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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.

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.

I was in the Social Media World Forum In Singapore in this week. One important topic was social media influences on other industries, like telcos and traditional media (e.g. content production and TV). It is clear that social media is an important new media and also traditional media tries to manage its better. For example, Sony Pictures produces mini-soap series for social media in China and it has been a success. Product placement and interactive discussions about products are important revenue sources.

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 moved to a new home in the UK a couple of weeks ago. I had many problems to handle the move of BT’s telephone and broadband. But a week after the move lines started to work. But in the last Monday all connections were disconnected. I used almost four hours on the phone to clarify the issue. The customer service was totally totally unaware, what was going on. Finally they promised to make new orders. I checked the status of the new orders from their web site, and all orders were canceled. So, I spent another three hours on the phone. I explained the situation to about 20 persons and then the person transferred me to another person. Long story short, I started to be really frustrated and started to comment the situation in Twitter. In a couple of hours BT started to follow me and send me direct messages. And I got one person to call me from the Twitter team. Finally she started to clarify the whole mess. She told that almost each person with whom I had talked had created a new order, but typically something wrong with the order. For example, a part of the orders were to our old address.  And I already got the first new bills also for a new lines to our old house.

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.

Youtube has again an excellent example of virality, 2.0 and consumer power: United Breaks Guitars. A singer flied by United Airlines and his guitar was broken. Months he tried to get compensation without any results. Finally he made a song and put it to Youtube. And in two weeks 3.7 Million people saw the video. United offered a compensation, but he refused to take it anymore. A good example that web and mobile really empower consumers. And it is more and more important for companies to understand virality and how to live with communities.

An interesting interview with Turkcell, known to be one of the most innovative mobile operators in the arena of mobile marketing, has been published by Mobile Marketing Magazine’s David Murphy. The full interview can be read here and we’ve summarised some of the key points below. Turkcell believes that mobile operators are not doing enough to cash in on the promise of mobile marketing, and believes it has carved a unique opportunity for itself by using the most innovative mobile marketing strategies out there, in a proactive manner.

Some of the highlights of its strategy are:

-Turkcell has built a database of 7.6 million opt-in subscribers which is actively used for mobile marketing, and it is revenue generating
-Quoting directly from the article, Turkcell’s Melis Turkmen says, “this is one of the largest databases of its kind in Europe, possibly in the world, and we know a lot about them, including their location, demographics, and their data usage that we target subscribers accordingly”
-Turkcell has managed to build this database with low level incentives for subscribers (e.g. 20 credits for 10 texts)
-They run campaigns both for Turkcell’s own marketing and for brands such as Pepsi
-Turkcell estimates that in 2009, there will be $91 million (£55 million) of revenues from mobile marketing in Turkey, of which they will take a 70% share
-The Tone&Win campaign has won awards around the world for its success. With this campaign, subscribers use an advertiser’s jingle for their ringback tone and obtain credits for doing so

We advise that you read the full interview as these innovative strategies are exciting. That link, again is here: http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.co.uk/2009/07/smooth-operator.html.

Xtract’s view on this is that Turkcell has done a commendable job implementing mobile marketing and it has all started with the ability to target subscribers based on real data patterns. One of Turkcell’s new ideas is to use mobile marketing for market research, so research companies can take short surveys of very targeted people via mobile rather than calling them and bothering them with a phone survey – and perhaps calling people that aren’t relevant. This is yet another example of how using advanced targeting of mobile subscribers can be a win-win situation for the operator, the third party and the subscriber.

Our deal with the Finnish mobile operator DNA has been covered in Mobile Marketing Magazine. Check it out here.

The text of the article is below.

July 06, 2009
Xtract Secures Finnish Deal

Xtract, which develops ‘social intelligence’ software, has revealed that Finnish operator DNA has deployed its ‘Social Links On-Demand’ solution, bringing the benefits of its targeted and personalised marketing offering to DNA’s 2.4 million subscribers.

Social Links On-Demand is a new delivery channel for Xtract’s flagship solution Social Links. According to Xtract, it helps operators to gain a three-dimensional picture of its subscribers for use in more targeted marketing. Social Links analyses behavioural, demographic and social network data from subscribers in an anonymized form, thus protecting privacy.

Social Links On-Demand’s key components include social network analytics; data warehouse/storage; database maintenance; and infrastructure services such as virus protection and firewalls. Operators can revolutionise strategies such as churn management based upon the service’s three-dimensional subscriber profiling, says Xtract.

“This is a revolutionary solution for customer insight,” says DNA’s Head of Business Intelligence, Jarkko Utriainen. “It helps us increase our marketing efficiency by harnessing the viral effects within social networks. At the same time, deploying the solution as an on-demand service that is hosted by Xtract saves us cost, resources and time in implementation.”

Helsinki, Finland and London, England — 5 May 2009 - Xtract has announced that it recruited three new members to its management team. These new members form a critical part of Xtract’s drive towards global market leadership in social intelligence solutions and services.

Gerry Gross – Vice President, Global Sales
Gerry Gross brings 20 years of executive sales and marketing experience in ICT business sector. At Xtract, Gerry has complete revenue ownership and is responsible for building and managing the global sales and partnerships’ team. Prior to Xtract, Gerry championed the worldwide sales efforts at First Hop, prior to its acquisition by Airwide Solutions. He has also held executive management positions at Surfkitchen in London and Beenz in New York City and strategic sales positions at Sprint Corporation in the US.

Sari Aapola – Vice President, Product Management
Sari Aapola has been appointed VP of Product Management at Xtract, responsible for product strategy, product marketing and product lifecycle management. A seasoned executive in the ICT sector, Sari’s most recent roles were as VP of Marketing and Product Marketing at Basware and before that at Tecnomen. Both are public companies belonging to the group of Finnish success stories in international software product and services business. Sari’s most recent project has been authoring a book on ‘Sustainable Thought Leadership’ published by BookSurge.

Mikko-Pekka Bertling – Vice President, Services
Mikko-Pekka Bertling has been with Xtract for the past two years. In his new role he is responsible for Xtract’s Social Links On-Demand solution, professional services, training and consulting. He brings a long experience in pre-sales for Active Data Warehousing and Customer Relationship Management Solutions. Mikko-Pekka has also worked as a hardware and architecture advisor and has managed Professional services’ operations in Finland and the Baltics. Mikko-Pekka started his career at IBM where he served in product development, product management and sales roles. Later on, he held several senior positions at CMA Teradata. Prior to joining Xtract, Mikko-Pekka was ADWH and CRM solutions’ expert and pre-sales owner of loyalty factory solutions at CapGemini.

“These key appointments maintain our tradition of hiring only absolute top-level executives with unmatched professional experience and market insight,” said Timo Laaksonen, CEO. “Xtract works on social intelligence technology, solutions and services that bring immediate and tangible value to our customers. Furthermore, our solutions enable the development of completely new kinds of mobile and internet on-line services and customer engagement models that can revolutionise the way that companies serve their own customers – targeted, personalised, timely and proactively. This is a new market where one can succeed only with the right combination of experience, insight, leadership, drive and innovativeness. I believe that with the addition of Sari, Mikko-Pekka and Gerry we are ideally positioned to have what it takes to become the undisputed market leader in our focus business.”

About Xtract
Xtract refines social interaction, behaviour and demographic data to create accurate 3D user profiles. These profiles for the first time utilise data as a dynamic tool in the day-to-day marketing for effective and intelligent targeting of marketing 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 and online companies to define accurate target groups for their marketing campaigns. www.xtract.com

Social links analysis company certifies its solutions to run on massive-scale database to support customer competitive advantage

Helsinki, Finland and San Francisco, California. – 25 February 2009 – Xtract, providers of social intelligence solutions for marketing and Greenplum, a leading provider of database software for the next generation of data warehousing and analytics, today announced that Xtract’s software solutions are certified on Greenplum Database 3.2.

Xtract’s social intelligence solutions analyze social interactions, behavior and demographic data that mobile operators and online companies already have, to create accurate, real time consumer profiles. Xtract software is deployed on Greenplum Database in a variety of scenarios, including on-premise software at customer sites and in hosted offerings at Xtract and other service providers around the world.

Greenplum database 3.2 was released in late 2008 and features substantial enhancements in key areas such as programmable parallel analytics, MapReduce and in-database compression. As Greenplum’s customers and partners migrate to Greenplum Database version 3.2, they are able to garner considerable enhancements in performance and scalability.

“Greenplum is our database of record, and as Greenplum advances the state of their technology it enhances the solutions in use by our customers,” said Mikko-Pekka Bertling, VP of Services at Xtract. “Customers such as TeliaSonera, Fonecta, Vodacom and PlusTV are reaping the benefits of Xtract’s analytics software running on Greenplum Database, and we look forward to future enhancements from Greenplum.”

“Xtract’s social intelligence solutions are a perfect example of how customers gain value from their data,” said Frank Bien, VP of Business Development at Greenplum. “As data volumes explode, partnerships such as the one between Xtract and Greenplum ensure that customers can utilize all their data for competitive advantage.”

About Greenplum
Greenplum is a database software company that is reinventing how companies gain insight and competitive advantage from their data. The company’s flagship product, Greenplum Database, is built to support the next generation of data warehousing and large-scale analytics processing. Supporting SQL and MapReduce parallel processing, Greenplum Database offers industry-leading performance at a low cost for companies managing terabytes to petabytes of data. Greenplum Database is used by major global organisations including NASDAQ, NYSE Euronext, Reliance Communications, Skype and Fox Interactive Media/MySpace. Greenplum partners with Sun Microsystems to power the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance. For more information visit www.greenplum.com.

About Xtract
Xtract refines social interaction, behaviour and demographic data to create accurate 3D user profiles. These profiles for the first time utilise data as a dynamic tool in the day-to-day marketing for effective and intelligent targeting of marketing 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.

Last night’s Business of Mobile 2.0 session at Mobile World Congress was a big success, so I have consolidated some key takeaways from the session in the below, from Xtract.

It was MWC’s largest attendee session outside of the keynotes, suggesting the merits of this topic on mobile industry executives’ minds.

Here are some talking points attributed to Jouko Ahvenainen, founder and VP of Xtract, social intelligence solutions provider, who led a portion of the session.

“Mobile 2.0 is about doing things together and sharing: co-creating, co-developing, co-funding, and co-succeeding. It is about individuals, conversations and communities.”

“2.0 business is about having high transparency, and it’s important to not that 2.0 enterprises are not new technology enterprises.

What they do have:
- New business models
- New ways of helping people to do things together

“That being said, there are many funding and earning model challenges to Mobile 2.0. As a crowd we cannot underestimate the importance of this fact:
mobile 2.0 can be run most cost-effectively but to be scalable and have a growth model, funding must be achieved for most businesses.”

“Social media has good opportunities to monetise services, but it cannot use old models to do it. When it comes to funding, new models are needed.”

The main challenges are:

- Content is not the main reason to use mobile or social media, it’s about people
- Search advertising is weak
- Contextual advertising inventory doesn¹t work properly
- People can create content and contexts in social media
- Mobile push media is not linked to Internet type context
- It is not possible to use direct social contact or personal data
- Segmentation and categorisation is key to respecting privacy
- Brands and advertisers are interested in user profiles
- Media agencies need metrics and measurable results
- “If 2.0 businesses are to survive on an advertising appetite, audience
- exchange must be interactive – a two-way street. Refined customer profiles are a high priority; user privacy is key; and optimising revenue for advertisers to give them measurable benefit are paramount to the model.”