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Social Niche Marketplaces and SaaSification
Google App Marketplace was the first marketplace for SaaS. However there has lately been an explosion of SaaS marketplaces. Unfortunately most of them are eCommerce sites that support subscriptions and resell Microsoft 365, some cloud backup and 3 to 5 things more.
Operators that are considering such a me-too marketplace should try harder
There is nothing like an average enterprise customer. Each customer is looking for a unique mix of services. You have innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards. You have self-employed, micro, small, medium and large companies. You have industries. Users are working on different functions within a company (finance, operations, sales, etc.).
However never has it been easier to personalize product portfolios according to market segments, industries, adoption likelihood, usage, etc. Operators should not set-up one marketplace but instead set-up intelligent personalized niche marketplaces. Users can tell you which industry they belong to, what their company size is, what their function is and if they are more eager to use the latest and greatest or if they want a full eco-system with a market leading product. This means that a highly personalized portfolio can be shown instead of a bunch of generalist products.
Why sell different products via different channels?
If you have customers segmented, then ideally all relevant products are presented in one personalized marketplace. Ranging from phones, tablets, mobile apps, SaaS, on-site equipment, advanced consultancy services, support, etc.
Bringing in intelligence and social commerce
The next step is to increase the likelihood of selling a product and cross-selling products. Users like product reviews and ratings. However users love product reviews and ratings from people they trust. What if each product in addition to a general section on product reviews and ratings also has a social review section. The social review section would be like:
- these contacts from my linkedin network have bought this service
- these contacts have bought these alternative services
- their ratings are
- in addition they also bought these services
How to go from 0 to 1.000.000 products?
Many operators offer services for “the average customer”. The product catalog is relatively small. Few have more than a couple of niche products per industry. Setting up a social niche marketplace is no good if you do not have a large catalog of personalized services to sell.
SaaSification to the rescue. Every industry has a lot of small companies that have build niche products. Most of these products require on-site installations. This means a lot of CAPEX. Often more is spend on buying the hardware, base software, services to maintain the data center, support services, etc. than on the actual software. By offering these small companies a SaaSification solution whereby they can migrate their on-site solution to an operator-hosted SaaS solution, the product catalog can be quickly extended with thousands of niche products. Offering tools to make single-tenant solutions multi-tenant and to make web solutions mobile-enabled, will substantially improve your chances to attrack ISVs.
New SaaS will move from the innovators towards the early adopters, early majority, etc. Early majority products will be niche market leaders, have strict SLAs, a support eco-system, etc. Leading products can be identified by the market. Operators can spot those niche market leading products and offer special deals, even co-branding. This strategy will allow a personalized long tail strategy without the long tail costs…
Thinking differently about monetizing telecom services
Free, the disruptive French telecom operator and ISV, is changing the rules. Via Femtocell and via controlling the WiFi access points of its customers, Free is planning to offload a lot of mobile traffic via its fiber network. This is translated into very sharply priced mobile calling and data plans. Free’s Founder is telling the telecom industry they should no longer try to make money with communication but focus on identity and payment services.
Free is right to change the rules of the game instead of waiting for non-telecom disruptive players to do so. However what else could Free do to generate extra revenues?
Social Mobile Graph
Facebook is talking about social commerce in which friends, family and colleagues are taking an active role in your buying behaviour. At the moment social networks are either for business reasons, e.g. LinkedIn, or for pleasure, e.g. Facebook. However both need a lot of maintenance effort in which you need to send or accept invites from people who you might have known 20 years ago.
What if your calling and messaging behaviour could take away a lot of this burden? If you call somebody mostly during business hours then this person is likely to be a business contact, especially if other business contacts of yours have the same behaviour. Your addressbook and linkedin could be automatically updated. However you could go a lot further and see which restaurants your direct business contacts call more often. Anonymizing this information and creating public APIs and a marketplace for app developers could lead to a lot of innovative services that can be monetized.
Numbering Plan Apps
The numbering plan is probably one of the most under-used operator assets. However everybody knows how to dial a number. Why not let other people make new numbers, e.g. based on non-existing country codes or using the # or * combinations? People would be able to make premium services for everything from voting, surveys, competitions, money transfers, etc. Putting *120* in front of your number could mean that the caller is paying you 1,20 euros per minute to call you. It is up to you to redirect your number to an application that makes people want to call you. You might have a large numbering app market to choose from. Add a # and a number at the end and you could have thousands of applications behind one number. The operator would get a revenue share.
Call Center as a Service
Call centers are mainly used by large corporations. However small groups of ad-hoc people could benefit from them as well. Ad-hoc software support hot lines in which experts can be freelancers could be of interest to some. But it could even be as simple as housewives that can help you with recipes. As long as rating the participant’s value, dynamic joining and leaving of participants, paying participants a revenue share, configurable participant selection rules, etc. are provided, the applications are limitless.
A lot more
These are just ideas but there are a lot more possibilities that you can implemented. Especially if you can control both the mobile device as well as people’s access point. However the past has shown that trying to get a few people pay a lot of money for a service and operator’s trying to do it all by themselves, have not been successful. Innovation is not only needed in the product domain but also in the business domain. Models that should be explored are:
- Freemium, whereby most do not pay but get the traffic to your service and only a minority pay for advanced usage. Many examples in the web 2.0, e.g. LinkedIn, Zynga, etc.
- Long Tail, whereby not only a couple of high paying groups are targeted but instead thousands of niches are targeted via the use of a general platform or third-party eco-system, e.g. Google Adwords, Facebook Apps, etc.
- Revenue Share, whereby others get the bulk of the revenue because they take the risk and the operator gets a small share but gets it from a large group of revenue sharers, e.g. Apple’s App Store
Telecom and social commerce
eBay’s CEO, John Donahoe, says that ecommerce is over and social commerce is the next thing. Social commerce is all about having a mobile with you and checking which of your friends or family has bought this item in the past. If your friends say “not good”, then you are likely to say “no purchase”. Additionally social commerce allows for online shops to steal away purchases from brick-and-morter shops.
Social commerce in its most basic form should be about having your social network help you to make the right decisions. However for guerilla marketers this is a new heaven in which mouth-to-mouth publicity can be “influenced” with the likes of Facebook…
How can operators do social commerce?
For their own services, it can be as easy as having a Facebook integration in their online shop that says which friends have purchased the service and how satisfied they are. It means that all the telecom catalog is added to Facebook’s social graph so people can see who is using what and what is their feedback.
Operators could go a step further and make a social commerce PaaS to allow everybody that has something to sell to use social commerce. A good social commerce PaaS should offer:
- The basics for a regular white-branded web and mobile shop (web/mobile store, unified catalog, shopping carts, white-labelled billing, analytics, reporting, provisioning, payment gateways, etc.).
- Integration into social networks (all catalog items are automatically added to Facebook, Twitter, etc.; tools to engage communities with loyalty/rewards; open stores in Facebook, eBay, Amazon, etc.; blogs, socialCRM, Youtube videos, etc.)
- Support tools (sales tracking, ERP connectors, helpdesk tools, etc.)
- APIs to manage all back-office tasks (e.g. procurement, shipping, etc.) and to automate all processes (adding products to a catalog, etc.)
- Value-added services: NFC payment for mobile that support it, billing & subscription management via your telecom invoice, call center on-demand to support customer’s customers, etc.
Operators should not reinvent the wheel and partner with existing players or solution providers that can provide parts of the overall platform.
Revenues can come from sign-up fees, monthly subscriptions, revenue share, resource usage, etc.
