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.