Saturday, November 15, 2008

Story Board for monetized 'Tele Social Networks'

Story Board for monetized 'Tele Social Network'

If you look carefully, you would find that the Telecom Networks are best positioned to move into social networking space. While social network allows people with common interests to interact in a forum, the tele-social network is the next step when those interactions become real time.

So, what is a tele-social network? It is bringing the concepts of social networking to our handset.

Imaging this - VilaTel is a leading mobile telco in India. Every VilaTel customer obviously makes on-net and off-net calls to friends, family and colleagues. With all the creativity in the marketing departments of VilaTel, there would be umpteen offers for VilaTel scubscribers to have their friends and family on the same network to reduce costs and benefit from Closed-User-Groups. (CUG for instance is a primitive form of tele-social network. )

Suppose, VilaTel offers every subscriber the facility to maintain his/her phone book as part of their subscription accounts - via the VilaTel Portal, it suddenly has access to information about who - interacts with who within the network. This is possible through a CRM and a BI engine, which together reveal a heat map of each subscriber in relation to other on-net subscribers analyzing the bills (or realtime) on the time (and money) spent on calls with those subscribers.

Effectively, VilaTel generates heat pockets or 'subscribers' who are very 'active' on the network.

These 'active subscribers' can then be classified based on their preferences. These preferences can be managed via their accounts on the VilaTel portal - such as joining or leaving a community. This is like VilaTel owning an Orkut or a similar social networking site.

This classification, as done in traditional social networks, can then be merged with the real time nature of telecom.

Commercializing the concept is easy. Just offer an 'active' subscriber based on the heat map, some free content pertaining to his 'preferences' (... news about an alien planet - if I belong to the 'alien club' community for example!) - and it is bound to spread into the network of the 'active subscriber' - generating revenue.

Over and above that, users in communities with special privileges (paid subscriptions to communities) may be able to post to the community forum from the handset - and all priviledged users get the post as an SMS. Imagine what this may be able to do for sales persons who gather leads from the net!

All in all, telcos - are best positioned to buy a few social networking sites and/or start some of their own. With creative marketing and value added service of bringing the social network to the phone, it should surely find takers from within their subscription base.