Analyzing the Indian Subscriber Behavior Towards Mobile Social Media - A Data Monetization & Customer Engagement Perspective

The Indian Mobile Services Industry is going through a paradigm shift in terms of their business model-moving away from a "Voice centric" business to a "Data focused" business. Mobile Operators are looking at new and innovative avenues to increase the data penetration or the contribution of non-voice revenue (currently hovering around 11%) with respect to their overall service revenue. A similar paradigm shift is also being witnessed in the manner in which communication and social interaction happens-with Social Media emerging as a front runner when compared to hitherto popular communication mediums: email and instant messaging service. The immense popularity of social media has attracted advertisers and enterprise users to effectively engage their prospective as well as existing customers using social media. In emerging markets like India, Social Media has been used for customer engagement and monetization.

Every day innovation in the mobile social media space is definig a win-win monetizing model for all the players in the value chain-device manufacturers, technology providers, telecom operators, and social media players. Operators are recognizing the need to investigate the subscriber behavior and aspirations relating to Mobile based Social Media. The extra-large investments in next generation high-bandwidth technologies like 3G & Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) will provide the required momentum to the mobile operators as subscribers resort to user generated content over social media. The paper analyzes the subscriber behavior to ascertain the avenues for customer engagement and monetization using this channel.