London, UK and Helsinki, Finland – In 2007 the implications of digital media, marketing and communications took global centre stage, with the understanding that targeted digital marketing and advertising communications can be significantly more effective, thereby delivering better marketing ROI. Nowhere was this more evident than in mobile advertising and marketing.

All mobile communications with the right tools can aggregate into delivering deep insight into customers’, needs and preferences, which can then be monetised. Such insight is called Social Marketing Intelligence.

Xtract’s Social Links Product, is the world’s first commercially available software for analysing social network interactions within large scale mobile communication networks. Social Links ability to deliver a far higher ROI for its clients has been proven in a series of trials and full-scale projects with mobile operators around the globe. And Xtract’s Social Links Product has recently been upgraded to deliver more valuable and efficient marketing ROI.

What does Xtract Social Links do? It transforms the latest scientific findings in the area of social network analysis into automated tools for real-time customer profiling and targeting of marketing activities – such as targeted advertising, churn retention and upselling. It contains tools for combining the network information with predictive modelling, relevant for specific business applications including reporting and visualization tools – making it a complete product for the mobile operator’s use.

“With the appropriate combination of customers’ profile, lifestyle, social linkages and behaviour, it is possible to leverage word-of-mouth and social influence in marketing,” says Kimmo Kiviluoto, CEO of Xtract. “This new form of marketing is able to be more relevant, timely and contextual and therefore proven to be better accepted by the consumer. With Xtract’s Social Links, it is possible to pro-actively offer benefits, services and products to the end users that fit their needs today but also be able to identify when their segment or profile need ‘changes’. This, most certainly enables an end user centric approach to providing ‘what’s needed’ instead of ‘what’s on offer’ approach”.

Xtract Social Links identifies the underlying network structures within the subscriber base, divides it into communities and classifies subscribers based on their social influence. The result is a completely new method of customer insight and marketing capability. With new, self-learning customer profiles through multi-dimensional analytics of real operator customer mobile operators can enjoy major business benefits. These range from the reduction of churn through efficient campaigns, to rapid increase of revenues from intelligent new customer acquisition and product launch campaigns.

Designed to Scale up

The Xtract Social Links is a software product based on standard Java technologies and components. The new, just released version, Xtract Social links 2.5, incorporates storage for the data for analysis shipping with an off the shelf Greenplum data warehouse solution, using standard PostgreSQL, which means that connections to any SQL compliant databases are straightforward.

The new Xtract Social Links 2.5 is now able to visualise the social network within a client customer base, visualise project campaign data on that network and drill down on specific communities. Delivering unique intelligence, which can then be monetised.

Reporting is also greatly enhanced and in addition to standard templates, ad hoc reporting capabilities are now available.

The solution is fully scalable using commodity hardware and thus able to accommodate any amount of data processing requirements. The Xtract Social Links Product thus provides a proven and robust platform for further development of Xtract Social Advertising Intelligence solutions.