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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.

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.

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?

UTalkMarketing featured an article by Jouko Ahvenainen of Xtract. In this article, Ahvenainen looks at word of mouth marketing in a pragmatic manner. Here is a quick peek with some of the requirements for starting a positive word-of-mouth effect:

• Identifying who within the social ecosystem of your customers is influential. In this way, any company can consider its customer base as a social network; we aren’t talking just about Facebook users

• Targeting these influential people (what can be called ‘Alphas’) with campaigns that are most relevant to them, which they are likely to want to share with their network

• Making real-time marketing decisions based upon actual data and the way it’s analysed.

A full version of the article can be found from: UTalkMarketing

Helsinki, Finland and London, England — 8 June 2009 – Xtract marketing director Arlinda Sipila will be chairing and speaking at the IIR Business & Telecoms Business Intelligence event this week in Amsterdam.

Today, Sipila will chair the pre-conference workshop, “Subscriber data – A goldmine of opportunity for mobile operator marketing.” The agenda for the session includes the following talks:

10.00 Subscriber social networks, social Influence and 3D customer profiling
10.30 Making it easy for the operator to utilise social intelligence for business
11.30 Monetising with social intelligence

In addition, on day two of the conference, Wednesday 10 June, Sipila will deliver a presentation titled “Social network intelligence: Utilising customer data effectively in marketing,” at 10:20am. The presentation will discuss topics including:

• The ‘active’ footprints that users leave behind in social media and how they can be analysed for improved, more individually relevant, marketing and advertising
• Mining the stories that customer data can tell an advertiser, and the sometimes-competing goal of maintaining user privacy

To schedule a one-to-one briefing with Xtract, or to obtain a copy of the presentations, please use the press contact details below.

About IIR Business Intelligence Conference
Held in the Hotel Okura, Amsterdam, Netherlands from Monday 8 June to Thursday 11 June, the conference will include speakers from companies including O2, Orange, Amdocs, Vodafone and Xtract. The programme will focus on practical strategies currently being deployed worldwide to optimise the planning, building and improvement of business intelligence.

About Xtract
Xtract (www.xtract.com) 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 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
emily(at)hatch-pr.com

Helsinki, Finland and London, England — 29 May 2009 – Xtract co-founder Jouko Ahvenainen will deliver the opening speech at London’s Mobile Web 2.0 Summit on 3rd June, at the Jumeirah Carlton Tower in Knightsbridge. In his presentation, titled “Mobile 2.0 Business – how to fund and monetise the new ecosystem,” Jouko will discuss how mobile and web operators can make money from social media and the 2.0 revolution, while steering clear of strategies that don’t work such as contextual advertising on social media platforms.

Jouko’s presentation will discuss:
- Delivering advertising over ‘hot’ media that users get involved with, including Wikipedia and Facebook, versus ‘cold’ media such as one-way broadcasting
- Social networkingis about people, not content. Social sites are places to make connections with others, and advertisers must understand the people behind the networks to best leverage the opportunities they provide
- The ‘active’ footprints that users leave behind in social media and how they can be analysed for improved, more individually relevant, marketing and advertising
- 2.0 monetisation and the sometimes-competing goal of maintaining user privacy

About Mobile Web 2.0 Summit
Speakers from companies including Xtract, Orange, Microsoft, Admob, Flirtomatic, Symbian and Telefonica will help lead the two-day conference, focusing on monetising the next generation of the mobile web, via a roundtable format.

About Xtract
Xtract (www.xtract.com) 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 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
emily(at)hatch-pr.com

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.

With less than three week’s experience at Xtract I can already say that this company is working in an incredibly exciting area – especially for anyone involved in marketing. For years I’ve listened to discussions and read about customer insight, and working to delight customers through real understanding. Yet, marketing has not changed dramatically. Now the emergence of social media is actually forcing a turnaround – consumers are really becoming subjects instead of objects, and the Importance of word-of-mouth is becoming clear to all marketers. I feel privileged to work as part of this.

I’m Sari Aapola, and I was recently appointed VP for Product Management at Xtract. My background is in BtoB marketing and product marketing, and mostly in telecoms and software companies such as Tecnomen and Basware. I’ve recently spent two years in Germany, and one of my projects there was writing a book called “Sustainable Thought Leadership – how to build awareness and credibility to support business”. In it I present a model especially for growth companies with great innovations on becoming thought leaders in their category and target group. I’m now thrilled to work in a thought leader company, promoting its ambition to take its innovative solutions to benefit customers. The book will be out in a few weeks’ time…

A new version of Xtract Social Links was introduced at the Mobile World Congress in February. It includes great improvements, especially as its new interface helps marketers to take full advantage of the product. For the further development of our offering, I’m looking forward to a dialogue with our customers, real insight that will help us delight our customer over and over again.

Benoît Méli fait un reportage sur les tendance du marketing digital au salon Online Marketing Düsseldorf, où il y interview trois “acteurs européens innovants”, l’un des trois étant Xtract. Sa traduction décrit clairement notre approche:

“Notre approche est différence de l’approche traditionnelle du marketing digital, car nous ne nous basons pas sur les contenus d’une page Web ou des résultats de recherche, mais sur les comportements des internautes sur les sites du Web social.”

En effet, notre solution analyse les comportements sociaux des internautes pour trouver les utilisateurs Alpha, qui sont les influenceurs des sites en question. Ca fait plaisir de lire news sur Xtract en francais!

Yesterday, the second floor of Molly Malones offered a nice and friendly environment for mobile people from all industries to connect with each others in the event organized by Mobile Monday (MoMo). The topic of the evening was Earning models in Mobile Entertainment, which is also an important question to many of our customers.

Our board member Alan Moore gave interesting insights into the big opportunity in utilizing the players with different roles in social networks. This topic is closely related to what we do here at Xtract for mobile operators and other customers.

Other speakers gave also fascinating presentations. Dr. Josef Noll from Norway spoke about privacy issues in entertainment business. He forecasted that privacy matters will be huge business in the future. Dr. Madanmohan Rao pointed out that in India, where Bollywood and cricket are the most popular forms of entertainment, the ones who will understand how to make money from mobile entertainment will earn a lot of money.

The place of yesterday’s event, Molly Malones in Helsinki, was also the place where the idea of MobileMonday was invented. The original founders of MoMo were present at the event and told about how no-one could believe at the beginning (Sep 2000) that eight years later MobileMonday events would be organized in tens of cities all over the world. It is exciting how a good concept, such as that of MobileMonday, has the power to spread all over the world, thanks to world-of-mouth and people networking with each other.