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This year’s Customer Segmentation and Intelligence conference will focus on the development of actionable strategies for mobile operators’ main challenges – drive ARPU and minimise churn. As the recession bites and customers radically change their behaviour, how can you use your segmentation tools and strategies to establish what they really want and develop valuable propositions that meet their needs?

The conference will cover what data, tools and models operators should use to develop meaningful segmentation strategies at both the macro and micro levels.

Xtract’s VP of Product Management & Marketing, Sari Aapola will speak in the morning of Day Two of the Conference. These are some of the points her presentation will cover:

Engaging Consumer 2.0 – Understanding And Exploiting Social Intelligence In Operator Segmentation And Marketing

• Consumer 2.0 is in the driving seat – understanding how a paradigm shift in consumer behaviour is changing the rules of marketing
• Defining Social Intelligence and determining how it can be used to tackle the most burning business challenges of churn and product up- / cross-selling
• Identifying the deliverables of Social Intelligence today and establishing how it can be integrated into the operator’s marketing processes and systems
• Where is Social Intelligence going next?

UTalkMarketing featured an article by Jouko Ahvenainen of Xtract. In this article, Ahvenainen looks at word of mouth marketing in a pragmatic manner. Here is a quick peek with some of the requirements for starting a positive word-of-mouth effect:

• Identifying who within the social ecosystem of your customers is influential. In this way, any company can consider its customer base as a social network; we aren’t talking just about Facebook users

• Targeting these influential people (what can be called ‘Alphas’) with campaigns that are most relevant to them, which they are likely to want to share with their network

• Making real-time marketing decisions based upon actual data and the way it’s analysed.

A full version of the article can be found from: UTalkMarketing

I run into an interesting website the other day. It’s called “My Parents Just Joined Facebook”. The site is edited by Jeanne and Erika who love their parents dearly (their words). I laughed while reading the cuts of conversations between the young kids and their parents over Facebook. If I were a mother of a teenage kid I would for sure visit this site often hoping to find new conversations and opinions every time I visited it. But, I do have other good reasons. As a marketer, I want to understand the new generation of “digital born”. I often ask myself the question: Do I get them?

Jeanne and Erika are good examples of the customer 2.0. Born digital, the customer 2.0 can be very different from what we’re used with. Why? Because, in most of the cases, we are simply just not well prepared to start a dialog with them. Customer 2.0 is asking us to make their experience with our brand fun, social and engaging. They are asking us to participate in a conversation with them. They can and do express their opinions about our brand freely and with as sophisticated tools as we do. This way, contributing in building our brand’s image. So, ready or not, we have jumped on the same boat with our customers and started a dialog.

Holding their attention
Here comes the next question: If we’ve handled the dialog part well and they use our services today, does that mean they will use them tomorrow? Holding the attention of the customer 2.0 means we need to hold the attention of their friends and community too.

We must learn more about communities and try understand how social networks work. Take churn in telecoms as an example. It has been shown that churn is highly viral. The churn behaviour within one’s community affects the individual’s churn decision. Combining information about social networks with the more traditional information about customers such as demographics and behavioural data in churn prediction can maximise the total number of saved customers through loyalty campaigns.

“Can customer 2.0 be a loyal customer” is also the topic of Sari Aapola’s speech at the 9th Customer Retention Forum on June 23rd in Singapore.

Further resources about social network analytics and solutions can also be found at our website: www.xtract.com.

I was in the Social Meets Mobile event in San Francisco in the last week. The discussion included many interesting topics how social networking is coming to mobile. More than 50% of MySpace traffic should come from mobile in a couple of years. One interesting topic is also, what is social communications vs. social networking.

Social Networking is now associated strongly to certain type of services like Facebook. But social communications is basically all methods to be in touch with other people. And it is must more than social networking. This is actually something Xtract has emphasized long time, when we have made social network analytics e.g. from mobile communications. And now we can say that a person use at least calls, SMS, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and IM to her/his daily communications. How to manage all that communications, how to keep relevant contacts, how to find/filter when you get too much, etc.

There is a huge need to manage all this better. Many firms develop tools for web, but e.g. mobile device companies sees that they have important opportunity here, because a mobile device can be the home of important part of the communications. And a kind of meta trend is that internet is coming more a conversation platform than a stable home page platform. That puts pressure also to players like Google that has been the tool to navigate in the jungle, but now we go to a new kind of jungle. I believe strongly that social network awareness come a mandaory component to help users in this new jungle, but also to help marketers and advertsisers to find right people and send relevant messages.

An Alpha is similar to a champion or an influencer. Nevertheless, in addition to having high influence and links in the community, the Alpha also has high probability to buy some of your products, acquire more customers or churn away. So, there are different kinds of Alphas and today I want to tell you how we find the Acquisition Alphas.

For Customer Acquisition, we use highly advanced analytics software that can process billions of data points. This powerful software is highly accurate. We find exactly those subscribers that have the highest potential to recruit new ones from another network. We take into account their influence level and number of off-net (out of your network) friends.

The illustration shows subscribers that have high or low influence and that might have off-net friends. Xtract identifies that the subscriber with the green circle has off-net friends (the ones in yellow) as well as high recruiting influence. This means that she would be the best target for your member-get-member campaign.

Finding the Alphas in your customer base is like finding gold in a goldmine. Remember! You need your Alphas and you need to treat them well.