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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.

Meet us at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Feb 15 – 18! We will be at Hall 4, level 1, location 4.1HS01. Did you know that poorly targeted churn prevention campaigns to prepaid customers can actually have a negative revenue impact? Come and learn more about how Social Intelligence brings immediate value in prepaid environments. To agree a meeting with us, please send an email to info(at)xtract.com.

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.

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?

CTIA was in San Diego in this week. Mobile apps start to be a serious business. There are 85,000 iPhone apps, and 12,500 Android apps. The number of Android apps is growing so rapidly that we can ask, how soon there are more Android apps than iPhone apps.

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.