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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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Telcos Capitalising on Social Networking Tools

Originally posted on 18Dec19 to IBM Developerworks where it got 8,218 Views

The announcement by Telstra* the other day of it’s social networking guidelines for employees (See Telstra’s 3Rs of Social Media Engagement and their online training class ) got me thinking about how Telcos should be using Social Networking tools and trends both internally and externally.  OK, Internally, a Telco is like any other big company when it comes to collaboration among it’s staff.  Social Networking tools help employees to  make contacts, learn and share more, find information more rapidly and maintain social networks beyond the physical boundaries of their own work location. If you’re curious about what I am talking about, I recommend you have a look at the great videos on YouTube from Jean Francois Chenier (An IBMer).  I have embedded the first of the series below:

 It’s pretty easy to see how within any large company, social networking software such as Lotus Connections makes sense provided you have enough people who actually use it – it seems to me to be something like groups calendaring – it is dependent on a significant proportion of the user population using the tool to make it effective. The way I see it, it is only a small step beyond the internal deployment of social networking tools to extend to a Telco’s trading partners.  That might include vendors, resellers (of Telco products – I was initially thinking retail, but that could include MNVOs), enterprise customers and others. Situations where employees of the Telco and employees of external companies need to work together and share information and collaborate – share idea, files, information – generally collaborate would seem to be a valid deployment of social networking tools. 

IBM already has an offering that uses social networking tools to build communities around the Ideation (Idea generation and growth) process, a kind of virtual brainstorming combined with idea and through sharing. The intent of the offering is to make it easier for companies to find and help to evolve idea for the next product to take to market.  In a Telco, this might be idea such applications like “Meet-on-click”** that a telco could take to market.  That offering is called the ‘Idea Factory’ and is not actually unique to the Telecom industry.  Kraft foods use the Idea Factory to come up with new ideas for product packaging.  When deployed in a Telco, we often combine the Idea Factory with IBM Mashup Center (recently V2.0 of Mashup Center was released by the way) – an offering I usually call the “Idea Factory for Telecom”.  The Mashup Center is used as a rapid prototyping environment for the ideas that are evolving within the Idea Factory.  In my view, this is a great way to build an active and dynamic developer community for the Telco.

China Telecom have demonstrated how effective the Idea Factory can be in a Telco environment – with a year on year improvement of 900% in a competition to find new applications  (3 to 27 new products).  Their Idea Factory deployment predated IBM Mashup Center, so they didn’t get the benefit of a rapid prototyping tool which I believe could increase the quality of the new product ideas even further.

While I am a big fan of the Idea Factory, I see that as just a starting point for social networking tools hosted by a Telco that extend beyond just their developer community and into their (much) larger subscriber base.  Think about building many local communities based around schools, churches, scout troops, national holidays, religious events, local football teams, mothers groups… anything really.  The community would have access to a shared virtual community on the web accessible from a PC or (more importantly for many developing nations) from a mobile phone, they would have microblogging, blogs, files sharing, discussion forums, profiles contacts AND be tied into more traditional Telco services such as calling circles.  The Telco could provide discounted call and text rate between community members.  Sound good?  I think so.  For the Telco I see a number of benefits:

  • Decreased likelihood to churn – increased ‘stickiness’
  • Stronger loyalty to the Telco brand
  • Increased revenue due to increase in call and text volumes and increased mobile data usage once a reasonable proportion of the community is using the tools
  • An additional weapon against the Internet based competitors (such as Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Instagram etc)

Telcos in my opinion have a significant advantage over the Internet companies when it comes to offerings like this. They have:

  • An existing relationship (post or pre paid) customer
  • More local footprint via people on the ground and reseller/franchisees
  • Existing monetary arrangements with the customers
  • Greater trust by customers (typically)

Telcos could easily become the local aggregation point for social networking within that community – for instance with a Facebook connection, subscribers could update their Facebook wall without the need to launch Facebook.  Microblogging entries could automatically update status in Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and sent a tweet out on twitter.

I think this is going to be big – web based social networking giants like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn have proved how popular web based social networking can be – add the local context to it and I think you have a winner for Telcos in many markets.

Now that I have started this thought, I think the next few posts could well be along similar vein – looking at the Idea Factory for Telecom, Telco focused Developer Ecosystems, User generated content and Public focused and Telco integrated social networking capabilities….

Here endith my thought (for now)