Since they are reborn, they must be supported by the school beauties.

Chapter 172 Preparing for the Weekend Outburst

Chen Cheng said goodbye to Liu Shiyu before eight o'clock. Liu Shiyu said she still had to practice her cello, but in reality, she didn't pick up her cello after Chen Cheng left. Instead, she plugged the headphone cord into the DV and played back the song "In My Song" that Chen Cheng had just sung.

Unlike a young girl experiencing her first love, she didn't become engrossed in the DV camera. Instead, she listened to the song and meticulously transcribed the sheet music with pen and paper, note by note.

After finding the lyrics, he wrote them down and then sat down at the piano to try playing and singing them.

Although she knew that the music quality of this song was not as good as "Lonely Patient", she personally preferred this song.

"The Lonely Patient" is good, but it is more suitable for listening than for singing.

After singing it several times, she liked the song more and more, and even had a premonition that if the song were to be released, it would definitely become a hit across the country.

However, she didn't aspire to be a singer, so she felt somewhat regretful about these two songs.

Chen Cheng left the music room and hurried back to the printing shop.

Whenever the printing shop is open, countless students line up nearby. I've even heard that students from other schools come to queue up with their photos. But ultimately, everyone is scanning photos to better use the school's intranet these days.

Chen Cheng exported the data from the second new user acquisition competition from the backend and then posted it on the school's intranet, announcing that prizes could be collected at the printing shop an hour later.

This user acquisition competition covered all registered users in Jiangcheng. As a result, most of the Jiangda users who had already started using the campus network were struggling to keep up. Apart from Yan Ruoxuan, who is a Jiangda student, all the other winners of the prize money were from other universities.

Yan Ruoxuan arrived happily upon receiving the news.

It has to be because her family is powerful. So many people racked their brains to attract users, but Yan Ruoxuan only made a phone call to her family and she gained a huge lead of more than two thousand people over the second place.

Even the most socially adept college students can only directly contact a few hundred people at most. And if the users they attract bring in other users, they generally won't bypass the middleman to follow them. So their data is nothing compared to Yan Ruoxuan's.

Yan Ruoxuan came in first place this time, so Chen Cheng was in charge of distributing the prize money, and Su Hexiang helped take photos.

When he handed the thousand yuan to Yan Ruoxuan, she was overjoyed and kept saying that this was the first money she had ever earned in her life.

After all the winning users received their money, Chen Cheng posted a picture and text article summarizing the results of the new user acquisition competition and attaching photos of the prize money distribution.

With these two successful and fully realized events, Chen Cheng began to attract the attention of netizens across the country.

He wanted to spread this viral user acquisition strategy across the entire internet.

He had previously worried that his platform lacked credibility with netizens from other regions, and that their enthusiasm for participation might be low.

However, with the results and photos of these two user acquisition competitions already available, he felt that these two competitions were the best endorsement for Renren.com, and it was time to promote the event to netizens across the country.

Because tomorrow is Friday.

This weekend is the first weekend since the launch of the school's online platform, and Chen Cheng wants to take advantage of this weekend to cause another surge in the number of users.

As for the lack of online payment, it doesn't really matter. As long as everyone trusts Renren.com and is willing to participate in the activities, I can go to the bank to transfer money to everyone.

It's just a little extra work for me, but it's totally worth it to attract users.

So he wrote another activity description.

Starting tomorrow at 11:00 AM, the third round of the new user acquisition competition will be held, with the same prizes for the top ten as in the second round.

To boost everyone's enthusiasm, he expanded the reward from 100 yuan per person for the 11th to 20th place to 100 yuan per person for the 11th to 100th place.

With a larger user base, the number of award recipients also needs to increase accordingly to ensure everyone has sufficient motivation.

However, Chen Cheng specifically noted this time: the third user acquisition competition is open to all registered users, regardless of location, and winners do not need to collect their prizes on-site. After the back office sends the bank information to the staff, we will complete the remittance within 24 hours.

After all, most of us are college students, both current and graduated. Everyone has their own bank account, so receiving and receiving money is very convenient; it's just a matter of putting in a little extra effort.

Moreover, Chen Cheng plans to play three rounds in a row, starting from 11 a.m. tomorrow until Saturday, which will be the first round. After that, the second round will start immediately until Sunday, and then the third round will start on Monday.

In his plan, these three days are perfect for college students to be free. If they want to earn some extra money, this weekend is the perfect time to work hard and make a big splash. This way, the number of users on Renren.com can also surge this weekend!
After finalizing the rules and details of the event, Chen Cheng attached links to the images and text from the previous two user acquisition competitions.

Previously, Chen Cheng had kept the information isolated, so users from other places had no idea that such an event existed. Now, they suddenly received a push notification and saw that the event had been held twice in just two days, and that money was actually given out on the spot. They had almost no doubts about the platform.

So everyone remembered the new user acquisition event at 11 a.m. the next day, and many people were already eager to try it out. Chen Cheng saw the number of reads for his post in the backend: over 20 registered users, over 6 online users, and in just a few tens of minutes, the number of readers exceeded 5.

This suddenly reminded him of a product he had almost forgotten: WeChat official accounts.

WeChat Official Accounts are undoubtedly the first truly meaningful self-media platform on the Chinese internet.

Thanks to WeChat's massive user base and ecosystem, many people could gain millions of followers back then simply by reposting jokes and corny humor on their public accounts.

Many once-popular opinion leaders, also known as "big Vs," became famous on WeChat official accounts by publishing articles that garnered over 100,000 views.

However, when short videos swept the internet, Tencent's own short video platform failed to keep up, so WeChat Official Accounts, a self-media platform mainly based on text and images, gradually declined.

In the two years before Chen Cheng's rebirth, not many people still used WeChat official accounts. Weibo, WeChat, and official accounts could no longer cultivate a true internet celebrity. In the years when short videos rose to prominence, all the top internet celebrities were, without exception, born from Douyin and Kuaishou.

According to Chen Cheng's analysis, Tencent failed to capitalize on the short video trend for three main reasons:
First, the efficiency of turning around was too low, and it failed to keep up with the trend of short videos;

Secondly, they failed to cultivate their own influential figures and internet celebrities in the first place, and lacked high-quality short video content;

Third, before that, I hadn't worked much with algorithms, and Weishi's algorithm had no advantage over its competitors.

Having no advantage in the algorithm is fatal.

Just like the intelligent driving features advertised for new energy vehicles, consumers can clearly feel the differences between different products.

When he felt that no short video app understood him as well as Douyin, neither Weishi nor Kuaishou could shake his industry leadership position.

However, Chen Cheng knew that from now on, for the next few decades, he wouldn't have to worry about the threat posed by short videos.

If we were to implement a WeChat Official Account feature on Renren.com now, we wouldn't need to do any additional development. We could simply mimic Weibo and WeChat Official Accounts. If it's an individual's registered account, it would be displayed as a regular WeChat Official Account. If it's a company, organization, or unit's registered account, we would add an authentication process and give it a blue V or similar verification.

At that time, I can first invite the principals of various universities, the deans of various departments, and the heads of various student organizations to join, which can be regarded as a platform for them to publish information and personal opinions.

Although there may not be much progress in the early stages, once the user base is large and major universities can open a "campus official account" on Renren.com, the website's authority will be greatly enhanced.

For schools, this is equivalent to having an information dissemination platform with a large user base, which is definitely much more user-friendly than the school's own official website.

In addition, users can selectively follow some accounts on various public accounts, gradually developing the habit of checking information on campus.

Chen Cheng acted on his idea immediately. Before the printing shop closed, he set up his "Campus News" account, which he used to post information about the new user recruitment competition, as the official news account of the campus network. Then he created a simple blue V icon and placed it at the end of the "Campus News" account name. When users hovered their mouse cursor over the blue V icon, a message would appear: This account has been officially verified by the campus network.

He then opened Word and wrote a requirements document.

He hoped that Xiao Peng would make some adjustments to the account's homepage immediately after the fishpond was launched.

Previously, user homepages were primarily personal, displaying personal information, photo albums, personal posts, and logs.

However, the official WeChat account should have a different interface.

We've designed it to resemble a true news account interface. When you open it, the account information is displayed in the upper right corner of the screen, and the entire information stream in the middle is used to showcase the latest updates from the official account.

Official accounts can publish content in three formats.

Text posts of no more than 150 words, long articles of no more than 20,000 words, and text and image posts of no more than ten pictures.

He also noted in the document that this feature is not open for registration at the moment and will be by invitation only.

Once registration is open, the amount of text and image information will put a huge strain on server storage and bandwidth.

An invitation system would be much better. Firstly, it can specifically invite universities and companies interested in recruiting college students. Secondly, it can give ordinary users who want to create their own media more to look forward to.

At that time, whoever is active enough in their own account, has enough fans and high engagement, will be invited to register their own personal WeChat official account.

This can also inspire everyone to focus on managing their personal accounts first.

(End of this chapter)