Taking the advice given to me by Nicky, I incorporated the concept of OKR in this convention. During the communication with Tutor, I realised that my convention could show the positive impact of OKR on the workplace by showing the negative state of a persona that does not use OKR. So my performance persona is a rabbit who doesn’t do OKR and has no purpose in life. By showing its rebellious and panicky side, I illustrated the impact of goals on life.
Considering how well the content would be distributed online, I chose Wei, a photographer studying at Goldsmith MA Fine Art, to co-create a series of photographs of a rabbit living in the disorder.
OKR has been successfully implemented by giant technology companies such as Google, LinkedIn because it has integrated individual employee goals with company goals. It provides motivation and ambition for employees increase. positive correlation will be created between personal development or learning objectives related to personal success scores will increase motivation for employees to achieve company goals. Its means OKR that is linked to the work performance score or chance to evaluate that they do a good job has more access than the OKR that focuses only on personal growth and not linked to the work performance score. Radonić (2017) OKR or Objectives and Key Results is an agile framework for setting goals in companies. The OKR method can lead to more transparency, alignment, focus and agility in organization. An OKR is a set of one Objective and n Key Results. (Casamitjana et al,2022). The Objective is the business result that needs to be achieved and should be written in qualitative terms.
The Key Results are S.M.A.R.T. (an acronym for specific, measurable, achievable , relevant and time-bound) goals based on specific key performance indicators. To start implementing OKR, there are several steps to do :1. Set Objectives, 2. Define Key Results 3. Update OKR, 4. Plan Activity, 5. Review OKR. OKR is designed to help organizations achieve their business goals quickly. It is described as “a critical thinking framework and ongoing discipline that seeks to ensure employees work together, focusing their efforts to make measurable contributions that drive the company forward. (Niven,2016). The framework consists of a set of objectives andcorresponding key results.
Nicky is the director of operations for the online celebrity company Ruhnn, responsible for managing over 100 celebrities under Ruhnn, an MCN company. Ruhnn was once one of the largest MCN companies in China, listed on Nasdaq in 2019 and delisted in 2021. Ruhnn once produced the phenomenal online celebrity, Zhang Dayi.
Wen Wan was one of the earliest netizens on the Douyin platform, gaining 6 million followers in one day in 2018, before quickly being banned from the platform due to various rumours and the underage plastic surgery fiasco. it was then that Nicki took an overnight flight to Wen Wan’s home to negotiate a 5-year partnership. Wen Wan has since reappeared on multiple platforms, and it was Nicki who was responsible for PR issues and account content operations. Having worked with a number of established netizens for a long time, Nicky has an in-depth understanding of netizens and we-media creators. At the same time, as a management leader of a listed company, Nicki knows how to lead a team, how to optimise the team’s organisation and has superb leadership skills. Having led various online celebrities in social media for so many years, Nicki has witnessed the rise and fall of Chinese social media at various times. Many online phenomena are cyclical, and the fate of we-media creators can sometimes be the same. So how to break the life cycle of a we-media creator is something Nicky and his team have been working on.
Questions.
1. Q: Do you think there is a large percentage of we-media creators (influencers) who have procrastination?
A: Of course it’s big, but we (the operators) will give the weblebrities slots in advance and plan out their daily work for them. Under this kind of working atmosphere, the weblebrities rarely affect the work of the team.
2.Q: What are the links between procrastination and other psychological problems among we-media creators? What are the causes of procrastination?
A: From an operational point of view, the causes of procrastination can be divided into two parts
The first part is that many we-media creators have moved from student to work. Learning at school is often reactive. Without deadline nodes such as assignments and exams, it is impossible to arrange work in an autonomous way.
The second part is anxiety about data. Especially now that the platform’s algorithm is becoming more and more accurate, and there are no pop-up videos within a period of time, weblebrities sometimes drop their powder, thus making them even more reluctant to post videos.
3. Q: Do you help influencers with procrastination or other mental problems (e.g. data anxiety, lack of confidence) in your work?
A: Yes. If a weblebrity’s data is bad for a period of time, we go back and analyse it to find the cause of the problem. Focus on the problem itself. At the same time we go and look for the sparkle in each person and develop a programme to amplify that sparkle. As the netizens slowly change, we then look to focus on their progress. This will have a positive effect. We make a lot of bi-weekly plans of what small goals we need to achieve in the two weeks. We also look at things from multiple perspectives. For example, sometimes an online celebrity loses followers, but in reality the followers she loses are not her target group. The result of her losing followers is that she has a more accurate audience for her account.
4. Q: Do you think there is any way to balance the work life of a celebrity?
A: There is no solution to this problem, because we are all workers. It’s hard to separate your time from your work as a labourer. What we need to do more than anything else is to adapt to the way the work is paced. Loving what you do will make your life a little happier.
5. Q: So do you think my last intervention didn’t really help we-media creators to ease their procrastination? Because I was mainly talking about work-life balance, and your point was that work life balance is a problem for everyone, not for we-media creators.
A: Yes, it’s true. But it can be used as a pre-project, so that other we-media creators can relate to it and realise that their problems are not an isolated case. But in operational terms, there is no way to directly help creators alleviate existing problems. If you’ve worked there, you may know that there’s an evaluation system called OKR, a framework that we originally used with our employees to get them to use consistent goals for themselves and their teams. But I’ve recently had the intention of recommending this framework to more influencers. So I would also recommend using a system such as OKR to give freelancers more reasonable goals.
After a discussion with self-publishers last week, I had an idea: to use my actions to raise awareness among more people. Self-publishers need to give themselves some space Self-publishers need a break!
The reason for this is simple，the work of self-publishing requires a lot of filming of life’s material, and creativity needs to be inspired by life. This leads to the fact that, in reality, a lot of time, that seems like a break is actually a state of work. Keeping up the tension instead makes it more mentally strenuous. Especially in the past few years, there have been more and more netizens in China who pose in public with no regard for others’ feelings. In coffee shops, young people can often be seen changing into multiple outfits to pose for photos, seriously affecting the mood of those who actually want to have afternoon tea. In many famous spots, tens of hundreds of girls dressing in the same outfit, wearing the same make up, and doing the same posing can be seen. Netflix shots are posted on social media so that more people can copy and learn from them. Many people choose to follow suit even though they don’t make money from the content they post. When will people be able to enjoy their holidays when they should be taking time off to take pictures and post them on social media?
So not only do I want more self-publishers to focus on their time off and plan a good work-life balance, but I also want more social media users to realise that creators’ photos and videos are often just part of their work and they don’t need to squeeze their time off for it.
Because my starting point was to critique the current state of social media in China. So I decided to use a comical and humorous persona to act out people taking photos in public and interacting with passers-by on the road. When someone wondered what I was doing, I would use a plastic microphone to explain my purpose for doing so.
During my conversations with passers-by, they told me that they hadn’t thought about the conflict between what the self-publishers were shooting and their time off before. But I could also sense from the conversation that the average person did not have strong empathy for my performance. For the average person, the life of a self-publisher is not at stake for them. And after I posted the performance video on the internet, people’s attention to the video was not as precise as I thought. Chinese netizens were more focused on why it was possible to live abroad without wearing a mask. So, how to use a stronger style to evoke the viewers’ awareness is something I need to improve in the next intervention.
After the last interview with We-Media creators, I had a discussion with 3 interviewees and two PRs working for brands about how to alleviate the procrastination situation of self-publishers. Interviewee number 2 gave a lot of practical advice. Firstly, she felt that journaling was an effective way to relieve her anxiety. This is because her anxiety and procrastination often stems from not getting anything done herself. When she has not achieved anything at the end of the day. she feels guilty and uncomfortable. But when she records what she has done each day, she does not think that she has accomplished nothing. In fact, much of the work is inner work, such as communication and making decisions. Being aware of her daily workload, she doesn’t beat herself up as much as she used to. A PR person adds that oftentimes self-publishers will choose to work at night. This kind of day and night work can have a significant negative impact on a creator’s physical and mental health. Especially if there is a communication problem when the overnight work is over. Self-publishers are extremely prone to breakdowns. Similarly, some videos are the product of overnight work by self-publishers who feel they have paid a huge price to do this and thus have high expectations of it. The lack of high expectations can be even more damaging to a creator’s enthusiasm for creating. Respondent #1 said that there is not an insurmountable problem with procrastination, and that it is often possible to push yourself and push your limits and still get the job done. When you think about your life and the panic you feel when you don’t have work, it doesn’t feel so hard to work.
Summary:
I’ve learnt that each of the CREATORS had severe procrastination. Most of them were often anxious, and two of them used anti-anxiety medication.
I created a focus group of the six interviewees, and they all talked about the motivations that trigger procrastination, using procrastination as a starting point. This was summed up in one word, anxiety. This anxiety can be interpreted in 4 ways.
1. Peer competition. Every day there are a lot of highly productive and high quality creators. Because they are all taking business advertising, creator content is competing. The content that has a lot of plays and likes in social media can put mental pressure on the creator.
2. The algorithm of the platform. Tiktok, instagram and other platforms have a video recommendation mechanism that forces the creator to keep producing high quality content. The high expectations of exposure and the reality of the discrepancy can also cause anxiety.
3. Feedback from viewers. Due to the anonymity of online users, some of them often make radical comments or even personal attacks on the creator, thus putting psychological pressure on the creator.
4. Physical health problems. Most creators do not have regular working hours and often work late at night. The sub-healthy state of health makes it easier to feel anxious. Also, because they are self-employed, creators are often questioned by their families.
The focus group then discussed a number of suggestions that all members agreed on, which could be divided into three parts:
1. Be awared that the data on the platform is not under your control. Don’t associate unexpected data feedback with yourself too much,
2. Acknowledge your own internal work, which is often neglected in comparison to the output. Anxiety is often caused form the stress of not making output. At the same time, outsiders may mistakenly think self media is easy work. But the reality is that many decisions and ideas cannot be quantified. Being aware of your real workload can help to reduce the burden of not having an output.
3. Work Life Balance. The competitive nature of the self-publishing industry has led creators to spend almost every moment collecting inspiration and shooting material on the fly. This leads to a lot of time seemingly spent resting, but it is still high-intensity work. It is an important lesson to learn how to take a break from life and work.
Interviewee #1, Wang, 21 years old, Male, 300k followers
Wang has been earning his own money since he graduated from high school and is currently on a break from university. He has worked as a salesman for Shiseido and as a front desk consultant for a plastic surgery hospital. Two years ago, in his spare time at work, he started posting videos about the cosmetic surgery industry, which became an accidental hit. He continued to keep up with the updates for the rest of his life, and slowly his account was seen by cosmetics brand owners who approached him to promote their products. He blended the expertise he had learnt at work into his videos, recommending cosmetics and skincare products to people.
But balancing advertising content with daily content has been a problem that wang has been overcoming. The platform’s algorithm recommends video content with a high number of interactions and a high completion rate to more users. And Wang’s highly-played content trolls the plastic surgery industry and expresses LGBT views mainly. There are two problems with this. First, the traffic generated by content trolling the beauty industry does not directly translate into traffic interested in beauty products. This is because people watch his videos in the hope that they can hear more sharp reviews. Yet promoting a product requires expressing one’s love for it. When viewers see a series of words from someone who is supposed to criticise a product, they will think that the blogger is not real enough, which will result in a lower number of views and interactions than other videos, which is not good for the overall advertising revenue of the account.
The second point is that LGBT topics are extremely heavily censored on Chinese social media. If such topics are discussed in a straightforward manner, the censors will limit the traffic of the content. As a result, Wang sometimes creates great content that cannot be widely distributed.
But Wang has never given up on making content in the LGBT space. Today his content takes the form of combining LGBT-related topics and make-up together. Using some of his own invented words and phrases to circumvent the censorship from the platform. This also means that Wang is under a lot more pressure than regular creators. The platform’s audits, the demands of merchants, the expectations of data and the responsibility to his fans often make him feel anxious. Recommending products to fans means making them trust him, and this trust often makes him feel psychologically burdened about his income.
Wang says his anxiety and procrastination make him often put off posting videos. But at the end of the day, he pushes himself and gets it done. But sometimes, he pays the price for his procrastination. Because advertisers and he would book slots, the creator’s video content all had to be reviewed in advance before it was released. If the review is delayed, sometimes this can be resolved by changing the release date. However, sometimes the merchant will not accept a change of date. This is because there is a time frame for the promotion of each product. When a merchant runs out of budget, or doesn’t have enough product revenue, don’t stop promoting. And when the launch slot is missed and no revenue is generated, Wang has no other way to vent his anger than to troll on social media.
Interviewee #2, Li, 23 years old, Female, 280K followers
Li is a girl who graduated last year. Her original plan was to study at home after university to prepare for her postgraduate entrance exams. But her job in self-publishing has slowly made her give up on this decision. After all, there are now 4.51 million students taking the graduate exams in China, but only 1.1 million actually get accepted. Preparing for postgraduate exams is a risky business that does not pay off in time to see the benefits.
Conversely, however, Li’s income from self-publishing jobs can be quite substantial. In China, before 2012 was the era of text-based social media, dominated by various forums such as Tianya Forum and Baidu Post. With the spread of 4G networks, the era of pictures and videos has gradually evolved. Li has been sharing her make-up tips and product swatches on social media since she was a freshman. Since 2020, Li has been experimenting with videos to record her make-up sharing. Thanks to her skilful make-up techniques, high-definition picture quality and logical and clear explanation style, she has gained many fans who trust her. She spends her spare time after school to shoot make-up videos. Her make-up style is not all about fashionable make-up, but rather blends her views on feminism and her own interpretation of current social hotspots into the video content. This is why her account is very popular with highly educated women with high spending power. Her single ad service offer is also much higher than that of bloggers with the same amount of followers.
However, as a quality content creator whose views are good at outputting opinions, Li still gets bothered by her productivity. She used to think she was a very self-disciplined person who felt she could organise her time between studying for graduate exams and working on her self-publishing. In reality, she slowly found that her self-publishing work took up most of her life time. Double-checking and revising scripted content with businesses consumes a lot of communication costs. As she is the one serving the content, she needs to meet the brand’s requirements as much as possible. Sometimes a shot has to be shot three or four times.
Filming not only takes up Li’s time, but also her energy. After a long day at work, it was difficult for her to devote herself to her studies.
In the summer of 2020, she gave up her exams and decided to devote herself to content creation. However, her life did not become as easy as she thought it would. Losing the one study goal of graduate school, she bet her life on working in self-publishing. She cares more than ever about the number of views and likes a video gets. Her sense of crisis has also never been higher. At first she worked all day and night like an office worker, but gradually she began to stay up late working and living the opposite life of an ordinary person. The traffic assigned to her by the platform dominated her life, and everything she did revolved around whether she could bring more attention to herself. Many people may not understand why we-media creators care so much about traffic, but the reality is that the income of we-media creators is strongly correlated with traffic. Traffic determines the kind of life a we-creators can lead.
Interviewee #3, Zhang, 22 years old, Male, 450K followers
zhang talks a lot about his self-publishing work. He is a very action-oriented person. He is currently producing an interview show. In each episode he goes to chat with other bloggers and discusses some interesting things he has come across while doing self-publishing. He says he enjoys the pace of his life now, although his traffic may not be as good as before he did the interview. But he feels that he is trying to think outside the box of traffic, to do what he wants to do, to do what he feels is meaningful, and that makes him feel happier in life.
But Zhang admits that his life is very different from the one in the video. In the video he is a happy and sunny boy, but in reality he is addicted to games and he smokes and drinks. He says he plays games with his workmates all day and then delays work until the early hours of the morning.
He feels he has passed the period when he would feel anxious because of bad video numbers. He has been working in self-publishing for almost four years. He’s done daily content shared by couples, he’s done funny episodes, he’s done interview shows, he says his traffic is one half less than it was in previous years, but he feels that being in self-publishing is about accepting these changes. You can’t let the job dictate your emotions, he says.
Zhang has also done live entertainment broadcasts in addition to his ad services. Live entertainment broadcasters make money through viewers’ rewards. When an anchor’s live stream is engaging enough, the average retention time of viewers is high, and the platform uses an algorithm to recommend live streams with high viewer retention time to more users. zhang’s live stream was once the number one most popular in sichuan province. He says that doing live streaming is more exhausting than shooting videos. Sometimes it’s 12 hours of work at once, and at the end of the live broadcast not only do you not want to do any other work, but you even want to say a word. The popularity of live streaming sometimes has nothing to do with effort, looks, personality and talent can all be factors that attract people, and many of these factors can’t be learned through later in life. zhang has many friends who are also fellow live streamers, and he says that sometimes your previously unpopular friends can explode overnight, and you can’t predict these. You can’t predict these things. It’s better to be jealous of other people’s success than to accept the reality.
What are we-media creators? We-media (also called self-media) is a platform on the Internet. It gives a user the facility to write articles and published videos that possess a very unique identity. On the basis of content format, we-media platforms can be split into three types, namely text, video, and audio-based. Besides the conventional we-media, like blogs, other we-media platforms that are gaining prominence are live-streaming platforms and self-made funny video platforms.
In 2020, some practitioners said there were more than 3.7 million full-time and 6 million part-time we-media creators in China. Of these, the majority are freelancers. University students and recent graduates are the mainstays of we-media creators. the past two years have brought unprecedented disruptions to the Chinese employment market. the post-epidemic short-form video advertising industry, live-streaming ads, and other new formats are emerging to bring growth to internet advertising. According to PwC’s Global Entertainment and Media Industry Outlook 2022-2026, “Generation Z” is becoming more dominant, and demand for advertising is becoming more customized, personalized, and smart. Internet advertising has an advantage over traditional advertising. At the same time, 10.76 million Chinese university students will graduate in 2022, and they will face increasing unemployment rates every year. 16.5% of those graduating in 2021 will choose flexible employment. A report on the Chinese social networking site Bilibili shows that the most desired career for university students today is that of a we-media creator.
Practitioners working for MCNs say that the we-media creators who sign up with companies today are mainly university students or graduates within three years. Apart from signing up with a company, more of these we-media creators would choose to be on their own lone courage. Be a freelancer.
The reasons that drive young people to become we-media creators are simple: high earnings, flexible working hours, free products, and the attention of others …… But not everyone can earn their first bucket of money through self-publishing. In one Chinese forum, the Douban group, there is a “Doing Sideline Failed Day.” This group is full of users who have tried their hand at blogging on various platforms, sharing their experiences of creating content with each other. Most of them were posting different tracks of content across the platforms to test the waters.
For them, self-publishing is a spice of life, a tool for continuous learning, a way to earn money for rent, and a way to express themselves.
They know that you can’t put your eggs in one basket, so they usually run several accounts at the same time, with different account IDs, different content tracks, and even different ways of presenting themselves – for example, one platform for graphics and another for videos. The girl who runs the most accounts has five different accounts at once.
In these days of doing self-publishing, some people earn extra money above their hourly rate without any effort, but many more have been running their accounts for almost a year but haven’t earned a dollar yet.
There are only a very few we-media creators who can make an account that receives consistent advertising. Not only do they need high-quality content to allow the platform’s algorithm to allocate more traffic, but the content of the account is also even more important to give the viewer emotional value while allowing businesses to see the commercial value. Many we-media creators are still unable to have the expected income after gaining followers and exposure. The shift to commercialization is the first lesson for every we-media creators.
But even if they are lucky enough to make a profitable self-publishing account, we-media creators still face pressures and challenges on all fronts. Anxiety about traffic, fear of decreasing followership, anxiety about not being able to meet merchant targets …… I interviewed 3 we-media creators with 10W-50W followers and social media advertising as their only income. All had varying degrees of anxiety, but all were, at the same time, finding their own ways to make peace with it.
The social media advertising market in China segment accounted for 67% of revenue in 2021.
The rapid development of the new short-video + live e-commerce industry has brought about a huge demand for talent, which has not only created a huge gap in terms of quantity, but also exposed the current shortage of practitioners in terms of professional ability and quality, while some enterprises have emerged with new problems and demands in the employment model in the short-video + live e-commerce field.
The survey results show that the penetration rate of short-form video marketing is expected to reach 90% in 2022, and the penetration rate of live-streaming marketing will reach 79%. The first half-year financial data released by some of the long-form video platforms show a significant year-on-year decline in advertising revenue, with traditional TV stations experiencing even more significant declines in advertising revenue generation over the years.
In 2021, Bytedance companies represented by Douyin short video will have annual revenues of more than 360 billion yuan, of which about 250 billion yuan will be generated from advertising commercialization and about 60 to 70 billion yuan from live streaming; the industry’s second largest player, Kuaishou, will also have annual revenues of more than 80 billion yuan.
Short video advertising in China has developed since 2019 and is now the largest, most efficient and fastest-growing part of all internet advertising formats in terms of average conversion efficiency and budget. In 2021, the annual advertising revenue of ByteDance and Kuaishou reached RMB 250 billion and 43 billion respectively, maintaining a growth rate much higher than that of the industry. The rapid growth of short video advertising is due to 3 parts:
1. the use of algorithmic recommendations for both content and advertising: through big data capture of user behaviour and high-frequency content algorithmic recommendations, short-form video can collect sufficiently accurate user profiles and behavioural preferences. By combining these characteristics with the recommendation algorithm of advertising, the targeting accuracy of short-form video advertising can reach a very high level, resulting in a much higher conversion efficiency than other forms of Internet advertising.
2. Vertical short-form video ads are more expressive: In terms of visual impact, audio-visual multimedia performance and user interaction experience, vertical short-form video ads are far more expressive than traditional graphic infomercials or patch ads, which naturally meet the communication characteristics of short duration, high focus and deep impression of advertising content.
3. The maximum ad load rate is extremely high: we believe that the measure of the advertising potential of content platforms is the theoretical maximum ad load rate, i.e. the theoretical maximum ad duration/total duration. As short-form video content is switched so frequently that it can be interspersed with an ad every few pieces of content, the theoretical ad load rate can be capped at 20-25% (4-5 pieces of content interspersed with an ad of the same length); whereas medium- and long-form video platforms have a much lower ad load rate cap than short-form video platforms due to the low frequency of content switching and the fact that users spend more time watching content than watching ads (e.g. The upper limit of ad load rate is much lower than that of short-form video platforms (e.g. a 45min TV series can only accept about 1min of patch ads, and any more than that will seriously affect the user experience). The extremely high ad load rate cap allows short-form video platforms, which have a large number of users and hours, to fully realise their traffic resources through advertising on a large scale.
Internet social media advertising has become the largest and most important segment of the advertising industry, with the market size of China’s Internet advertising industry at around $934 billion in 2021, or +21.9% year -over-year; the overall growth rate is highly correlated with the macroeconomic boom. Based on the economic environment, we expect the growth of the internet advertising industry to face greater challenges in 2022. However, in the medium to long term, the Internet advertising industry will continue to grow in line with the development of the overall economic scale.
