Ilja Laurs, GetJar’s CEO, spoke in the same conference with me. It is always great to hear Ilja’s comments about the apps business. GetJar is really an interesting success story. It is world’s largest open apps store. They have had more than 500 Million app downloads. Ilja had many excellent points about openness. Most of apps stores are not yet open, if we think how they support different devices, and how the content is restricted. From Social Intelligence point of view it was really interesting to hear that in GetJar 40% to 90% of new users of an app come from friends referals. One more example of the power of social networks.

Another interesting topic was operator’s role in apps business. Operators have many assets like billing, network service (e.g. messaging and location) API’s, and customer information. The last one can be used for insight, targeting, and personalization that is coming crucial in apps business. There are so many apps that it is hard for users to find relevant apps and this makes it also difficult to make niche apps. How to get right people to find them. Operators could make this in their apps stores, and they could also be an enabler for 3rd party apps stores. But as many participants commented in CTIA, operators have been very slow to utilize these assets. Now it would be really time to do it, if operators want to have a role in this business.

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 have now a telephone line, but not yet broadband. But what makes the situation better is that I have now one person in BT’s Twitter team who knows the whole case and I can directly tweed with her. It really makes my situation easier. I believe / hope they get it now work. We have agreed with this person, no one else can handle the case anymore.

So, what we can learn from this. If they get this now to work, it was their Twitter team that saved this customer relationship. It was good they follow Twitter comments and it makes the communication much more effective when I can now tweet and not to call to a telephone queue. What is still missing they should have better solutions to know customers and make immediately right things. And a coincidence in the case is that Xtract could actually help them in that area. Maybe it is the next discussion when I first get my connections to work.

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.

Technology Review summarizes the new technologies to get advertising work in social media: “Startups that help advertisers and marketers better target the users of social-networking sites are fashionable investments for venture capitalists in North America and Europe. Such startups hope to sell advertisers detailed information about individual social networkers. They include the brand-new 33Across (which we profile in our list of 10 notable startups, which begins on page 50) and the more established Finnish company Xtract, which counts Vodafone, T-Mobile, and Blyk among its customers and has begun selling its software to advertising agencies and online marketers and publishers. ”

Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review, commented in the Millenium Prize event that our solution is the most complete solution he has seen for solving “the multi-billion dollar problem.” It is nice to see that we have really found a way to build solutions to monetize digital communities.

New Business Week (December 3, 2007) has an interesting article about big changes in the advertising business. The article focuses especially on Saatchi & Saatchi’s challenges to keep their revenue and find a new growth. They have won new customers (like J. C. Penney) and marketing professionals love many of their campaigns. But their clients have not got concrete commercial results from the campaigns. As Business Week says: “Yes, most clients still believe in creating an emotional bond with consumers. But Roberts had come to the conclusion that many companies are desperate for an über-consultant-a ‘brand navigator’-who, in a fragmented media universe, can help them to make that connection across multiple media.”

Business Week continues: “For most of the 20th century the so-called creatives ruled the industy. They didn’t worry about where and how an ad run. They didn’t analyze market niches. They were about Big Ideas what would connect a brand, emotionally, with millions of consumers. Today, you might say, the Small Idea is ascendant. Ads are targeted at individuals or communities of consumers. That’s because the media universe is so fragmented – into blogs, social networks, television, magazines, and so on – that finding the right medium is fast becoming more important than the message itself.”

Some other interesting quotes from the article: “This data-driven approach is a natural fit for Web advertising, one reason direct agencies have become a dominant force online.” and “It was the need to fill this gap (from TV, print, and radio to multiple media) that prompted Roberts to try and buy a digital agency. Last year he hired an investment banker to find one.”

But it is exactly the following comment that explains Xtract’s fast growing business: “Marketers are stampeding online, where Saatchi lacks the tools and talent to compete. Digital boutiques are proliferating, staffed with ’90s tech vets and Gen Y video artists dedicated to making ads for social networks and whatever comes after them. Meanwhile, chief marketing officers are looking for data to justify their ad budgets to the bean counters”.

I really liked this article, it really summarizes the change in marketing and advertising. And it is a concrete example, why marketers and advertisers want Xtract’s solutions to utilize real digital media customer data for profiling, targeting, and consumer understading.

Full article.

I was with the engagement marketing guru Alan Moore in Library House’s Media Tech event in London this week. Alan presented Xtract and Social Marketing Intelligence to the audience, which included many people from the leading media and investment companies. Advertising and social networks were the main topics in most of presentations this year. Antti Örling from Blyk (Xtract’s customer) especially emphasized the value of targeting and relevance in mobile advertising. He mentioned that Blyk achieved 12% to 43% response rate in their mobile campaigns, compared to the norm of 3% to 6% in mobile and 0.2% in the internet.

People still have a lot of questions, e.g. “how will social network, mobile advertising and business models be like in the future?”. But people see the value of targeting and relevance in digital advertising, and understand the “hot media” needs social marketing intelligence.

You can also read more from Alan’s blog.