I was in the Social Media Wo
rld Forum In Singapore in this week. One important topic was social media influences on other industries, like telcos and traditional media (e.g. content production and TV). It is clear that social media is an important new media and also traditional media tries to manage its better. For example, Sony Pictures produces mini-soap series for social media in China and it has been a success. Product placement and interactive discussions about products are important revenue sources.
Telcos must also manage social media. I had my own experiences (see my earlier blog) with BT in Twitter. Now we saw some examples, how people make YouTube videos about their telco customer service experiences (and normally they are not very nice). But many telcos have now learned to handle this better. In the conference we saw some statistics (source: Strategy Analytics, estimates for year 2010) from social media mobile usage. For example, 15 to 25 year-old uses over 50% of their communications time in social media, so mobile calls, text messages and landline calls will be totally less than 50% of the communications time. And 70% of mobile browsing (data) revenue is coming from social media usage. SingTel just launched a new mobile device (INQ) that is especially designed for social media use.
Social media has influence on telco’s marketing (how to make social media marketing), offering (how to package social media to its own offering), and product development (how to develop new services). One new concept is telco 2.0 (I know we have seen enough 2.0 terms, but maybe it anyway is a good way to describe it). It basically means that telcos also open API’s for 3rd party developers to accelerate new service development. In practice, it means e.g. an application can use location and messaging services from the network. Several mobile operators are active in this area, for example, Vodafone (betavine), Telefónica (O2 Litmus), and BT (Web21CSDK).
I think telco 2.0 principles are mandatory for the industry. It is important to accelerate development cycles from an innovation to end-user service. It is also a competition between handset applications, traditional internet applications, and telco applications. It is not easy to open API’s to telco networks, but it is positive to see that big players have started to do it seriously.
We moved to a new home in the UK a couple of weeks ago. I had many problems to handle the move of BT’s telephone and broadband. But a week after the move lines started to work. But in the last Monday all connections were disconnected. I used almost four hours on the phone to clarify the issue. The customer service was totally totally unaware, what was going on. Finally they promised to make new orders. I checked the status of the new orders from their web site, and all orders were canceled. So, I spent another three hours on the phone. I explained the situation to about 20 persons and then the person transferred me to another person. Long story short, I started to be really frustrated and started to comment the situation in Twitter. In a couple of hours BT started to follow me and send me direct messages. And I got one person to call me from the Twitter team. Finally she started to clarify the whole mess. She told that almost each person with whom I had talked had created a new order, but typically something wrong with the order. For example, a part of the orders were to our old address. And I already got the first new bills also for a new lines to our old house.