My NewComm Forum Talk on SMS as a Social Networking Platform

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As part of my 2009 Society for New Communications Research Fellowship, I gave a talk titled ‘SMS as a Social Networking Platform’ at the 2009 NewComm Forum in San Francisco on April 29.

I started off by saying that one of the most important lessons my research on social media in the emerging BRIC countries has taught me is that marketers, and entrepreneurs, can learn a lot from digital activists, especially about engaging people who aren’t going to spend much, or anything at all, at little or no cost.

Then, I used several examples to illustrate my three big ideas.

1) The $50 mobile phone will continue to be the default computing device for billions of users in Asia and Africa.

2) SMS (not WAP, GPRS or 3G) will be the primary technology for web access for these users.

Mobile Social Networking Take Two

3) The ecosystem to create a social networking platform entirely on SMS is slowly emerging.

Then, I used my 4Cs Social media Framework to identify the features an ideal social networking platform should have and speculated that it can be replicated for the $50 mobile phone by doing all the transaction on SMS and running all the algorithms in the cloud.

SMS-Based Social Networking

Here are the slides from the talk (PPTX/ PDF/ SlideShare) –

Here is the video of the talk (Vimeo) –

Related posts:

  1. My Talk on SMS as a Social Networking Platform at NewComm Forum
  2. WSJ Story on SMS-Based Social Networking Platform SMSGupShup
  3. Three Dimensions of Differentiation for Indian Social Networking Sites
  4. My Talk on Vote Report India at NetSquared DC
  5. My NetSquared DC Talk on Vote Report India