Archive

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.

We have a brand new white paper online on the topic Brands need People and People need Brands: How social analytics benefit consumers while protecting their privacy.

Using new social tools, consumers can decide, what information they want to reveal to the advertisers and what to keep private. For marketers and advertisers, this is a unique opportunity. They can concentrate on promoting their products and services to those who have already shown interest to them.

In the white paper, we analyze ways of making marketing relevant and useful for the end users. This can be done by targeting the Alpha users, the most influential persons in a social network.

We list six topics to consider when planning social analytics:

1. Provide simple opt-out
2. Inform users on data usage
3. Protect customer information
4. Respect industry guidelines
5. Let users control their privacy
6. Advertise to youth with care

The white paper also presents, how mobile operators can use Xtract Social Links to find effectively the targets for marketing campaigns. The Product Marketing Module for Xtract Social Links can bring this power to targeting specific products effectively to the influential users.

Did you find the white paper useful? Was there something missing? All feedback is welcome!

Download the white paper here.

We have a new white paper online on the topic Social Advertising Intelligence: How to reach consumers with active advertising.

Customers are increasingly moving from mass broadcast media to social media, making current advertising processes less effective than before. Until now, the tools for planning and buying online and mobile advertising have been lacking.

In the white paper, we analyze the four main challenges that advertisers face with online and mobile advertising, that is:

1. Measuring the full impact of the ads
2. Lack of tools
3. Ads cannot be bought in a unified way
4. Lack of information on online users

The white paper also presents, how Xtract Social Advertising Intelligence can be used to target campaigns effectively, solving some of the challenges with multi-channel advertising.

Did you find the white paper useful? Was there something missing? All feedback is welcome!

“the main point of information visualization is not to decorate, nor to show-off but, to help in making the right conclusions on unexplored data”

I recently googled for information on visualization, or casually, “infovis”. I ran into a weblog on Information Aesthtics (”infosthetics”). Visualizing social networks seems to be one of the leading topics in this blog, too. Network visualization is, as Janne recently pointed out, technically difficult as such, but also conceptually problematic. And network visualization is only one visualization task in our work.
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