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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.

When I read Jay Alabaster’s article on the Japanese behavior on social networking websites, it made me realise how difficult it must be for some companies to get any customer insight from their customer base.

According to Jay, “the vast majority of mixi’s roughly 15 million users don’t reveal anything about themselves” and keep in tight groups, to which he adds that “fewer than half of Match’s paying members in Japan are willing to post their photos, compared with nearly all members in the U.S”.

Must be so frustrating to sit on so much data and not be able to get any useful insight extracted. I wonder how companies like pixi.jp handle it, considering users have fake profiles, or then companies like match.com considering how differently users behave from culture to culture around the same service.

Last night I had a great time listening to Marc Davis, Chief Scientist of Yahoo!, talking about the new developments that they have been cooking at Yahoo! However, the night was first started with two presentations from Idean, who also paid for the pints – thanks guys! So, where is all this free beer and good talks? At MobileMonday, which returned to the roots of where it all started – Molly Malone’s Irish bar in Helsinki.

Marc Davis at MobileMonday in Helsinki

Marc started his presentation of by outlining Yahoo!’s visions of how to combine social networking and mobile into something that is ubiquitous and easy to use and develop for. I’ve always viewed the mobile phone as very good tool for social networking. Of course, you can call your friends, but I’ve also been texting to them for over 10 years now by both SMS and email, nowadays I can do video calls from the mobile too. So how is that changing? Well, I guess it isn’t. We’re just adding more ways to communicate to the same device. Which, let’s face it, is not a mobile phone anymore, but the most personal computer you have.

Marc also told us about Australian Aboriginal tribe, the Achilpa. They carry a sacred pole with them all the time as they wander around the desert to find food and water. To them, the pole marks the center of the universe – Which is very convenient as they never get lost (unless the pole breaks). “Where ever you go, is the center of the universe. And your people are always with you.”

The mobile has definitely become our sacred pole. (What three things do you take with you always when you go outside your home?) If our modern pole breaks, or runs out of battery, we would be lost and without any contact to our people.

However, is it too easy to think that you are in contact with our friends and loved ones if you just check their Pulse? I sometimes think that we are becoming more and more like the people in Solaria, a world envisioned by Isaac Asimov. Solaria is a world that is extremely sparsely inhabited and the people never meet each other in person, only through holographic viewing systems. They even have strong phobia about meeting in person. Isn’t this the direction we are going? Soon all that is required is to broadcast yourself and read the Pulse of your friends? And, in the best or worst case – depending how you look at it, that Pulse is already filtered by some ingenious system that tells me what is important.
I hope not. However, even though it was very nice to go home and give my wife an old fashioned analog hug, I have to admit that I’ve been away from home so many times that to be able to send at least digital hugs is very welcome.

What about the bag of ideas? Well Marc gave a good presentation of new Yahoo! technologies, like BluePrint and Fire Eagle. Take a look, and I’m sure you will get some great ideas. I did.

The second competition of our competition series opens today: Xtract International Student Design Competition 2008. It is opened for all students of the following art schools:

• London School of Communications, London, UK
• University of Art and Design Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
• Akademia Sztuk Pieknych w Warsawie, Warsaw, Poland
• Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA
• California College of the Arts, San Francisco, USA
• Tama Art University, Tokyo, Japan

We are trying to educate people through this competition what real social networks are, not facebook buddies, but social networks of people who REALLY communicate.

Blog was not invented in China, but it has been hugely popular in this country. Nowadays, almost everybody has a blog, presenting whatever he/she feels like to. Its users range from Nintendo DSL gamers to pop stars, and its hosts range from Windows Live Spaces to the Chinese native blog host www.bokee.com. And nonetheless, many of these hosts are reported to have attracted a large number of users.

This popularity can be probably attributed to the common Chinese character of being self-contained. Many Chinese prefer to keep their opinions to themselves rather than speaking out aloud. However, they do have a desire to share their experiences and knowledge, if the communications channel is right. Blogs are clearly one of those. Very often, the Chinese simply exchange their blog addresses, and then, when sitting back at home, they talk to each other over the blog. Blogs have obviously facilitated information flow and the construction of social networks in this country and particularly among the youth.
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