Mobile Entertainment

Mobile operators have made impressive achievements in accelerating the time to market for new services and content. But since most users have still to experience much of the content on offer, their next great challenge is clearly discoverability. Encouraging consumers to try new services will be the key factor for further growth.

Operators often use direct SMS or MMS push to raise awareness of new value added services. This approach raises several problems. Push messages, by definition, are unsolicited and therefore may be displayed to users at an inconvenient time. They can appear annoying and intrusive As a result, operators try to limit this activity, in many cases to less then five messages per month. Also, there’s a risk that push messages won’t be relevant to users. Operators often know little about the real interests of their subscribers, and this limits their targeting capabilities.

To avoid the ‘spam’ issue, operators must find a way to make messages better targeted for improving service discoverability and increasing usage.

One possibly surprising answer to this might come from social networks.

Operators have long been discussing ways to leverage these Web 2.0 phenomena. Until now, most efforts have been focused on bringing them into the mobile networks, by making them accessible use from mobile devices.

But maybe, to solve the discoverability problem, operators need to move in the opposite direction. Popular services like Facebook and MySpace are ideal platforms for viral marketing for mobile services.  By reaching beyond the operators’ own networks to expose the user’s mobile experience and letting them share their lifestyle activities with their friends in these online communities, operators can successfully increase awareness and usage of new mobile offerings.

For example, users who sign on to their social network service are normally greeted with community-related activity updates, such as:

·    Maya has changed her profile picture
·    Oliver and Karin are now friends

But when a mobile-to-social network approach is employed, users will be able to receive also mobile-related activity updates, such as:

·    Maya has downloaded "Rain by Madonna" ringtone
·    Oliver has upgraded his device to an iPhone
·    Karin is currently roaming in Barcelona

This strategy helps to address both the intrusiveness and targeting challenges. It’s far less intrusive, as it comes in the form of recommendations from friends rather than unsolicited messages from a service provider.

Targeting is improved too. While operators can struggle to analyse subscriber data, social networks do it automatically: they group users by common interest, so recommendations between contacts of the same network are by default more relevant than service provider "spam." The popularity of the social networks in getting millions of subscribers worldwide is counted on the ease of use and the users’ interest in viewing their friends’ activities. In the same manner, viewing friends’ mobile activities would complement the overall user experience and generate high interest and traction. Viral marketing over Facebook can also bring operators the bonus of reaching an audience which may not be using their network services (yet), whereas traditional SMS or MMS push messages are confined to the their current subscriber bases.

By creating a presence on social networks, operators can leverage existing subscriber communities to boost service reach and promote mobile services in an effective way. As subscribers will be more receptive to try a mobile service that was recommended to them by their friends, social networks turn out to be the ideal vehicle for increasing adoption of new mobile service rollouts, and strengthening the mobile operator value.