Jarkko Utriainen, head of business intelligence at DNA says: “This is a revolutionary solution for customer insight. 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.”

Xtract CEO Timo Laaksonen says: “Operators need to make their marketing messages and methods less about ‘them’ and more about the subscriber. With Xtract, campaigns become more engaging, spreading through the operator’s subscriber base virally. Offering social intelligence as a service means lower initial costs for the operator, getting it up and running more quickly, and enables using the service flexibly wherever marketers are based.”

Social Links On-Demand is a new delivery channel for Xtract’s flagship solution Social Links. It helps operators gain a unique 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 key components include: social network analytics, data warehouse/data storage, database maintenance/filing, and infrastructure services (virus protection and firewall). Operators can revolutionise strategies such as churn management based upon the service’s three-dimensional subscriber profiling.

Xtract press contact
Emily McDaid
emily@hatch-pr.com
+44 7748 6333 55

DNA press contact
Helena Melamies
Helena.Melamies@dna.fi

This year represents the first time truly quantitative research has become available on mobile advertising, and the numbers indicate conflicting trends in this nascent market, points out Xtract, providers of social intelligence software.

For example,
• The first expenditure study on mobile advertising in the UK, taken by the IAB and PWC, showed that the mobile ads market is growing 99.2% year on year, even when advertising in other forms of media dramatically decreased in the same period
• The huge growth in mobile advertising has been attributed to its exceptional targeting, immediacy and return on investment, says the IAB
• It also showed an impressive 44% of 16 - 24 year olds have checked social networking profiles on their mobile phones, suggesting younger generations are at the ready for mobile web and advertising
• Source: [http://www.iabuk.net/en/1/mobileadvertisingexpenditure120509.html]
However,
• Juniper Research’s study released in June indicates that by 2014, mobile advertising would still only account for up to 1.5% of total global adspend, despite mobile advertising offering ’substantially higher’ response rates than advertising in other media

“There is clearly a conflicting trend at present,” said Jouko Ahvenainen, co-founder and VP at Xtract. “Mobile ads are the most interactive, compelling forms of advertising for many brands, and offer far better response and click through rates when they are done well. And usage of the mobile web is growing rapidly. Other forms of media are struggling to sell advertising, in particular newspapers, and are shutting down. Yet even in five years time, leading industry bodies predict that mobile advertising will remain a mere drop in the ocean in terms of overall global ad spend.”

“This is leaving the industry scratching its head about how to cash in on the promise of mobile advertising. One thing that we constantly hear from advertisers and marketers, who hold the purse strings, is that they need far more intricate levels of targeting than are generally available today; measurability; accountability; and clearly defined ROI, in order to choose mobile over other media platforms. Clearly, highly-targeted forms of advertising that can be measured back are the way to continue the upwards trend in mobile ads. If marketers can’t see exactly who they are targeting, and understand the likely behaviours of these customers socially, they can’t trust the most personal advertising channel available today, and mobile will continue to be insignificant in the overall global ads picture.”

More information about Xtract’s social intelligence approach, on the frontiers of targeting in the mobile advertising market, can be found at www.xtract.com.

Press contact:
Emily McDaid (emily(at)hatch-pr.com | +44 7748 6333 55)

The presentation will discuss:
• Consumer 2.0 in the driver’s seat
• The power of communities and word-of-mouth
• What does Social Revenue reveal to you that ARPU does not?
• Churn is the symptom – what’s the disease, and is there a cure?

To schedule a one-to-one briefing with Sari after her talk, or via phone, or to obtain a copy of the presentation, please use the press contact details below.

About Customer Retention Forum
The conference, held from 24 - 25 June in Singapore’s Amara Hotel, will focus on minimising churn to maximise customer retention and profitability. Companies at the show include Vodafone Australia, Tibco, Bharti Airtel and Chunghwa Telecom.

This is the direct link to the event for more information: www.churnforum.com

Press contact
Emily McDaid
emily(at)hatch-pr.comout Xtract

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

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

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.

Helsinki, Finland and London, England — 20 May 2009 - From today, Xtract will offer its flagship social intelligence product, Social Links, as a service, while the software licensing model still remains fully supported. Called Social Links On-Demand, it enables mobile operators to cash in on the social networking phenomenon for targeted, viral marketing on a pay-as-you-go service model.

The On-Demand model means minimum upfront investment and no operational hassle. Xtract estimates that Social Links On-Demand is 74 per cent faster to set up than traditional in-house implementations and offers 39 per cent faster payback time.

Julien Theys, mobile industry analyst at Screen Digest, said: “Efficient analysis is key to leveraging the power of social networks and eventually monetising them through relevant content and advertising. An on-demand solution can provide access to social network intelligence that is light, flexible and financially less cumbersome than traditional software licenses. It is therefore ideally suited for operators who prefer not to invest heavily in in-house analytics and database marketing solutions and resources, especially in the current economic climate.”

Social Links On-Demand combines software, hardware, implementation, customer support, operations and maintenance in a bundled service, hosted by Xtract. This means operators don’t need to invest upfront in software licenses or hardware platforms. Social Links On-Demand is delivered via a service level agreement that best suits each operator’s business needs, e.g. dependent on the number of subscribers served, amount of data or level of security required. All data is processed anonymously and customer transaction results are processed in a way that complies with data security and privacy regulations.

Business users such as marketing and campaign managers are provided with a secure browser-based graphical user interface which they use to: view social intelligence dashboard reports and graphs; create Social Links analytics runs; define campaign targeting; configure and export target lists; and, view their community dynamics.

About Xtract Social Links
Social Links is the first commercial software that uses social network analytics to enable companies to leverage social intelligence in 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 profiles and targeting. Social Links has won several industry awards for being successfully deployed by top-tier mobile operators worldwide.

Social Links offers benefits for mobile operators’ marketers, campaign designers, product managers, analysts and CRM managers. The information provided is used in highly accurate targeting, and gaining customer insight for campaign and product planning. Social Links also supports subscriber lifetime valuation and campaign design.

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.

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.