【Reading Reaction #3】 Bilibili， Embrace the Groundswell by User cooperation

In a world with highly developed information technology, the power of the groundswell should not be ignored. To embrace the groundswell, companies should consider customers as their collaborators in order to make improvements. Bilibili is a good example.

Bilibili, a Chinese video sharing website themed around anime, manga, cartoon, and games, was launched in 2010. On this website, users can upload, view and leave comments to videos about various themes, such as music, dancing, science, skill-teaching, entertainment, fashion, and movies. 

Different from other video sharing websites, Bilibili becomes unique because of its core feature, a real-time commentary subtitle system called “Dan Mu”, which means bullets in Chinese. This system allows users to send real-time comments while watching videos, and these comments will be displayed as moving subtitles overlaid on the video playback screen. By using this function, users can both watch the video and read other viewers' comments at the same time, which may create a chat room experience and allow users to interact with each other more. As of 2015, Bilibili has over 50 million users. To be attractive, Bilibili tries different ways for embracing the groundswell.

On the one hand, Bilibili tried to encourage its users to participate in the design and promotion of the site. In 2010, Bilibili held an online activity about design its mascots. This activity allowed users to create and elect original characters, and the design which got most votes would become official mascots of the website. After the selection, two young female characters with blue hair named “22” and “33” became the official mascots of Bilibili and had been in use so far. 

In 2014, based on users’ suggestions, Bilibili began to provide live broadcasting functions. Every user can register for a live broadcasting room and become the host of the room. By using this function, users are able to do live broadcasting and interacting with other viewers at the same time.

In 2016,  Bilibili also held several activities called “Front Page Collection”, which allowed users to create front page designs for specific subjects. Not only the participants could get physical rewards, the winning design works would also be used as official front page design for a month.  By holding different activities and listening to users’ opinions, Bilibili makes its users become participants of the site design and improvement process. As Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff said in their book, to embrace the groundswell, companies should make customers an integral part of the way for innovation and improvements. That is also Bilibili did.

On the other hand, Bilibili also used social media to follow the groundswell. Bilibili has its official customer service account in Sina Weibo, WeChat and Zhihu, which are the most popular social media networking sites in China. The homepage of Bilibili Sina Weibo account had about 2 million followers and it almost posts every day.

To communicate with oversea users, Bilibili also had its Facebook and Twitter account, which has thousands of followers as well. All of these accounts had very high response frequency and users can always get their answers in time.

Once they post something, other users may share these post as soon as possible. By using these social media networking accounts, Bilibili can not only better promote themselves, but also interact with its user more.

As time passing by, the power of online users becomes more and more important. To cooperate and communicate with users, companies can not only improve themselves but also better embrace the groundswell. That is also why Bilibili become attractive and successful.