Synchronizing With Social Networking

Mobile Social Networking: Market Growth, Revenue Potential

Industry statistics clearly substantiate the growing impact of social networking on the mobile phone. A recent IAB survey showed that nearly half of the 16- to 24‑year-old market had updated their social networking pages via a mobile device. A separate ABI Research survey looked at the cross-section of mobile users and social network users. Of social network users surveyed, 46 percent have visited via a mobile phone, with MySpace and Facebook being the target leaders.

In 2009, an estimated 55.6 million adults regularly (at least once a month) checked their social networking account. That is nearly twice as many users as those found in a similar 2007 survey. This trend represents the highest growth of online activities, and social networking currently ranks with instant messaging in terms of activity.

(Source: http://mashable.com/2009/07/28/social-networking-users-us/)

A Mostly Ignored Market

All the market indicators that point to the importance of social networking for mobile users highlight the need for a solution that can tap into different social networking platforms, keep them all in sync, and consolidate their info into a single, easily accessible source. Currently, two major industry players have solutions for address contact/content synchronization. However, these platform-specific options fail to extend their reach to the social networking market.

Apple’s MobileMe is designed for the iPhone. The product offers push-button synchronization of an address book, email, and calendar across an iPhone, Mac computers, and PC computers. MobileMe handles media content, and its subscription price includes 20GB of cloud storage data. In addition to being limited to the iPhone platform (SIM card sync is not supported), MobileMe’s synchronization fails to register with social networking sites. This means that the only way an iPhone user can update a Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter account is to download site-specific applications and handle each login individually. Real-time synchronization between social media applications is not an option.  According to Apple’s web site, MobileMe’s price is $99.00 per year for an individual account.

The Microsoft MyPhone backup system works with any phone running Windows Mobile 6.5 or above. MyPhone works similar to MobileMe in that it backs up and synchronizes an address book, email, and calendar across supported mobile devices and PCs. MyPhone offers cloud media storage; however, its 200MB capacity is far smaller than MobileMe’s default of 20GB. Except for photos, MyPhone largely fails to extend its push-button synchronization to social networking sites, leaving users to individual downloaded applications for their respective accounts.  There is no cost for MyPhone.

A Clear Opportunity

While Microsoft and Apple see the value in synchronizing address book and calendar information, they fail to respond to the social networking boom -- not just synchronizing with a social networking account's contact information, but also providing functionality to update status and share media. Consumers could benefit immensely with an application that:

• Synchronizes address book across social networking, mobile device, PC/Mac, and other platforms (e.g. VoIP accounts)
• Creates synchronized update posting across social networking sites
• Is compatible with a wide range of phones and devices on a carrier’s network
• Enables significant cloud storage of media for synchronized sharing

Compatibility is key to a successful application. MyPhone and MobileMe are limited by platform, so -- even if they upgraded to include social networking functionality -- each carrier’s benefits are limited to users with the applicable platforms. While Microsoft and Apple provide added functionality for their user base, they ignore other users. This makes sense from a marketing perspective for those companies; however, this can actually be troublesome to a major carrier supporting hundreds of different models. Also, from a consumer perspective, users can only extend their sphere of social media contacts to those people who use MyPhone and MobileMe, which is quite limiting.

Now consider a major mobile carrier able to deploy a social network-capable synchronization application that works across the majority of its user base, including smartphones running Apple iPhone, Google Android, Palm webOS, RIM Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and more.

With a subscription model capable of reaching a significant portion of a carrier’s user base, application and data usage revenues can only increase as the demand for social networking functionality increases, becoming one of the mobile industry’s key drivers over the next five years.

Social networking is all about sharing text updates, vacation photos, home videos, new podcasts, and more. Images, video, and audio can all be captured on the modern mobile phone, making it the ideal starting point for the sharing process. However, each step presents a question that must be addressed with a new aspect of functionality:

Step 1: Capture media – What is done with an image, video, or audio after it is captured?  With a cloud-based storage model, users simply upload files to their allocated storage space on the provider’s network, and it becomes accessible for social networking purposes. As people create more and more media files, the need for increased storage becomes greater, thus a new revenue stream is created.

Step 2: Select people to notify – Virtually every mobile user has at least three address books: personal email, professional email, and mobile phone. Add in alternate email addresses, social networking contacts, and other such sites, and suddenly things become a lot more complicated. The need for inter‑platform/inter-site functionality thus becomes critical in order to create a single, streamlined “profile” for each contact in an address book.

Step 3: Share updates – Synchronized posting from a mobile phone across popular social networking platforms is the Holy Grail for this situation. A one‑touch solution, from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn, can fulfill growing demand by the mobile phone community.

Step 4: Responding – A subscriber responding to social media posts translates directly to increased data usage, which leads to increased service usage and ultimately more revenue for carriers.

Conclusion: The Time Is Now

The unique growth pattern of social networking synchronization provides carriers with a strong opportunity for new revenue streams. However, it also represents a significant potential pitfall. Brand loyalty comes at a premium in today’s “what have you done for me lately?” market, and – as the spotlight grows heavier on the need to sync up a phone's capabilities with Twitter and Facebook – social networking capability will carry more weight in a user’s choice of carrier.

If executed properly, a carrier can retain users and strengthen brand loyalty while tapping into new revenue streams, such as new subscription fees and cloud storage charges.

The ideal social networking application must be compatible with many phone models, communicate across popular social networking platforms, and enable easy cloud-based storage so that media can be transmitted. From here, the spotlight shifts solely on to the carriers themselves – they are responsible for fulfilling this demand, and they risk the loss of current and potential subscribers should they fail to act.

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