The fol­low­ing is para­phrased from a pre­sen­ta­tion made by Alli­son Cerra, Chief Mar­ket­ing Offi­cer, Amer­i­cas Region — Alcatel-Lucent, at the Social Net­work­ing Con­fer­ence 2010 in Miami, FL.

Con­sider the fol­low­ing iden­ti­fied mar­ket­ing chal­lenges in the cur­rent online social media ecosystem:

1. Ser­vice providers are con­strained: Today, just 20 house­holds con­sume more broad­band than the entire band­width used in 1995
2. Devel­oper com­mu­nity aren’t mak­ing money: They need to launch and main­tain ser­vices that end-users want for free
3. End-users are fru­gal: How to get users to pay for things when they are accus­tomed to hav­ing things for free?
4. Mar­keters are strapped: Very few in the mar­ket­ing space have fig­ured out how to mon­e­tize things

The com­mon thread above is that cur­rent busi­ness mod­els aren’t sta­ble in today’s social media ecosystem.

How­ever, research indi­cates that con­di­tions can be cre­ated to mar­ket ser­vices bet­ter online. Based on a sur­vey and focus group ses­sions with over 1,000 social net­work­ers, three key points stand out:

• Social net­work­ers are not that social

A recur­ring theme in the study was: “I have a lot of rela­tion­ships I try to main­tain, but I don’t have time to develop deep sub­stan­tive relationships.”

Also, social net­work­ing is all about the users: their social net­work­ing expe­ri­ence “val­i­dates” them. For exam­ple, being tagged in a photo is an ego­cen­tric plea­sure: to the user, it means “I am important”.

In con­trast, MMORPG play­ers are not intro­verts at all, quite the oppo­site. These peo­ple love the net­work, not the game. It’s about shar­ing a pas­sion so inti­mately with a small group of peo­ple, that the rela­tion­ship becomes more impor­tant than the game.

• Social net­work­ers can be con­vinced to pay

Peo­ple online are used to hav­ing things for free. But what if you know your friend’s sta­tus at any time, regard­less of the device you’re using? What if you know where your friends are at any time? How would this change the social net­work­ing experience?

Let’s think about an “advanced friend finder” appli­ca­tion: I land in Miami and I can know where you are and what places you rec­om­mend and whether you are free to meet or not, based on your loca­tion data, your pres­ence, your his­tory of geolo­ca­tion, and your shared cal­en­dar. If this type of ecosys­tem of ser­vices is put together, would you pay for this type of  information?

Another exam­ple is, what if you meet some­one at a con­fer­ence and two weeks later they call you and you don’t remem­ber them well any­more? But how about if when they call you, their LinkedIn pro­file pops up auto­mat­i­cally? Would you pay for this type of infor­ma­tion, if ser­vices were inte­grated in this way?

Research show that social net­work­ers are will­ing to pay for these types of value-added ser­vices. (Also, they are not as averse to adver­tis­ing as we might like to think.)

• Pri­vacy is a con­cern … or is it?

If I’m going to give you my pres­ence and loca­tion, isn’t that too much info? In focus groups, peo­ple are not com­fort­able with shar­ing infor­ma­tion. How­ever, in prac­tice, peo­ple do share this infor­ma­tion when the fol­low­ing three con­di­tions are met:

1. You allow  users to opt-in (rather than opt-out) — the user must remain in control
2. Social net­work­ers are more con­cerned about when infor­ma­tion about them is released, than who has access to it
3. Social net­work­ers over­whelm­ingly trust ser­vice providers more than social app devel­op­ers with their sen­si­tive information

Con­clu­sion:

The above sug­gests that when pri­vacy con­cerns are addressed and social appli­ca­tions are com­bined with ser­vice providers, new con­di­tions can be cre­ated to develop an ecosys­tem that is more con­ducive to mar­ket­ing and mon­e­tiz­ing online services.

snc2010, social media, busi­ness, mod­els, mar­ket­ing, umcnj595, mon­e­ti­za­tion