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Due to the flight chaos in Europe, the 3rd Annual Driving Loyalty in Telecoms has been postponed to June 3-4. The event still takes place in Budapest, at the Hotel Sofitel Chain Bridge.

On April 20-21, top speakers from leading European operators will address customer retention with best practices and fresh views in an event organised by Jacob Fleming Conferences. Join us to hear the presentations, discuss the role of Social Intelligence in retention activities, and enjoy spring in Budapest!

Xtract’s superior social analytics tool helps operators drive revenue and reduce churn

FINLAND, 16 February, 2010 – Xtract, the leading provider of social intelligence-based analytics solutions, announced today an upgrade to its flagship social intelligence platform, Social Links. Social Links enables network operators to analyse the behaviours and interactions of mobile subscribers within the network, helping them to monitor and identify the best targets for revenue generating targeted messaging campaigns. Key benefits of the new platform include product launch capabilities for totally new kinds of products, increased personalisation features and new dashboard reporting functionality, allowing operators to effectively monitor churn virality across the mobile network. Social Links is already helping operators worldwide and in one recent case gave the selected operator a percentage product take-up almost 4 times that of the competition.

Mobile subscribers increasingly seek to engage with more applications and enriched services. Industry analysts predict the app download market to generate revenue of up to $4.2 billion by 2013[1] and research predicts that mobile application store users will quadruple to more than 100 million in five years[2]. This presents a major revenue-generation opportunity for operators. On the other hand, churn continues to be a major threat, especially in volatile prepaid markets. Randomly or poorly targeted marketing will result in a lost opportunity in both cases. Xtract has seen several examples in prepaid markets, where incentivising subscribers, who were not going to churn, with campaign offers actually destroys secured revenue. Another recent phenomenon has been to launch new services to subscribers with SNA, but relying only on non-contextual influencers to drive the launch virally – leading to failure.

Xtract believes that successful targeting relies on the operator’s ability to analyse a combination of a mobile subscribers’ propensity to do something, combined with their influence within the fabric of the network. The analysis of mobile subscribers’ social context aware propensity to do something, combined with their influence has proven itself in Xtract’s Social Links platform. It allows operators to effectively harness key influencing factors of customer pull and target even subscriber groups that have traditionally been more challenging to reach, particularly the pre-paid market which makes up 77% of global subscriber share. Social Links also allows operators to benefit from the value of demographic prediction capabilities in targeting pre-paid subscribers, as well as the power of predictive social network analytics (SNA) in churn prevention, new product launches and the top-up marketing required for operators to retain a loyal pre-paid subscriber base.

“Over the past twelve months, we have witnessed a shift in industry perception in the value of social network analytics, as the idea has evolved from initial hype and buzz of conception through to a mature, valuable network asset. As a result, many operators are beginning to recognise the business benefits of analytics as a solution to unlocking the gates to previously untapped revenue y,” said Mika Lindholm, CEO, Xtract. “As leader in this continually developing space, Xtract is ideally placed to forge the way in driving increased awareness of its value and benefits. Our platform allows us to build further on the success of our pioneering technology, enabling mobile operators to expose and harness the value of subscriber network interactions and drive valuable revenue opportunities through a combination of greater understanding, sophisticated product marketing and targeted, personalised campaigns.”

The key benefits of Social Links 3.5 include:
• Product launch capability: Operators are able to use analytics for the launch of more targeted, novel kinds of products
• Tagging targets: The predictive analytics of Social Links produces a scoring list for campaign targeting. Social Links analyses subscribers in the target list, and targets with specific features can be tagged to further personalise messages, media and offers for smaller subgroups. New dashboard reporting on churn virality in the operator’s network.

1) Yankee Group, ‘Forecasting The U.S. Mobile App Gold Rush’, www.yankeegroup.com
2) In Stat, ‘The Apps Store is Born: Smartphones Enable New Marketing and Advertising Opportunities Worldwide’, www.instat.com

About Xtract and Social Links
Xtract is the leading provider of Social Intelligence based analytic solutions and services to mobile operators. Its tools analyse the wealth of customer profile and service usage data to predict the propensity of subscribers and those in their social network to either churn or increase spend, and influence others to do likewise. Consumer behavior is analysed on a far deeper level than by using historical data alone, also gaining insight into and understanding how customers communicate with each other, and who are the most influential in the network. Xtract also provides custom analytics to other verticals especially in the Finnish market. The core offering is dynamic segmentation based on rich data feeds, with other applications include optimization and fraud detection.

Xtract Contact:
Sari Aapola
Email: Sari.Aapola@xtract.com

PR Agency Contacts:
Chrissie McGoldrick
Email: cmcgoldrick@miliberty.com
Tel: 00 44 207 751 4444

Elena Dunn
Email: edunn@miliberty.com
Tel: 00 44 207 751 4444

Propensity or influence? During the past months we’ve had several discussions internally and with our customers about virality. Our experience clearly shows that not everything is viral in marketing. Churn virality varies in different networks and there are cases where churn is not viral at all. Product marketing is a more potential case, but it’s become clear that the viral spread totally depends on the attractiveness of the offering.

This week I attended a seminar on how to do marketing in Facebook. One of the success stories was the launch of a new IKEA store in Malmö – a campaign designed by ad agency Forsman & Bodenfors in Sweden (check IKEA Facebook showroom campaign ). They succeeded in creating an incredible viral spread by allowing people to tag IKEA items on the store manager’s profile page, and get the items for free. Obviously a compelling offer – but the point of the designers was that if you want things to spread – it’s all in the offering. Simple ideas usually work best. You are fighting for your customers’ time, to succeed you need to offer them something worthwhile, and your brand needs to be something they are willing to promote. How do you find such ideas? These guys advice was – gut feeling.

This basically means that you are working on a trial and error basis. It also means that finding so-called influencers in your network will not guarantee viral spread. Influence is always context related, and you need to find the first tier targets to get any results at all. That’s why we put so much emphasis on finding the people that have the highest propensity in each context. At the same time we find the ones with the highest influence on others. So, if your gut feeling was right and you have a killer offering, you’ll get both the high first tier pull rates and the virality. But if you cannot find even the first adopters for this particular offering – you’ll have no virality either. Simple.

The good news is that if your offering is relevant but not viral (and you will have lots of these), you need to find the customers with the highest propensity in each case. These revenue streams are what matter for your business and they directly affect your bottom line.

More than two thirds of the world’s mobile subscriptions are prepaid. Yet the marketing discussions mainly revolve around postpaid topics, and the problematics in how to know more about and reach the prepaid customers are left in the background.

Lately, Xtract has worked closely with several large prepaid focused operators on both churn and product marketing. Together, we have found critical issues that we have solved, for instance in churn definitions as part of the analytics process.

At the end of January, our Product Marketing Manager Mikko Röntynen will speak on these topics in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the IQPC event called Prepaid Mobile Summit 2010. His topic will be:

Driving the value of prepaid customers using Social Intelligence
· What is Social Intelligence and what can it reveal about your prepaid customers?
· Demographics prediction as a basis for targeting in marketing campaigns
· Finding right targets for effective customer retention, product up-sell and customer acquisition campaigning

Improved insight and targeting to prepaid customers is a key strategic focus for Xtract in 2010.

I recently attended two events for the mobile industry: Mobile Asia in Hongkong and an IIR event on Customer Segmentation and Intelligence in London. I had the opportunity to listen to numerous speeches, and two themes in particular caught my attention:

· The necessity to use microsegmentation to reach and engage consumers and

· The challenge and opportunity of data services and applications for mobile operators

As Garrett Johnston from MTS Russia put it In his presentation in Mobile Asia, the key to operators’ success in the future lies in the long tail of brands – and these are the brands of their application partners. How can operators matchmake between the varying and versatile needs of their customers and the supply of niche applications? Analytics was seen as the answer by many, but several open questions remain on the implementation, especially on truly making analytics part of marketing processes.

Operators have worked on segmentation models for a long time already. The projects have been long, cumbersome and internally focused (!). Are these static segmentation models going to help in selling a large variety of products, services and applications to subscribers? Yes and no. When resuming the key learnings at the IIR event on segmentation, one of the groups came up with the idea of hierarchical segmentation where the operator works with a few high-level segments on a strategic level, but uses dynamic segmentation with more variables as input on a tactical level . I believe there is food for further investigation in this idea – more flexibility to really engage the versatile consumers with niche marketing, offerings and flexible pricing through microsegmentation, based on strong but easy-to-use analytics.

Helsinki, Finland and London, England – 4 November 2009 – Xtract today announced the GSMA has shortlisted the company for its innovative flagship social intelligence product, Social Links, for the Mobile Innovation Asia Grand Prix Award for the second year in a row. Social Links is used by mobile operators to help them gain more value from their customers through improved churn management and product marketing campaigns, as well as more targeted customer acquisition strategies. This year’s accolade demonstrates the evolution from the great vision behind Xtract’s product to real implementations that are currently achieving vastly improved marketing campaigns for mobile operators. The Mobile Innovation Grand Prix award showcases promising entrepreneurs from small and medium-sized companies bringing innovative new products and services to market.

“It’s been a big year for Xtract Social Links as it evolves to bring real innovation, especially in the areas of churn management and product marketing, to mobile operators from around the world,” said Timo Laaksonen, CEO at Xtract. “We have also made Social Links available as a service with improved graphical interfaces. The GSMA’s recognition is an even greater honour this year, as our product matures and achieves real results for operator marketing.”

Winners of the Mobile Innovation Grand Prix APAC Tournament will be presented at the forthcoming GSMA Mobile Asia Congress, which is taking place in Hong Kong, China from 18-19 November. Xtract will be present at the conference at booth MI11.

About Xtract Social Links
Social Links is the first commercial soft¬ware that uses social network analytic¬s to improve mobile operators’ own marketing. Social Links utilises anonymised subscriber transaction data to generate customer insight based on social intelligence, predict the behaviour of subscribers (e.g. for churn management and product up-sell/cross-sell) and to understand the network of influence between subscribers. Social Links is based on advanced analytics that dig deep into the granular communication patterns between subscribers to draw highly accurate targeting and deep insight.

Social Links offers benefits for mobile operators’ marketers, campaign designers, product managers, analysts and CRM managers. The information pro¬vided is used in highly accurate targeting, and gaining customer insight for cam¬paign and product planning. Social Links also supports subscriber lifetime valuation and campaign design. Social Links is available either as licensed software or as a fully managed service, Social Links On-Demand.

About Xtract
Xtract (www.xtract.com) refines social interaction, behaviour and demographic data about mobile subscribers, enabling operators to utilise data as a dynamic tool in their day-to-day marketing for effective and intelligent targeting of campaigns and advertising. Xtract’s Social Links is an automated, self-learning solution capable of analysing billions of mobile transactions with easy to use and actionable tools for operators to define accurate target groups for their marketing campaigns.

Press contact
Emily McDaid
Hatch PR

Xtract’s CEO, Timo laaksonen, will be one of the panelists at Growth Forum. This year’s conference will explore the ways and means that make software companies world-class success stories. It will bring together industry leaders and their views on education, training, research and innovation.

The Growth Forum is organized by the Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association – a non-aligned association for innovative, professional, growth-friven and entrepreneurial software business executives. The association drives the success of software business as an industry and supports individual software companies in their road to success.

More information can be found from the event’s website.