Electric depth 丨 pulse: Internet company rumors first place

Since the end of 2021, affected by the cooling external environment, China's large Internet companies have generally begun to lay off employees, including Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and JD.com. Under the cloud of layoffs, the emotions of the company's employees gradually accumulated and sought to be released. Pulse - This workplace social platform, because of the characteristics of the subordinate section "Job Words" can be posted anonymously, makes it a dense voice for employees of Internet companies affected by layoffs.

In the pulse of the workplace, Tencent is a company with rigid management, management positions controlled by middle-aged people, and employees are generally intimidated by PUA; Baidu is a company that wants face - finding part-time jobs as spectators at insignificant events attended by the boss, or suppressing new people to deliberately not give high performance; Alibaba's P7 employees are generally considered to be old and well-paid, but not strong. In the real world, in stark contrast, the three companies have all received multiple awards and high rankings in terms of recruitment attractiveness, employee benefits, technology investment, corporate social responsibility, etc., and are almost the best companies in China from a business point of view.

The latest to be hurt by the news on the job is Tencent. On January 26, 2022, a recent Tencent graduate was notorious the night before for complaining to the company's WeChat management about the excessive overtime intensity, and he announced that he would leave Tencent regardless of the outcome. On February 8, an anonymous post in Pulse's job post claimed that the intern in question had been marked by Tencent as never hired. This unfounded news continued to ferment after media reports such as Fast Technology, and Tencent's public relations head Zhang Jun had to come forward to refute the rumors and denounce the report as "fake news".

Debunking rumors on the pulse of rumors has become one of the daily tasks of the public relations department of Internet companies.

The content on the pulse of the official speech has been reproduced and amplified by the WeChat public account, self-media and some online media, making the online information more difficult to distinguish between true and false. "Although we immediately debunked the rumors, not everyone who has seen the rumors can see the rumors, and the damage has been caused." A publicist at an Internet company that has repeatedly dealt with "rumors" on the pulse said.

The 7 Internet companies interviewed by the power plant have already been one of the daily tasks of the public relations departments of these companies to deal with the content on the pulse; and the individuals involved in the personal content of employees and managers have basically adopted a tolerant attitude, and they have no means and time to deal with these half-truths and half-truths. Simply put, Pulse puts the company gossip in the pantry on a public online platform.

What does the content of the terms mean for the pulse? Is it really as rigorously vetted as it claims? What will be gained from the veins behind the "rumors"?

Sources of traffic and controversy

Pulse was launched in October 2013, and at the beginning of its establishment, it LinkedIn benchmarking, focusing on workplace social functions, and the first wave of users included Wang Xiaochuan, then CEO of Sogou, and Xu Xiaoping, founder of Zhen Fund. In 2014, workplace social giants LinkedIn entered China.

Anonymous posting is a feature that distinguishes Pulse from LinkedIn and other workplace platforms. This has a lot to do with Lin Fan's entrepreneurial accumulation. He is a former technical partner at the professional social networking site Avenue.com and previously served as Sogou's technical director. In January 2012, Lin Fan founded Taoyou.com, which mainly uses algorithms to mine user interpersonal networks from a scientific point of view. After testing the waters of taoyou network, avatar taotao, and mimi three products, Lin Fan understands the attractiveness of anonymous content to workplace social users.

The early anonymous area was relatively loose in its management of posts, which undoubtedly indirectly encouraged many users to participate in posting. In 2015 and 2016, Baidu was already a high-frequency word in the anonymous area, and anonymous users often posted information about Baidu and Robin Li, plus Baidu was plagued by negative search at that time, and the attention was high. This anonymous content about Baidu has driven community activity and traffic, and the product has benefited.

The anonymous zone was once the largest segment of pulse traffic, and a front pulse middle level said that before changing its name, the anonymous area contributed at least half of the traffic to the pulse.

When Maimai announced the D round of financing, it was revealed that as of August 2018, the total number of registered users of Maimai reached 50 million, with an average monthly content view of about 3 billion; Lin Fan was asked in a delayed interview in February 2021 that "the official DAU (daily active user traffic) only accounts for a little more than 10% of The Pulse", but the former did not respond.

As a company's core trade secret, the traffic data of the core sector will not be published. In response to the power plant's inquiry, Pulse revealed that the contribution of the job area to pulse's daily active flow accounted for less than 15%.

Pulse has gained enough attention because of the anonymous community, and even these anonymous posts have caused it to cause a lot of lawsuits.

On the China Judgment Document Network, Pulse (the main company is named "Taoyou Tianxia") is a regular customer, and has been sued by cheduoduo, ByteDance, Baidu, B station and convenience bee for anonymous posts on the job.

A person from Chehaoduo Group said that the same anonymous "Wang Chongyang" had posted twice in September and December 2019, and the core content was the cash flow of Guazi used cars and layoffs. After appealing and sending legal letters, Che Duoduo did not effectively solve the problem, and then directly chose the pulse of prosecution.

According to the july 2020 first-instance judgment, the Beijing Internet Court upheld Cheduoduo's claim and ordered Pulse to provide Cheduoduo with information such as the real name, contact information, and network address of the user who posted it.

Pulse has always claimed to be working hard to crack down on emotional content, emotional posts, and content that creates gender antagonisms, but company rumors never seem to be far removed from the job. At the beginning of 2021, because an account certified as a "Bilibili employee" on the platform posted unfavorable remarks against Station B, Pulse was sentenced to 300,000 yuan in the first-instance judgment. The content of this post is - "B station, can sleep with the little sister, I slept four." "Obviously, this is a malicious attack without any basis.

In its reply to the power plant, Pulse claimed that the proportion of negative content in the station accounted for only 3%-5%. In other words, at least 95% of the remaining content is workplace interactions, career growth, and networking opportunities. "The reason why this part of the content has received little attention is because it is not topical and therefore has not been widely disseminated by the media." This is Pulse's explanation of why the job is more concerned.

Even though there are many legal risks, Lin Fan's confidence in his words has never wavered. On February 16, 2022, at the media communication meeting where Pulse launched the "company review" function, he described the job post as "People's Square" in an interview, which means the inclusiveness of the job. Correspondingly, the pulse is not without emphasis on the truth, the circle of colleagues is the main real information, Lin Fan called it "a place with a belonging".

Colleague Circle is considered the "sister" product of The Job, launched in 2019. The former mandatorily requires enterprise information authentication and provides a variety of authentication methods; but the poster of the job can not go through the enterprise certification, although the pulse encourages users to post in their real name, but the job is more like a tree hole.

If a user wants to post in the in-service, he can choose to be anonymous or in what role (including former and current employees). If you choose the most recent identity, users can even use an identity that is not authenticated by enterprise information. For example, if a user only needs to add a period of work experience to their resume, they can use that identity when posting in a job without verification.

For false identities, Pulse lacks the corresponding governance means, but only prompts users that if they post with an unauthenticated identity, not too many people will see it. But some people can still see that this is the main reason for the birth of rumors in the job talk area - it is not a real name, and it is not responsible before the company sues.

According to the power plant's investigation, Pulse did not directly monetize the contents of the job. Advertising was the biggest source of revenue for Pulse in the early days, but in 2020, revenue from advertising, recruitment and membership businesses has been almost equal. Until now, the business statement still has not appeared in an advertisement, and still does not accept commercial deletion.

But the influence of the job on the pulse is invisible. A former Baidu mid-level official said that Baidu had ended up in a settlement between the two sides because of the post of the official statement and the pulse of the lawsuit. But Baidu found that Baidu's pulse colleague circle has more than 100,000 IDs, while Baidu has only more than 40,000 employees. In Baidu's earnings report, this data is queryable.

Obviously, there are a lot of IDs that are fake, duplicate, or even non-Baidu employees. Pulse Theory should proactively remove these duplicate IDs after receiving a complaint to ensure the authenticity of the circle of colleagues. But in the end, Baidu spent more than 200,000 yuan to buy this service, and then the two sides collided with the database under the condition of information encryption to rule out those invalid IDs.

Image source: Visual China

Operate "rumors" and gain heat

Almost every time he was interviewed by the media, Lin Fan, founder and CEO of Pulse, would have a different interpretation of his job. In February 2022, Pulse launched a company review system that claims to help job seekers understand a company from company reviews, thereby improving job search matching.

This review system is not currently related to the official statement, but in the media communication meeting, the pulse side claims to consider incorporating the content of the professional statement into the review system. However, in terms of anonymous content, the two have similarities. Many media outlets have tested reviews after they were launched and found that anonymous reviews can also be made without authentication.

In the clarification, Lin Fan regarded "Pulse is the most hated company of Internet manufacturers" as a misunderstanding. On the face of it, he dismissed this assessment as "understandable." But whenever he is asked the question of "whether the professional speech condones the user's rumors", he will answer that it is not the pulse that allows employees to produce the negative of the company, the pulse is only to provide a channel for users to express, because the problems that break out in each enterprise are objective. Even if there is no pulse, users will go to Weibo, Zhihu and B station to send those negative information about the enterprise.

He even believes that the credibility of Pulse will be higher and more responsible than other platforms, because Pulse has the user's enterprise identity authentication, which can help enterprises to filter and filter information. "We're not making trouble." He stressed in an interview with NetEase Technology.

Lin Fan deliberately blurred the "negative" and "rumors", intending to use a clever statement to avoid the outside world from paying attention to the pulse Of the word There are many rumors. Of all 7 people interviewed, they all acknowledged the existence of rumors in their posts, and some even called them "the birthplace of Internet rumors."

But in Lin Fan's view, many Internet manufacturers regard Pulse as enemies, possibly because Pulse refuses to provide information about the so-called "whistleblowers". In the matter of refusal, Pulse is treated equally, even if Pulse's investor Wang Xiaochuan comes to ask for it, Lin Fan will refuse. In Lin Fan's concept, he insists that "the term is a platform for employees and enterprises to have an equal dialogue." ”

This insistence condones users and also brings risks to the pulse. In July 2018, during the Chakra D round of financing, the relevant departments ordered Chaumaeu to rectify the anonymous area within a time limit, turn off the function of anonymously publishing information, and strengthen the management of users. After more than a month of rectification, the pulse anonymity area was upgraded to a new job.

As long as the job was still there, Lin Fan had to offend some people, even friends. But at least on the surface, Lin Fan didn't care too much.

"Whether on the front-end page or internally, Pulse is increasingly inclined to encourage real-name content and weaken the weight of anonymous information." An employee of Pulse Operations said. But when asked what the "encouragement" was internally reflected, he did not say explicitly.

In response to the power plant's inquiry, Pulse revealed some improvement measures, which will be gradually implemented in June in the near future - Pulse plans to upgrade the product, focusing on adjusting the home page navigation structure, downgrading the job description to secondary navigation, and encouraging users to browse more real-name posting content on the home page.

The employee in charge of the operation also revealed that because the whistle-blowing of the job can bring more public attention, the team of the pulse will intentionally or unintentionally use the heavy information on the job to create more voices.

One of the details he mentioned is that in the KPIs of the Pulse Media team, one of them is "Pulse External Communication", that is, the medium of Pulse requires pulse media to enhance the brand and popularity of Pulse through communication means. Anonymous content on the job has the attribute of breaking news, which is easier to catch people's attention, so it can achieve better results in dissemination.

As a result, this point is actively amplified. The media personnel of the pulse public relations department will directly output the exposé content of the job to the media, and then help the media find interviewables for the corresponding companies. For example, after a new energy vehicle company laid off employees, Pulse once took the initiative to contact the media to help the media report on the condition of assisting in contacting the interviewee, and only required the brand information of "Pulse" to be revealed in the report.

The Pulse employee in charge of operations said that the operation of the business and the operation of the circle of colleagues have KOLs (opinion leaders, potential interviewees) of popular companies. If there is a revelation of these popular companies in the workplace, or if the circle of colleagues of the corresponding enterprises is extensively discussing a topic, Pulse Public Relations will contact these KOLs through operation, combine the information of the news, and cooperate with the media to form a so-called "topic selection".

"In fact, the media of the pulse has always had kPIs that borrow the official words for brand communication, and it is also necessary to borrow the content of the circle of colleagues in stages. Why is it a stage, because the circle of colleagues is equivalent to the second intranet of the enterprise, there are many internal information of the enterprise, and it is not good to use too much. An employee of Pulse confirmed it. With the help of the in-service speech, the pulse has played a role in the negative reports of many enterprises.

However, Pulse denied the above statement, and they said in the reply letter: "Pulse does not have a KPI assessment system, and the OKR management system is implemented. Pulse Media is responsible for media communication, and diffusion user speech is not their OKR. ”

A former senior employee of Pulse said bluntly that UGC (User Generated Content) is the advantage of Pulse, in the era of self-media, Pulse plays almost the same role as the media, and is closer to the source of information than many media. Pulse also intends to strengthen the output of content through various forms, carry the user's breaking news, process it into news and information, and build multiple channels on Weibo and WeChat public accounts to expand its influence.

On Weibo, one of the most well-known accounts is the chief insider officer, who has more than 1.1 million followers, mainly transports pulse posts for content release, and circumvents issues such as the authenticity of information in the name of "breaking news". Although there is no connection on the surface, the WeChat public account "Hou factory youth" does belong to the pulse in operation, and a regular employee of the content operation department brings several interns to combine the workplace hotspots and the screenshots of the pulse posts to produce content.

On this public account, there are many hot content in the workplace, such as the sudden death of a ByteDance employee, the account quoted a screenshot in the pulse of the pulse in an article, the screenshot content is "suspected sudden death of the employee's document editing record", but has not been verified by any information.

The revelation of the job statement has also attracted the attention of many self-media. In the account of "Yu see column", a special daily issue of the "Today's Big Factory Gossip" column was launched, and each issue had about 10 unconfirmed gossip messages. The author also emphasized in the disclaimer at the bottom that the material came from the gossip content of platforms such as Pulse, and posted the unverified information on the grounds of "gossip porters".

In this way, the content operation of the pulse has formed an internal and external cycle: internally, through various channels, it actively spreads and ferments those anonymous posts that attract attention; externally, it uses the news and media cooperation of the professional speech to carry out brand communication through media reports, and does not restrict the self-media to carry out those unconfirmed posts, and evades the responsibility of the platform and content publishing subjects on the grounds of "breaking news".

Of course, the pulse is not without progress. The former Baidu mid-level who was interviewed believes that from complete anonymity to adding ID to now adopting the ID plus enterprise information method, this is Pulse's progress in fairness and combating fake content.

The above-mentioned Pulse employees responsible for operations said bluntly that Pulse tries to provide more channels and ways to help users understand the authenticity of the information on the business statement, such as combining the user's feedback and labeling the relevant content as "controversial"; for each job, it provides more means to help users evaluate and consider the authenticity of the content in more dimensions.

However, when asked whether "after enough progress in the terms of the profession, there will be a revelation about the pulse", no one could give an answer.