Service Providers Hone Their Social Skills

Social networking is addictive. It’s not just viral, which implies an almost predatory inevitability of “infection.” No, I think addiction is more like it. I know from experience. Facebook didn’t bite me, I bit into—and liked—Facebook. Oh yes. Liked it entirely too much.

And I don’t know if you have any friends who Twitter, but they seem to go from recreational use to full-on junkie status in the space of days.

Carriers are starting to realize this weakness that even 35-year-old professionals like me have for social networking. And while the initial forays were along the lines of Verizon Wireless giving mobile access to MySpace profiles (remember when that was a hot thing?) or Helio providing exclusive MySpace mobile capabilities (the ability to update the profile from the phone, i.e.), it was unclear how much added value beyond the coolness factor social networking could provide in such deals. And what about wireline carriers? How can they benefit beyond providing the Internet access to get to the sites?

This might be an irrelevant aside, or perhaps it’s not: for all the hipness that Helio, an MVNO on the Sprint-Nextel Corp. network, tried to radiate out to justify its super high-end handsets, it may be a stone weight to its parents at this point considering it’s been losing money for two years. And Helio progenitor SK Telecom might be trying to unload it. Virgin Mobile USA and SK Telecom are “in talks,” it emerged this week. About what? Analyst firm Ovum Ltd. conjectures that SK is trying to sell Helio to Virgin Mobile, or, SK Telecom is trying to acquire Virgin Mobile, arguably one of the most successful MVNOs. Raymond Yu, Ovum analyst said: “Acquiring Helio will give [Virgin Mobile] access to some high-value customers, but the numbers here are very small (Helio currently has around 200,000 subscribers), so it will not give Virgin Mobile USA the much-needed subscriber boost it desires. Another view is that SKT is searching for an exit strategy. Despite launching two years ago, Helio remains a niche offering. Hence it is understandable that SKT is considering "cutting its losses.”

So, social networking cache didn’t do much for Helio. But this week two bits of news emerged that signaled a new leaf for service providers trying to leverage the Web 2.0 phenomenon. First off is the Comcast-Plaxo love match. Plaxo is an address book, sure, but it’s a virtual one that links in (oops, sorry, linkedin) the ability to send e-mails, instant messages, check voice mail etc. to everyone in your network from work (Outlook), home (Comcast), out on the road at an Internet café or from a mobile phone. That sounds a lot like...unified communications! Fixed-mobile convergence! Sticky, loyalty-engendering, consumer-business-role-defying manna from service provider heaven!

See what I mean? Social networking + access networks = populist UC, without all the messy IP PBX integration. It allows service providers to worm their way into every aspect of people’s lives. It livens up the triple- and quad-play too. Will this become a trend? Hope so. Along the same lines, over on the other side of the pond Vodafone plc has acquired ZYB, a Danish company that has a social networking and online management tool for contact and calendar information online. Again, it represents Vodafone’s ability to give ad hoc unified communications for the general population, allowing users to share and backup content when they are on the move, to share calendars, and to leverage presence to show when they are available for a phone call. “Consumers will increasingly be able to move seamlessly between the PC and the mobile phone, keeping their friends and contacts aware of their movements as they choose,” said Ri Pierce-Grove, analyst at research firm Datamonitor. “ZYB's upcoming Phonebook application is a clear move to ease consumers’ movements between PC and mobile devices, as well as to deliver some of the benefits of unified communications.”

Nice to see service providers getting close to customers and finally getting some social skills, isn’t it?

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