Study: Social networking still a telco opportunity

Telecom service providers can still participate in and benefit from social networking trends – if they aim to add value to the medium rather than try to compete with Facebook or MySpace head-to-head.

That’s the key conclusion of a new study from IBM titled “Changing Face of Communications,” released this week. According to the report, social networking is not about new Web sites or applications but a fundamental shift in how people communicate, moving away from point-to-point and two-way conversations to many-to-many collaboration and sharing. Control of that communications is also shifting away from the “proprietary domain of telecom providers” to more open Internet platforms, the report said.

Based on current growth patterns, IBM estimates that by 2012, the number of unique monthly visitors to online social networking sites will surpass 800 million.

Traditional telecom service providers must embrace this change and growth – or be bypassed, said Chris Pearson, partner and global telecom industry leader for IBM Global Services. Telcos must focus on moving beyond basic connectivity to “allow individuals, organizations, communications and objects to interact and communicate in ways that were not possible before,” Pearson said.

IBM offered specific short- and long-term advice for how telcos should embrace social network.

Short term:

• Help add mobile components to existing gated social networks via their mobile operations.
• Partner with, or acquire, existing social networking players to acquire expertise (for example, Vodafone’s acquisition of Zyb).
• Enable other participants in the social media value chain -- such as advertisers, virtual operators or applications developers – to leverage telco capabilities like presence, location, SMS and more.
• Focus on enterprise social networking working with existing business customers.
• Work closely with content delivery network (CDN) and over-the-top (OTT) content providers to lower the cost of delivering high-bandwidth content via social networks.

Longer term:

• Broaden the scope of traditional communications by more actively focusing on many-to-many collaboration.
• Explore the opportunity to create gated social communities that work across existing telco communities on fixed, wireless and IPTV networks.

The social networking report was published by the IBM Institute for Business Value.