The Rise of Syndication and The Social Graph: Going from Individuals to Communities

By Marc Leclerc

In the previous issue I wrote about combining context with preferences in order to offer choices relevant to a consumer's changing situations and desires. This approach leverages key capabilities of Internet technologies, and telecom networks including IMS to provide rich communications services and new ways to monetize them. Consumers get services they value, and carriers can build an offering that can even compete with free Internet services. But can the social aspects of telecoms be leveraged to bring even more value to consumers and create new revenue opportunities for carriers?

Let us first recognize one of the most significant advantages enjoyed by carriers: consumers almost always begin any social activity by going to an address book – most likely the one in their phones. Few people bother to memorize phone numbers because we each have an address book in our mobile phone. These address books, along with our various IM buddy lists, e-mail address books and social networking friend lists, define our social map – the people whom we influence and who influence us. Telecom operators can leverage these relationships to reach potential new customers for services – a concept called "viral marketing."

Communication-oriented services generally gain value as more people use them (a.k.a. Metcalf's law). Viral marketing works because it is often in the consumer's own interest to get family and friends to join a service – a process integral to the success of social networking and IM communities. People are more likely to join a new service when it is recommended by someone they know and trust. Also, people who are part of the same social circle often have common interests and shared activities. They are more likely to have overlapping lifestyles and share preferences. What is relevant to a consumer is more likely to be relevant to his or her family and associates. Why would a carrier choose to engage in this form of marketing? Viral marketing generates high-quality leads at essentially zero cost – other than the cost of the initial awareness-building campaign and maintaining the viral marketing mechanism. Telecoms carriers are ideally positioned to utilize the data syndication tools (syncML and Active Address Book solutions) already implemented in their networks and widely deployed in both mobile and Internet-based devices. Telecoms networks are the largest in the world, serving more than four billion subscribers, thus delivering massive market reach and quality leads to prospective advertisers.

As mentioned in the previous issue, a key element to making this approach work is consumer buy-in. Just like suggesting a movie or restaurant to a friend, if a person is to recommend a service, they must feel confident that the service will provide a positive experience for their acquaintance. As such, here are a few basic guidelines for success:

• Explicit grant of permission: Consumers need to feel in control of the recommendation process because their reputations are at stake. It should be simple for both the people recommending and receiving the offer to opt-in or out of the process as they see fit.

• Ease of use and recommendation: It should be extremely simple to forward the service or application to any person in the consumer's address book. Similarly, it should be easy for the recipient to subscribe, and billing must be equally simple and unambiguous. This ease of use is how the syndication capabilities of the telecoms value chain provide a key competitive advantage.

• Global access: As people's social graphs usually span markets and regions, the service should function across carrier, geographic and even network boundaries. This requires tight interoperability where possible (via standards and specifications such as RCS, or rich communications services), and working "over-the-top" – even if this means a reduced feature set – where IOT standards do not exist.

• Feed your stars: Certain people have a great deal of influence, either because of the size of their contact bases or the degree of repute they enjoy. It pays to know who these people are and cultivate their patronage via early adopter marketing, premium offers and by providing mechanisms to enhance their reputations such as blog sites, contributor awards, etc. Of course, this mechanism only works if the service or application in question delivers true value to the consumer. By combining the context and preferences of the individual consumer with his or her social graph, viral marketing can extend the commercial benefits of relevance into entire communities creating new revenue opportunities that leverage the unique advantages of telecoms.

Marc Leclerc is Manager, Global IMS Expert Center, Ericsson (www.ericsson.com).

NGN Magazine Table of Contents