Chris Anderson, the author of the Long Tail book, has written a good blog post with the title “Social networking is a feature, not a destination” about social networking websites. His point is that social networking should not be the privilege of specialized social websites, such as Facebook or MySpace. Instead, every website should incorporate social networking features.
We are currently working with T-Mobile in Germany around social network marketing. T-Mobile is trialling Xtract Social Links, a powerful solution that helps to deeply understand customers and significantly improve their offering to better match customers’ needs. Community marketing intelligence is a new and exciting approach in marketing for T-Mobile Group, enabling them to be at the forefront of this new advancement.
Here at Xtract we get to work with data sets which are often in the form of networks. These may be, for example, social network data sets in online forums or links between web pages.
Often it would be useful to draw pictures of these networks, to understand better what their structure is. However, with networks that have millions of nodes, this is in practice impossible.
The problem of visualizing large networks is a common one and many different mathematical and aesthetical approaches have been taken to tackle it. Visual complexity is an interesting website, where a large number of network visualizations are presented.
London, UK and Helsinki, Finland 15 October 2007 - Xtract, the trusted partner in community marketing intelligence, has appointed three new members to its Board of Directors:
- Martti Mehtälä, former Managing Director of Microsoft Finland as Chairman of the board
- Alan Moore, the Engagement Marketing guru from SMLXL as Member of the board
- William Greenberg, senior Canadian management advisor as member of the board
“Martti, Alan and William bring strategic business, marketing and management strengths as we are moving the company to the next level. Xtract has a smart business model and excellent technology. Our solutions are being delivered and demanded by world?s largest brands and we are well set for this challenge,” says Jouko Ahvenainen, previous Chairman of the board and Chief Operating Officer of Xtract.
Martti Mehtälä, Chairman of the Board of Xtract adds: “In the digital age, customer knowledge and understanding of communities they belong to, is of fundamental commercial importance for all industries. In fact, companies will not be able to properly monetise their customer communities without relevant community marketing intelligence. Since Xtract specialize in analysing social networks and predicting customer behaviour, this gives us a unique competitive advantage, and an opportunity to provide our customers deep insight understanding about their end-customers’ behavioural patterns, likes and dislikes, which can be used for improved, more focused and more relevant marketing, saving in cost and speed to market.”
The other existing Xtract board members are Xtract’s co-founders Kimmo Kiviluoto, CEO and Jouko Ahvenainen, COO as well as Juha Mikkola, Senior Partner and a Co-Founder of Eqvitec Partners.
About Martti Mehtälä, Chairman of the Board
Martti Mehtälä has been the Managing Director of Microsoft Finland for 12 years, until June 2007. With over 25 years experience as a senior manager in the IT industry, he has a profound knowledge of the computer and software business as well as many lines of businesses. Martti and has been working in cooperation with many well-known international computer companies and various channel partners.
Martti started his career at Nokia Data in 1982 and then as the Country Manager of Computervision Inc (1984-1986). Back at Nokia, he held several senior management positions in sales and marketing within Nokia Data and ICL group. Before joining Microsoft he acted as Managing Director of Dava Oy, the second largest IT-distributor at that time in Finland.
Martti Mehtälä is also a member of the board for SysOpen Digia and chairman of the board and co-founder of NatureGate.
About Alan Moore, Member of the Board
Alan Moore is the originator of the term, philosophy and principles of Engagement Marketing . He started working on the concept in the late 1990’s, which, culminated in his writing of the book Communities Dominate Brands. His consultancy SMLXL helps businesses and customers (to) better engage with one another.
Alan’s recent book, Communities Dominate Brands, has provided an international platform for him to address, radio, television, conference and digital audiences globally.
He advises many global companies on strategic engagement marketing and how to navigate from the old commercial and media world to the new one.
Alan’s theories, work and practical guidance has played a key role in enabling the global company Nokia to rethink is marketing strategies, and product development. He is an executive director of Masthead, Media Solutions for Global Social Networks. He sits on the advisory board of CVON and he teaches a Mobile Social Networking course the Oxford University for further education.
About William Greenberg, Member of the Board
William Greenberg is currently a consultant to consumer manufacturing, private investment and technology firms where he structures relationships with strategic and financial partners and oversees new business initiatives. He advises senior management on a range of important issues related to financing, alliances/joint ventures, operations and technology and business development. He has co-founded several companies including KORE Wireless Inc. and Green Brook Corporation. Mr. Greenberg serves on the Advisory Boards of several firms including Inetasia Inc. and Active Products Ltd. He is a former director KORE Wireless where he also served the Board as Secretary Treasurer and Jetnet Internet working Services Limited where he was a key advisor to their management and served as a member of the CRTC CISC Sub-working Group on co-location in Canada.
About Xtract
Xtract is the trusted partner in community marketing intelligence. Our core strengths are in social network analytics and process optimization. We help mobile operators, media companies and consumer businesses to deliver efficient marketing by predicting customer behavior - giving meaning and life to raw customer data. Xtract enables marketing departments to leverage and deliver on the potential of their brand assets, by understanding their customers and their behavior, the communities they belong to and how they interact within those communities.
Xtract is based in London and Helsinki, and operates across Europe and Asia, working with over 50 blue-chip companies with intensive customer data.
Contact:
Jouko Ahvenainen, Chief Operating Officer
E: jouko.ahvenainen@xtract.com
M: +44 791 248 1154
Arlinda Sipila, Marketing Director
E: arlinda@xtract.com
M: +358 40 528 8651
There has been an active discussion whether social communities are a fad. It was said that even Steve Ballmer thinks they are only a fad. Engagement marketing gurus, like Alan Moore, think communities are something fundamental for human beings. Here is my prediction: Internet communities as we know them today are a fad, but social networks and communities will be a fundamental part of all Internet and mobile services and marketing. I just flew from London to San Francisco and had time to read some articles and really thought this question. Communities like Facebook and MySpace are now very popular, but I see they are only the first step and still quite artificial social networking between people. Advertisers have seen the value already today, and we at Xtract also offer tools for find the right people and communities for each advertising campaign. Individual community services comes and disappears but the phenomenon itself will live. But this is only a starting point. People have many other services they use daily in the Internet. They live with their mobiles 24/7. It cannot be so that your social activities and at the same time community marketing intelligence is limited only to certain web sites. Social network perception will be a fundamental part of everything people develop for the Internet and mobile in near future. And community marketing intelligence will live inside all services and platforms in the future to offer better usability and more relevant and effective advertising.
We’re getting more content on youtube! Maybe we’ll end up having soon clips from last week’s Xtract birthday after party. 
My son’s in the eighth grade. It is interesting to observe how these school children are influencing each other when it comes to choosing mobile phones and even mobile operators. In Sweden, when Vodafone was sold off to Telenor, they changed their logo colours from Vodafone red to Telenor blue. Telenor ran heavy and expensive campaigns on pretty much all types of media about this colour change. One of the girls in my son’s class said quite loudly in front of a bunch of her friends: “I don’t like blue, I like red better!” And within 3-4 months, most of the kids in that class, including my son, had mobile phones and subscriptions from the operator 3 who happens to have a reddish logo. Is this girl an Alpha User? You bet! And then my son went around saying that Nokia phones are not cool, they are for old people. In the last school event, I asked a few kids in the class what phones they have. They were all, either SonyEricsson, or Samsung. And that considering that Nokia overall has the biggest marketshare. This word of mouth seems to work both ways - for a product or service, as much as against it. Read: Children, School and Mobile Phones.
When Arlinda asked me to write something about my master’s thesis on the company blog, I was stumbled. Thus is not because I wouldn’t have anything to tell about the thesis. Instead, I have been basically living the thesis for the last eight months, which makes it difficult to pick any single viewpoint to the work.
The topic of my thesis work is Bayesian clustering of huge friendship networks. It discusses methods to find structure in large networks, such as networks of friendships and presents an algorithm for this purpose, originally devised by Janne Sinkkonen, the chief researcher here at Xtract.
The algorithm finds overlapping group (i.e., cluster) structure of nodes. In each group the nodes are expected to possess similar traits and each node may belong to multiple groups.
The method studied in the thesis uses a Bayesian model of friendship formation, which is based on the theory of homophily studied by sociologists since 1950’s. What is nice about the approach is that it not only tells into which groups each node belongs, but also about the certainty of the group assignments.
It was interesting to do the thesis for a company, because there was a real need for the algorithm: The algorithm and its implementation are now being taken into use in customer projects. This is different from the academics, where the developer may often be the only one to ever use a reference implementation.
You can read more about the algorithm from the abstract we wrote for the MLG’07 -workshop: “Inferring vertex properties from topology in large networks”.
