!
There is no doubt that everyone must choose B. Because none of the above A is operable.
Take "Love the environment, everyone has the responsibility!" as an example. When we see this prompt sign, we may think, "I know how to protect the environment, but how to care for it? Okay, don't think about it, just know."
"Love the environment, everyone has the responsibility" just tells us that the environment is very important, but the specific purpose is not explained, and the publicity effect is not good.
people are lazy. We often don’t think about the details and we usually don’t do it without giving clear instructions.
Therefore, the community name must be "operable" and can clearly let everyone know how to do it and what effect it achieves.
Finally, the WeChat group we selected was called "Learn TE together, and it will be effective in three months", among which TE is the abbreviation of "The Economist" (Economist). The group names below are referred to as TE groups.
Next, let’s think about why Tsinghua and Peking University can become the prestigious university that students always dream of?
Without thinking, you can definitely blurt out: these students from famous schools have excellent teachers, strong teaching staff, and high scientific research results.
So, why are the students of these two institutions so outstanding?
Answer: They only recruit top talents in the country based on the college entrance examination score line.
Note that there is a very important action here: " filter ", so that they ensure the quality of enrollment from the source.
Similarly, if we want to make the WeChat group high-quality, we can also conduct preliminary screening from the source.
For friends who joined the group, we actually did two layers of filtering:
first layer, and actively followed the fans of the "Wang Buliu" official account.
"Wang Buliu" public account mainly focuses on sharing resources of "Economist".
Following fans of this official account means they are more interested in "The Economist".
And "The Economist" is a pure English publication that ranks elites. Fans who can understand or are willing to read "The Economist" are themselves positive college students or professionals.
Therefore, the overall quality of these fans is very high.
second layer, first test for joining the group. The test method we adopted is very simple, just translate it into English and Chinese.
When a friend wants to join the group, I will randomly send an English sentence to help translate it.
I will decide whether I am qualified to join the group based on my translation quality and academic attitude. In addition to screening group members whose basic English skills have reached a certain level, this test can also increase the attention of group members to the TE group.
column two scenarios:
- Many people are at the bus stop and wait for half an hour but still no buses come. What should I do? We might rather continue to waste our time under the cold wind than call us again.
This is not stingy, but unwilling to give up, because you have invested half an hour and don’t want the past time to be “wasted”. - went out for a trip, and there were so many tourists at the scenic spots. No matter how collapsed or the scenery was, no matter how unsatisfactory the scenery, you still had to endure the standardized action of "self-portrait nine-grid + location check-in" in order to leave with peace of mind.
Because you have invested a lot of energy in visiting this attraction, "I've come here", I'm really unwilling to go home.
These are common scenarios of sunk cost theory.
Sinking cost refers to the cost that has occurred in the past and cannot be changed by any decision in the present or future.
By doing group entry test, no matter how the translation quality is, you have at least invested the time and cost, so you have more expectations for the quality of WeChat groups.
In addition, you will be qualified to join the group through careful translation and will cherish this opportunity to join the group even more. This will be more conducive to creating a good learning atmosphere for WeChat group. After joining the group, as the saying goes, state has national laws and groups have rules.
Where there are people, there are rivers and lakes, and there are often countless contradictions, conflicts, resentment and dissatisfaction, because people cannot achieve fairness, and everyone yearns for fairness.
To make an organization have an efficient order, regulations are indispensable.
Regulations for WeChat groups. In order to facilitate everyone's understanding and compliance, we only agreed on two items:
1. Advertising is prohibited. If there is any violation, clean up the group.
TE group zero tolerance for advertising. This is the bottom line.
formulates this bottom line, which comes from a theory called "broken window effect".
" Breaking Window Theory " was jointly proposed by American criminologist James Q. Wilson and George Clin. They believe that
crime is the inevitable result of chaos - if a window is broken and no one comes to repair it after a long time, passers-by will infer that this is a community that no one cares about and no one manages.
soon, more window glass will be broken, and then scribble will be scribbled, and garbage will spread everywhere. Then some people with self-cleaning will move out of this community, the housing prices in the community will drop, and some people with low quality will move in. The last good community will start from a broken glass window that is unattended and quickly collapse into a problem community.
This theory has been proved to be very correct after practice:
In the late 1980s, the public security of the New York subway was very bad, and the government adopted many strategies but did not work much, and it brought very high costs. For example, increase the number of police officers, increase the number of patrols, etc.
Later, the government stopped making big moves, and they decided to do two small things: crack down on ticket evasion; and clean every carriage that was graffitied.
2 or three years later, the security of New York Metro miraculously improved.
This is because fewer graffiti makes people feel that "this city is very standard", which naturally reduces people's motivation to do bad things.
Correspondingly, community governance should also prevent "breaking window behaviors" such as "advertising messages" and "worthless water chat" in advance.
2. Participate in discussions and sharing appropriately.
reiterates "appropriate participation" in order to strengthen the foundation of the community, that is, the value of the community comes from communication and sharing.
If everyone only watches in the group but does not participate or share, then for individuals, no matter how strong the English level is, it will be of no help to other members in the group, and it will be of no sense to any help or meaningless.
Therefore, for TE group management, I set a default threshold: Every six months or when the group number reaches 400, the group members who have not spoken for a long time and have not shared it.
So, when cleaning up group members, how to ensure that it can reduce error deletion without causing major negative impact? In other words, how to formulate a "standard measure for cleaning up group members"? After comprehensive consideration of
, I decided to to prioritize deleting members who no longer follow group messages.
specific methods are shown in the screenshot.
To prevent accidental deletion, I notified three times in two days.
Then, for group members who have replied to the group name, I will add a number "1" before their group nickname.
January 1, 2022, in the member management of the TE group, I selected a member whose nickname is not the number "1", and completed the deletion operation in a concentrated manner. A total of 130 people were deleted this time.
Everyone knows that cleaning up members is a very offensive thing. However, as a group leader, it is necessary to strictly implement regulations in order to convince the public in order to ensure that the community is good.
Of course, the premise of daring to do this is that this community is indeed valuable, otherwise it may not be necessary to clean up, and everyone will have already quit the group by themselves. The exit mechanism of
effectively promotes everyone to actively share valuable things, allowing everyone to gradually create an atmosphere of learning and sharing, so as to achieve their own gains.
Through everyone's joint efforts, many group members have actively joined the construction of TE groups, and based on subtle evolution, has basically formed the unique culture of our community - willing to share and dare to share.
- In this WeChat group, everyone dares to express their opinions, is willing to share their learning experience, and is enthusiastic about analyzing long and difficult sentences.
- In this WeChat group, the overall quality of the personnel is very high, there is no insult or spreading rumors, and there is no keyboard warrior.
- In this WeChat group, everyone will pay attention to their words and deeds and maintain a good image. It's like you don't wear pajamas and go into high-end social situations.
In order not to make TE groups a pure chat group or become deserted, we need some routine tasks to maintain a sense of ritual so that everyone can have topics, topics, and discussions.
Speaking of ritual sense, there is a famous "lip balm effect" in marketing:
Many women take out lipsticks every hour to apply, but as long as you are not living in the Arctic, the climate in the place you live will not dry so that you need to reapply lipstick every hour.
So why do these women apply lipstick so frequently? Psychologists have found that it is not because their lips are dry, but because they are addicted to ritualized behaviors like "pick up lipstick and apply."
So, in order to make the activities in the group feel ritual, the daily routine task we designed is to read English news and continuously form the motivation for English learning.
I will post the updated article of the official account "The Economist Espresso" to the TE group every morning.
The Economist EspressoThe Economist Espresso, use a cup of coffee to understand the world's dynamics and be familiar with the world's key things. The article from
official account
"The Economist Espresso" comes from the pure English fresh news produced by the Economist that day. Use a cup of coffee to understand the world's dynamics and be familiar with the global key issues.
In order to strengthen this sense of ritual, we also designed the "translation and search for trouble" activity. The translations posted by the public account " Postgraduate Entrance Examination English Notes " are the output of my personal learning. After all, my ability is limited, and there will be some poor translations.
Postgraduate entrance examination English notes Monday to Friday, one Economist Morning Post is intensively read every day; on Saturday, share the original PDF and supporting audio of the current Economist for free. 101 original content
official account
Every day, I will forward the latest translated articles in the "Post-level English Notes" that day to the TE group, and encourage everyone to use my translation as a target and criticize and correct me more.
If you often read the articles of the "Post-level English Notes" official account, you will find that I often provide a correction in the articles the next day.
This is actually the result of everyone's discussion. In order to make the translation more "faithful, wise and elegant", everyone deepened their understanding of knowledge points during the discussion and improved their learning results.
However, if group members do not participate in the discussion, they will benefit little.
Why?
There is also a "learning pyramid" theory here.
Learning Pyramid is a research result of the National Training Laboratory in Maine, USA, proposed by learning expert Edgar Dale in 1946.
Learning Pyramid is listed from the top: Listening to classes, reading, multimedia, on-site demonstration, discussion, practice, and teaching others. The learning efficiency of these seven learning methods has also increased from 5% to 90% in turn.
- At the top of the tower, it is the first way of learning - "listening", that is, the teacher said above and students listen below. This is the most familiar and commonly used method, but the learning effect is the lowest, and the learning rate is only 5% after two weeks.
- The second type of content learned through "reading" can maintain 10%.
- The third type, learning in the form of "sound, pictures, videos" can reach 20%. The fourth type of
- is "demonstration" and "see demonstration". Using this learning method, you can remember 30%.
- The fifth type, "group discussion", "participate in discussion", and "speak", can remember 50% of the content.
- The sixth type, "practical exercises", "learning while doing", and "experimental methods", can reach 75%.
- The last learning method is to "teach others" or "apply now", which can remember 90% of the learning content. The discussion of the community in
is exactly in line with the fifth situation, that is, the learning effect can reach 50%.
As I said just now, uses the exit mechanism to encourage group members to share. But this is equivalent to using coercion and is difficult to last.
Because people's motivation comes from two aspects: internal motivation (interest, enthusiasm, sense of mission, sense of accomplishment) and external motivation (material motivation and punishment), and these two systems often cannot exist together.
That is to say, people either act because of internal motivation or act because of external motivation.
When external motivation (material motivation and punishment) controls a person's behavior, people no longer think this is interesting.
For TE groups, we are more about stimulating the inner motivation of group members and letting them share out of interest or sense of accomplishment.
In addition, sharers also need to have an effective and intuitive feedback mechanism.
We think about it. If you share something but the group is dead and you have not received any feedback from group members, will you continue to share in this community?
sure won't.
So, that's why, I will continue to promote and encourage in the group:
group members should actively give praise and positive praise to group members who share valuable content!
Through a WeChat group sorting out, you can see that some common things actually contain a lot of theoretical knowledge.
We can learn more theories and apply these theories to practice, so that theories can really help us improve our work and life efficiency.
Insert an off-topic talk. In the process of cleaning up group members, I also had some minor misunderstandings and disputes with many friends.
This also aroused my reflection:
When we encounter inconsistent with our own cognition, our first reaction is not to think about the other party’s challenges and doubts, but to feel that we were offended, and then decide: “No, do it with him!” Why does such a situation occur? So how to avoid it?
I will make up for the lessons first, and will focus on this phenomenon on the article on the "Wang Buliu" public account next Saturday.
0 The cover of the issue of "The Economist" on January 15, 2022 is still not posted. You can download and read it yourself.
Baidu Netdisk has begun to ban the accounts that share "Economist" on a large scale, so the PDF, MOBI, EPUB and audio resources of the magazine "Economist" on January 15, 2022 have been changed to Alibaba Cloud Disk sharing.
Special reminder: Alibaba Cloud Drive will also detect resources and prohibit sharing of files marked as violations. During the sharing process of "The Economist", the audio part is most likely to be judged as a violation and cannot be shared.
We English sailing members still share the full set of "Economist" resources (PDF+MOBI+EPUB+audio) through the Baidu network disk group.
