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User Generated content for Telcos

Originally posted on 11Jan10 to IBM Developerworks where it got 7,683 Views

There are a number of opportunities as I see them for Telcos over the next few years. There are definite opportunities for social networking which will enable a carrier to move from a traditional communication model with their subscribers to a more collaborative and open ‘Shared Social Space’ . For mobile operators, this market movement presents both opportunities and risks for the telco making that journey.

Opportunities

  • Extension of Social Networking to the mobile where operators continue to enjoy exclusivity
  • Extend enterprise offerings to include Social Networking and collaborative services
  • Offer users of mobile, online, and possibly IPTV, a unified rich Social network-experience across the “3 screens”

Risks

  • Virtual mobile social networking operators reducing network owners to bit-pipe

One of the most obvious moves for a mobile carrier is to simply allow mobile access to social networking tools. While this might satisfy the subscribers who want mobile access to Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace etc they are effectively reducing themselves to a bit-pipe (all of those companies already have mobile interfaces for their platform). If Telcos are going to be able to effectively fight off those Internet based rivals, the Telco MUST offer some value beyond just the pipe. That’s where the Telcos have to use their closeness and brand to the best advantage to ensure that the carriers do not get relegated to the ‘plumbing’.

I spoke about the advantages that Telcos have over the Internet based Social Networking providers, this is where the Telco must play their hand and use those advantages because failure to do so will result in them being just providers of bandwidth. One way for Telcos to exert more ownership and maintain their value for subscribers is through User Generated Content (UCG). I’ve spoken to a number of Telcos int he past year about UCG in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand – for some reason those that I spoke to all had the idea that it is a space they ‘should’ move into, yet not one of them actually had the guts to step up and do it.

This is contrary to the they I think they should be moving and it feels to me like they are stuck in an old telco product thought mode. The whole idea behind long tail applications is that you have very short time to market for your products and try out as many as you can. Kill off the ones that fail and keep and extend/enhance the ones that do well. I speak to Telcos a lot about long tail applications – usually with respect to technology like IBM Mashup Center, WebSphere sMash and Telecom Web Services Server, but also with respect to traditional SOA as well. For example, Globe Telecom in the Philippines are executing a long tail strategy for new products brilliantly – with the help of a SDP and Unified Service Creation environment based on IBM’s software, they are able to bring new products to market in as little as 15 days. It used to take them at least eight months! They know that some products will work and some will fail, but by taking advantage of the short time to market, they can launch many products very quickly. This strategy is proving very successful for Globe, their resellers and their subscribers.

Sorry – got on a bit of a tangent there… back to UGC.

A Telco that deploys a User Generate Content framework has a number of opportunities for revenue – some better advised than others. For instance, one carrier I spoke with last year wanted to charge artists/publishers to upload content. To me, that would be a good way to prevent their platform from every taking off. The table below shows the various revenue opportunities from the artists/publishes, the consumers, the advertisers and others.

Artist / Publisher

Uploads:

  • Mobile:
    • Free apart from Data Charges ($)
    • Web:Free
  • Viewing:
    • Mobile:Free apart from Data Charges ($)
    • Web:Free
  • Consumer Purchases:
    • Ringtones/RBT’s ($)
    • Own Ringtone/RBT ($)
    • Ringtones ($)
    • Artist Wallpaper ($)
    • Video ($)
    • MP3 ($)
  • Premium Subscriptions: ($)
    • Automated alerts e.g. fan club started, x number of downloads made, etc

Subscriber

Consumer Viewing:

  • Mobile:
    • Free apart from Data Charges ($)
  • Web:
    • Free

Consumer Purchases (any channel):

  • Ringtones/RBT’s ($)
  • Ringtomes ($)
  • Artist Wallpaper ($)
  • Video ($)
  • MP3 ($)

Premium Subscriptions: ($)

  • Automated alerts e.g. Photo tagged

Advertisers

Broadcast Ad Revenue

  • Ad inserts before video starts ($)
  • Ad inserts could vary by site the video is published to e.g. Youth brand, Facebook, YouTube, etc
  • Ad Funded Content
  • Advertiser decides to do a “Powered by …” sponsorship for a given artist via their Fan Club for a week. ($)

Variability:

  • Different ad pricing by site published to ($)
  • Different pricing by artist popularity ($)

Endorsements:

  • Voted #1 by Telco XYZ Social Community
  • Community Testing ($)
  • Selling the value of the community to relevant companies that want to test new products/ideas within the community.

Supplemental

  • Cross Selling / Up Selling to Artists and Consumers
  • Transactional service revenue from enabling 3rd parties to consume and use the common web services exposed from the UGC platform.
  • Synthetic Currency – encourage the community members to do some rewarding. To do this they’ll need to purchase synthetic currency from the carrier.

As you can see, there are plenty of opportunities to establish new revenue streams from UCG – but any telco looking to move into this area need to tread a careful line between getting revenue and encouraging usage.

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Localised Social Networking Communities supported by Telcos

Originally posted on 31Dec09 to IBM Developerworks where it got 10,998 Views

As I see it, Telcos (particularly in counties that I deal with) are in a perfect position to transform their subscriber’s enthusiasm for social networking into real business benefits
Combining traditional Calling Circle Applications (aka Family & Friends, or VPNs as the Telcos would call them) with online (PC or Mobile) communities to share information. These could be short-lived around:

  • Religious event
  • Public Holiday
  • Sporting finals
  • Wedding Anniversary
  • 21st Birthday Party

Or they could be longer term communities such as :

  • Kindergartens
  • Scout Troups
  • Football Clubs
  • Fan clubs
  • Church Groups
  • Service Clubs (Lions, Apex, Rotary etc)

These are just some that come to mind off the top of my head. I am picturing discounted call and text rates for community members as well as discounted data rates for mobile access to the web community including blogs, activities, profiles, discussions etc. Think about these sort of integrated scenarios for Telcos:

  • Sending SMS messages to blog subscribers every time that blogger posts a new blog
  • Emails or SMS message to a community – based on either their profile or their current location.
  • Microblogging aggregation – the subscriber sends a SMS to a shortcode, which then updates all the other microblogging services that subscriber uses (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Freindster etc)
  • Write blog posts on your mobile phone either via a MMS message (including images, video or audio), the phone web interface, an email interface or (for shorter entries) SMS messages.
  • Bloggers could recieve SMS messages whenever someone comments on their posts
  • …. the list goes on…

In these days where churn is a significant issue for most Telcos – especially in countries where mobile number portability (MNP) has been introduced, anything a telco can do to make themselves more sticky for their subscribers is a good thing. Also add to that the potential additional revenue from additional data and messaging usage and we have a proposition that lot of telcos would be interested in. I wouldn’t see this as having a major effect on ARPU, but every little bit helps.

I can picture a wide range of services that telcos could combine with their Social networking offerings that would draw out additional revenue from their subscribers. While there are plenty of Internet based companies offering blogging, file sharing, profiles, microblogging etc, none of them have the established relationship that a Telco has with it’s subscriber base. Additional, very few of them have a local presence outside of their home country. Telcos are localised in nature – either through government heritage, Government regulation, Language or social reasons – Telcos need to take advantage of that fact. OK, their in country competitors have the same advantage, but in this race, the real competitors are the Internet providers. Obviously, a Telco that can move on this territory before their local competition will have a significant advantage in the marketplace.

My gut tells me that within each country, we are just waiting for the first Telco to offer these sort of converged services before all the others in that marketplace decide that they need to as well – the Domino effect.

Speaking about the Domino effect, I am struck by the irony of the naming of that principle and what is happening in the Vietnam telco market right now. The US Government coined the term the Domino effect to justify entering the Vietnam War in support of South Vietnam (to prevent the fall of the rest of South East Asia to communism), yet in the Telecom industry in Vietnam, we are seeing a Domino effect with respect to Service Delivery Platforms right now – one telco goes down the SDP path, so now they are all going down the SDP path…

Now that I have rambled onto the subject of SDPs,  a telco could offer Social Networking services without having a SDP in place, but in order to offer true integration between the Social Networking offering and the traditional telco services, a SDP will be required unless they want to go down the custom code path and I think we all know where that ends up – Spaghetti Junction!

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Using Social Networking to Evolve Ideas – The Idea Factory for Telecom

Originally posted on 30Dec09 to IBM Developerworks where it got 9,113 Views

As I alluded to in my earlier post (Telcos capitalising on Social Networking tools), Telcos can use Social Networking tools to their advantage in a number of ways. I also mentioned the Idea Factory for Telecom – an adaptation of the basic Idea Factory offering now owned by Software Group Services for Lotus. This offering was originally put together by the High Performance On Demand Services (HiPODS) team and had no less than six servers minimally required for the offering. That is because the Idea Factory (or Innovation Factory as it was previously known but renamed due to trademark issues) was originally offered well before Lotus Connections was released. These days, small to medium implementations can be done with Lotus Connections, IBM Mashup Center and a number of templates and add-ons (widgets) for Connections. A Proof of Concept could potentially be done with a single server. Larger Idea Factory implementations – particularly where Telcos are hosting the service for their enterprise customers and MNVOs would also require a WebSphere Portal Instance as well.

Probably the best explanation I can give to you of the Idea Factory is for you to watch the recorded demonstration I have available below  – in fact I have quite a number of variations of the same demo customised for different Telcos – the demo below  the most recent which was recorded before Connections 2.5 was released and so was done with beta version of Connections – see if you can spot the fault in the video! I tried to cover it up as much as possible because I needed to show this video to customers, but it’s in there and you will see it if you know what you are looking for…. 

For online access to the latest Idea Factory (V2) recorded demo – just launch it below… Also note that this is a lower resolution version for online use. I also have a larger version that I used for offline demos, it is 24Mb in size so I will share that with anyone that requests it rather than make it generally available.

Way back in 2007, there was a good whitepaper about the Idea Factory – I have uploaded it to Collaboration_to_innovation-leveraging_web20.pdf. This document is now quite out of date with respect to the technology used to deploy the Idea Factory (then called the Innovation Factory) – these days, we would use Lotus Connections 2.5 as the base platform and add widgets for the polling/surveys requirement and set up activities templates to manage the ideation process, then use IBM Mashup Center rather than QED Wiki which was a IBM Research developed Mashup Environment (check youhtube.com – there are lots of QEDWiki demos available).

The Idea Factory for Telecom fosters collaboration by incorporating a self-service portal for consistent user experience and integration.
Aside from this limitation, the concepts expressed in the whitepaper and the usage of the Idea Factory remains relevant. I guess one point that this whitepaper makes it that IBM has been in this Web 2.0 game for a while now – longer than we have had Generally Available product to support the concepts.

If we look at the above diagram, Lotus Connections will take care of most of the Collaborative Services and the Portal (UI) requirements while IBM Mashup Center takes care of the Services Cluster and the Services Catalog (called the Widget Catalog in the Mashup Center).