IMV31 : Social Networking Goes Mobile

The following is a transcript for IMV31 : Social Networking Goes Mobile. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast brought to you by MindComet. And now, here's your host, Ted Murphy.

Ted Murphy:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo Episode 31. I’m your host Ted Murphy and with me today is Dan Melinger, CEO of Socialight. Welcome to the show today Dan.

Dan Melinger:

Thanks, Ted.

Ted Murphy:

Dan, can you start off by telling our listeners a little bit about what Socialight is and how it came about?

Dan Melinger:

Sure. Socialight is an example of mobile social software; it is essentially social networking service a la MySpace, Facebook, etcetera and then optimized for mobile use. One of the things that’s special and separates networks when they use mobile and when we take it mobile is that we take location into account: where the user is when their accessing the service. So Socialight allows you to actually -- in addition to all the features of connecting with your friends, messaging, creating your own sort of user space, it allows you to attach messages to specific places so that people nearby can see them. We allow any old user, anyone who just signs up for the service, to do that. And then we also allow editorial content producers, commercial content producers or anyone who thinks they’ve got something to share that people are willing to sign-up for. And that’s through something called channels on the service.

Ted Murphy:

So how does that work? I’m walking down the street and all of a sudden I get a message on my cell phone?

Dan Melinger:

It depends on the phone. (Laughter) Today in the United States not all mobile carriers give access to their location information. Now that’s starting to open up more and more because it’s actually federally mandated through e-911 services that carriers are able to tell where your phone is, but for consumer applications they don’t necessarily have access. But if you’ve got the right interface if you’ve got the right kind of phone, you’re on the right service then yeah that’s exactly what happens.

There are two ways of getting messages on Socialight and the one that you just described is sort of the push mechanism. It’s I’m in a certain place. The phone tells our servers I’m here and then we say oh there’s something that is relevant for you there and we’ll actually push it to the phone. The phone will buzz in your pocket. And people only elect to have stuff pushed to them that they’re really interested in. It’s only opt-in stuff. We never push advertising that’s not suitably opted-in for.

So it’s either -- it’s coming from a friend, someone you trust or a channel that you specifically subscribe to which could be a commercial channel or non-commercial channel. And the other way of getting these is pull. And that’s sort of like mobile search. It’s I want to search for this specific term maybe it’s sushi and we return back to you essentially listings that come from again both the users and commercial sources that are relevant to where you are and the people you know.

So we’ll send you first a review of a sushi place that was made by a friend or a friend of a friend. Or if you subscribe to a content source like a restaurant review service then we’ll return that as well. And around that we do supply advertising. It’s clear what’s advertising and what’s not advertising when we return those results to you. The cool thing is that it’s not random advertising. It’s very well directed based on where you are. So, sort of know a lot about you coming into it and hopefully it’s actually something that’s not annoying to the user, but is actually useful to the user because it’s targeted so nicely.

Ted Murphy:

So what type of subscriber rates and responses have you been seeing so far? Obviously, this is a new space that you guys are playing in. What’s been the uptake?

Dan Melinger:

We released the platform in October 2005 as a Beta version. And that’s the version that’s still out today. And it’s accessible only on select interfaces. So we haven’t done a lot to expand the user base. Right now we’ve got a couple thousand people using it. At the end of September, September 2006 that is, we are releasing a new version that’s going to be accessible to many, many more people on their mobile phones as well as some new hooks for our content providers.

We’re expecting to scale pretty nicely at the end of 2006 then going forward early 2007. People on the service right now are early adopters and young people really excited about this new way to communicate with people around them.

Ted Murphy:

So speaking of that, what are the technology requirements right now in terms of an end user?

Dan Melinger:

Number one, everything is accessible on the website. So you can get a flavor for what it’s all about by going to Socialight.com and browsing around looking at the content. On the website, you can actually browse it on a map and browse different areas.

On the mobile, today we’re accessible on Sprint Nextel phones, the old Nextel phones that are now apart of Sprint because of the merger. And those phones have GPS capabilities and know where you are potentially. There are a lot of people on that platform and that’s all of our users using it today. But it’s only once we expand and allow more people through more interfaces to use it that it’s going to scale. It’s coming very soon.

Ted Murphy:

I know that the travel and tourism industry is experimenting with the application. And obviously, the location-based advertising has got to be very appealing to them. How are you seeing marketers taking advantage of this and what are the creative applications you’ve seen?

Dan Melinger:

It’s actually interesting. The travel and tourism industry as much as it would seem logical that that would be our first market it’s not. And that’s not what we’re going for. We’re going for kind of young adult, teen up to about mid-thirties market. The reason for that is what we’re trying to enable is not necessarily people to find media in weird places where they’re unfamiliar, but actually to connect with people nearby in places that they are very familiar with.

I’ll give you an example. What we allow is say you’re a high school student out of high school and you want to see kind of what other people are saying at the high school. By taking location into account you’ve got an ad-hoc message board essentially for people nearby. So you can sort of get the pulse of what’s going on and communicate really easily with people nearby. And comparing that to services that are out today, like MySpace for example, it’s just as easy to communicate with someone half way across the world as it is to communicate with someone who’s just across the street.

Now what we do is bring that back to the local community. And there’s some really cool things about being able to communicate with people half way across the world. And I don’t want to knock that but what we’re doing is bringing it back to the local community and allowing people to actually communicate with people that they might already know or have a potential to really meet in real life off the internet and off the network.

Ted Murphy:

You mean people still talk in real life? (Laughter)

Dan Melinger:

(Laughter) Not as much and that’s actually -- no, it’s true and -- I mean the Internet has made people a little less likely probably to talk to people in meet space as we call it. (Laughter) And what we’re trying to do is bring that back and enable it again. And use the technologies that at first were developed to allow people to communicate with people all over the world really easily and enhance their ability to communicate with people nearby.

The way we live today in urban environments like where I am in New York City we’re really densely packed in but we might not know our neighbors. Or in suburbia where we might not know someone two houses down the road is kind of weird. We have all these great tools for communication; yet, our communications with people who actually live near us is not any better than it was. It’s in fact worse than it was probably a decade, two decade’s ago.

And what we’re trying to do is use the Internet to enable like local community to connect again. And it’s the same -- it’s not just about people. It’s also about local business. We want local business to be able to connect with those people nearby.

And so when you take location into account you can do a lot of interesting things. We essentially see location as a filter that helps us to figure out what you might be interested in. And for advertisers we supply tools that allow any size advertiser to market people nearby. And whether that’s Target buying up thousands of locations around the country or whether that’s a small mom and pop restaurant that’s just buying one spot it scales quite nicely and you’re only paying for that specific location. It’s quite well targeted.

And on the flip side, the CPMs and the CPAs, cost per action, cost per call, that we can allow are quite nice because it’s so well targeted. And you’re actually getting people who really care about the content they’re receiving.

Ted Murphy:

So can marketers leverage these location-based messaging apps to actually create a customer profile like where they like to eat or shop? Is that information either provided back to the advertiser or can you provide that back to them and say well we know that this guy goes to this sushi restaurant five times a week? What level of information is available there?

Dan Melinger:

We supply information in aggregate. We can’t tell you the specific habits of a specific person that will violate our privacy policy for our users. That’s very important to us because when you’re dealing with location it’s a very personal thing. Also, potential danger is around others knowing your location. But today you can find people based on sort of aggregate data that will push back.

So people that are nearby and that search for this specific key word -- And as time kind of goes by -- as we continue to develop the platform in our roadmap we’re going to be sort of collecting richer and richer data and be able to target better and better. But it’s going to be data that’s an aggregate. You’ll be able to say I want to find people that are -- you could say I want to find people that are in this area most of the time. So they’re obviously not just visitors coming through but they’re people that live around there.

Or the flip side if you’re kind of in the tourist market you’re looking for people that have never been there before. So that is the type of dated information that we’re going to be aggregating in the future and allowing you to target based on.

And then feeding data back to the content provider and to others in aggregate is something that we’re also going to be looking at down the road outside of targeting but actually learning about the people who are nearby, etcetera. So a lot of really rich, interesting information that you can find.

Ted Murphy:

So what are the top three things that marketers should know about location-based advertising?

Dan Melinger:

Number one, say is that it can be extremely well targeted. The closest thing I think we have today to location-based advertising is the type that we’re talking about is billboards and outdoor advertising. And what we know is that that is sort of a brute force method and location-based advertising. What’s coming is much, much better targeted.

Number two, it flips the tables and enables smaller players in the market place to come back because it’s so well targeted the smaller players don’t have to do a blanket media buy in order to reach their target market. So it enables the smaller players to get onboard pretty quickly in an economically viable way.

Number three is that it’s an ascent technology. And if you get in today you’re going to be trailblazer. There are --

Ted Murphy:

Whoo-hoo. (Laughter)

Dan Melinger:

-- pro’s and cons to that of course (Laughter) because you’re going to be testing things out. And there are probably going to be some failures early on but you’ll also get a lot of attention for being early and you’ll learn a lot.

Ted Murphy:

Well, that’s great. I really appreciate you coming on the show today Dan. If our listeners want more information about Socialight they can visit Socialight.com.

Dan Melinger:

Uh-huh.

Ted Murphy:

And hopefully we can have you back on the show again in the future when you roll out some of those new features and tell us all about those.

Dan Melinger:

Sounds good, Ted. Thanks for having me.

Ted Murphy:

All right. Have a great day.

Dan Melinger:

All right, you too.

Announcer:

For more information on this week's topic, visit http://www.InternetMarketingVoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, the Relationship Agency.

[End of Audio]

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