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

Chapter 227 Warm-up for Singles' Day

Ding Ning agreed to give the job Chen Cheng offered her a try, but to be on the safe side, she wanted to learn more about the Xiaonei.com product first.

Chen Cheng readily accepted and offered her a monthly salary of three thousand yuan.

He knew that Ding Ning's family was not well-off, otherwise she wouldn't have bought her first mobile phone in her junior year of college, and she wouldn't have chosen a cheap Nokia model.

I didn't pursue graduate studies in my past life because of financial pressure.

A monthly salary of three thousand could solve all her current problems in life, studies, and even postgraduate planning, but Chen Cheng was afraid that she would not accept anything more.

Chen Cheng didn't expect that Ding Ning couldn't accept three thousand yuan. She felt that she would definitely have to explore and learn at the beginning, and one thousand yuan was already a lot, let alone three thousand.

Chen Cheng could only vaguely tell her to try it out first, and they could discuss the salary later, which Ding Ning finally accepted.

When Liu Shiyu went to Yanjing, Chen Cheng wanted to see her off with Ding Ning, but she refused no matter what, saying that she was afraid of being sad when they parted, so she didn't tell them her specific flight time.

Seeing that she was unwilling, Chen Cheng gave up the idea, but reminded her again on the phone: "If Sister Shiyu wants to join Renren.com, my door is always open to you!"

Liu Shiyu smiled and said, "Don't worry, I'll give it a try. If I'm not capable or unhappy there, I'll let you know immediately."

Chen Cheng also instructed her: "In addition, if you really want to debut someday, you can use all the songs I have sung for you for free. If you sign with a record company, I will authorize the record company to use the copyright, but I will give you a share of the copyright fees."

Chen Cheng knew all too well what record companies and management companies were like.

They are a group of exploitative people who, under the guise of art and ideals, squeeze every last drop of profit from their signed artists.

If it's an artist's own original song, they most likely won't pay extra copyright fees; but if it's a third-party song, they'll have to pay the full price.

Liu Shiyu hadn't considered that possibility, and simply smiled and said, "Don't worry, unless you sign me, I won't consider pursuing a career in the entertainment industry."

Chen Cheng laughed and said, "That's quite a test for me. I'll try my best. If I can ever create a music marketplace on Renren.com, I'll sign you!"

Chen Cheng is well aware of the current state of the copyright market in China, so he is not very interested in any business related to copyright.

Often, when you work hard to create something, someone else simply takes it and uses it, which feels very unfair and unpleasant.

The cultural industry is a hotbed of copyright infringement, and he really doesn't want to touch it at all.

Chen Cheng had originally hoped that Liu Shiyu would reveal her identity as "Miss Shi" before leaving, but the woman didn't mention it at all until she hung up the phone.

On Sunday noon, Chen Cheng uploaded the songs he sang.

This time he issued an announcement saying, "New background music for members is now available, and you can listen to it in advance."

Since each song only has one verse, it's fine for non-members to listen to it.

"Lonely Patient" and "Long Time No See" are very popular among male users. The former can make people look pretentious and profound, while the latter can express the feelings of unrequited love.

These days, most male netizens like to act pretentious and profound, and most of them have also experienced various unrequited love. So, when these two "most of them" overlap, they almost encompass more than 80% of male netizens.

As the new background music gained popularity, the cartoon show for Singles' Day was also finalized.

Designers from art academies showcased their talents, creating their own Singles' Day cartoon shows. Chen Cheng selected more than ten sets and posted an announcement on Sunday afternoon: "November 11.11th is coming soon. On this day full of 1s, we are calling on male and female singles to celebrate the first Singles' Day on Renren.com!"

All users found it very novel.

It turns out that 1 can represent a single person.

November 11th is indeed all about sticks, so defining this day as Singles' Day is quite clever!
To make the first Singles' Day a bit more exciting, Chen Cheng included several activities in the main text.

The first activity is that everyone can get a free "I'm Singles' Day" light stick in the campus show. After you get it, your character will be holding the light stick, and the light stick will also flash.

Free materials can help increase the exposure of the Double 11 and Singles' Day concepts, deepen user impressions and acceptance.

The second event is a series of exclusive Singles' Day campus fashion shows with "flash sales" at extremely low prices. You can also buy by the day. If you only use it on Singles' Day, you only need to pay 0.1% of the original price. For example, if it was originally 9.9 yuan, it will now only cost 0.99 yuan, which is 0.1 yuan. If you buy a one-month validity period, you only need to pay 11% of the original price.

The purpose of this activity isn't to make money, but rather to further enhance the concepts of Singles' Day and Double 11, while also subtly introducing the concept of "flash sales," and then trying to stimulate users who never spend money to make the leap from being completely stingy to spending a penny. The third activity is that on Singles' Day, anyone who posts a status update at exactly 11:11:11 with the phrase "Happy Singles' Day" will have a chance to participate in a lucky draw. 11111 users will be selected to receive 11.11 Renren coins each, and another 111 users will be selected to receive 111 Renren coins each.

In his past life, Taobao turned Singles' Day into a shopping frenzy. Chen Cheng can't run an e-commerce business now, but he can still organize a shopping spree. He can just give away some campus coins. It won't cost much, but the effect will definitely be good.

The fourth activity is on Singles' Day (November 11th). The Xiaonei Coin Expansion Card will be available on the Xiaonei Show Mall. The card is priced at 111 Xiaonei Coins. After a successful purchase, it will automatically expand by 1.1 times, and the balance will increase by 122.1 Xiaonei Coins.

The fifth promotion is that if you purchase an annual campus membership on Singles' Day, you will not only enjoy a discount of 11.11 campus coins, but you will also receive an additional 11.11 campus coins after successful payment.

There is currently no annual membership available. A one-year subscription costs 120 yuan, but now you can get an annual membership for only 98 yuan after a 11.11 yuan discount and an additional 11.11 yuan gift.

Most members nowadays pay monthly, and they might stop paying if they feel something isn't exciting anymore. Selling annually during the promotion will definitely boost consumption, and we also need to reinforce the memories of Double 11 in various ways.

With a series of activities launched all at once, netizens on Renren.com immediately felt the strong sense of ritual of Singles' Day.

People love to follow trends, and Singles' Day is no exception. No single person would have thought there was a holiday related to bachelors. Renren.com has organized so many activities, including giving away Renren Show items, lucky draws, and flash sales. It's quite a lively event.

As a result, netizens quickly embraced the subculture of Singles' Day and began enthusiastically promoting it in advance.

All campus-related promotions related to Double 11 went live automatically the moment the announcement was released, and within a few hours, 300,000 users claimed free Double 11 light sticks.

Moreover, in the past few hours, the number of posts has tripled compared to the same period yesterday. Chen Cheng had the backend randomly select one out of ten to create a list and found that most of the posts were related to Singles' Day. Some people expressed that it was interesting to define Singles' Day as Singles' Day, some people expressed that they were just right for this holiday, some people asked who could spend Singles' Day with them, and some people prayed that they could win the Singles' Day lottery.

The topic of Singles' Day (11) suddenly became very popular.

Seeing these posts, Chen Cheng suddenly had an idea: to create a topic hyperlink, which is the topic tag with the ## combination that will be commonly used on the Internet in the future.

Once the ## symbol is used, the words in the middle will become the topic and will automatically form a hyperlink. Clicking on it will take you to a page full of posts on that topic.

This kind of approach is very common on Weibo. Combined with Weibo's trending topics, it is a powerful tool for Weibo to maintain its activity level. Later, most Weibo users stopped posting content and simply used it to view trending topics and follow gossip. But even so, it can still generate huge traffic for Weibo.

The posts on Renren.com are actually similar to Weibo.

Users can see the posts and updates of the people they follow, but the trending search terms feature is not yet available.

If this feature is added, when people post about Singles' Day, they will be automatically taken to all the posts related to Singles' Day. This way, they can see not only their friends' posts but also those of strangers, interact with them, and even become a trending topic if their own posts are interesting and receive many likes and interactions.

Moreover, this page is easy to make and the functions are easy to implement; it's just a matter of writing some basic logic.

With this idea in mind, Chen Cheng came up with another new one: tagging friends.

When users can use trending search terms to break out of their original friend list, they may see things that they can see but their friends cannot, making the @ function very useful.

Whether it's using the # symbol for topics or the @ symbol for mentions, both are very useful on social media platforms and will become part of users' habits.

In his past life, he didn't know who first invented these games, but in this life, he knows it must have been him.

Therefore, Chen Cheng immediately convened a meeting with the technical and product teams.

At the meeting, he raised three technical requirements.

1. Topic;
2. Trending Topics List;
3. @friends.

The topic function, as everyone understands, is essentially a front-end code usage. It treats the ## symbol as a string of code for the user. Once the user uses the ## symbol and there is substantial content in between, a hyperlink will be automatically generated for that content.

However, no one has a clear idea of ​​how the trending topics list should work.

Xiao Peng asked him, "Mr. Chen, could you briefly explain the logic behind these trending topics?"

Chen Cheng said, "Simply put, it's an algorithm. Once a user generates a topic using the hashtag key, the system records the topic, counts its occurrences, views, comments, likes, and shares, and then calculates its popularity value based on a specific algorithm. Once multiple topics are generated, the system sorts these popularity values ​​in descending order and then presents the top ten directly to the front end. As the popularity changes, the ranking also changes. The popularity value and its relative ranking need to be updated at least every ten minutes."

"For example, for the hashtag #SinglesDay#, every time a user posts about it, it's worth 5 popularity points. Every time it's viewed, it's worth 0.1 popularity points. Every comment is worth 1 popularity point, every like is worth 0.5 popularity points, and every share is worth 3 popularity points. The system backend records the user's relevant behavior and calculates the final popularity points using a formula. However, this algorithm should not be made public. Once it is, someone might try to manipulate the popularity points of a certain topic!"

The crowd listened in amazement. They couldn't understand how Chen Cheng could provide such a comprehensive solution in such a short time. They all regarded Chen Cheng as a genius. But for Chen Cheng, these were just very superficial algorithmic logics. Compared with ByteDance's algorithms, they were child's play. Fortunately, he was now an absolute pioneer in algorithm development. Algorithms are like big data databases, which will continue to improve over time and with the addition of rules, eventually forming a huge algorithm database that is difficult for others to catch up with.

(End of this chapter)