1. Social Networking Going Mobile
(in the context of developing countries)
by
Hafiz Muhammad Idrees Butt
COO – SMSall, Pakistan’s Largest SMS Social Network

2. Social networking is the grouping of individuals into specific groups,
like small rural communities. Although social networking is possible
in person, especially in the workplace, universities, and high schools,
it is most popular online.
Web is easy, convenient and offers great flexibility to present the
content
We are living in a world where most of us ‘think’ that everyone is
connected now via facebook/twitter or the internet
Social networking is not suited on the web anymore or the
big screens of our computers and laptops as much as on the
cell phones, that we carry all the times

3. Some Interesting Stats
World’s total population= 7 billion
Mobile Subscribers = 6 billion
Internet users = 2 billion
Smart Phones users = 1 billion

4. Some Interesting Stats (cont)
No 3G in Pakistan yet
Out of 114 million Subscribers,
only 8 millions have smart phones
in Pakistan
20 million Internet Users
6 million Facebook users

5. People are accessing their social networks through their
mobile phones now more than ever before
Your mobile phone is the most important screen in your life.
The average number of times a person looks at his/her cell
phone is150 in a day.
Mobiles offer you some unique abilities such as all time connectivity,
payment mechanism that other screens/devices in your life don’t offer.
Not only this attracts existing social networks which are web
based to pay attention on the smart phone penetration
(facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars!) but also
worries Telecom Operators on the increased reduction of the
SMS revenues
Feature phones sales still outnumber smartphones 2:1. If your mobile
strategy doesn’t include feature phones, it doesn’t include most of
your customers.

6. Hence the networks of people are likely to grow from the
mobile phones (smart phones or featured phones)
What is required is to develop the facebook experience for the 6
billion people on the planet (or the other 5 billion) to get the full
meaning of social networking, focusing on a common medium
such as SMS
What is the ‘facebook experience’?
Relationships, information sharing, exploring more connections
etc

7. What facebook experience may look like on the SMS channel
• Friends and Family (Private Groups)
• Status sharing which results in reason to chat (generating more traffic)
• Sharing your life
• Interest based groups, Public Groups and Communities
• Bikers, Coffee lovers
• All modes of communication. Many to Many (Conference messaging), One to
Many (broadcast), Many to one (responses), One to One (private)
• Profile sharing and searching
• Profile alerts etc
• Privacy and Control
• Invite, kicking members
• Information Streams
• News alerts, Verses, General knowledge
• People following each other
• Following of Javed Bashir on SMSall, a very famous singer with over 5000
followers
• Multi-lingual (to remove the language barrier)

8. Integrating Voice with SMS
• Anonymous conference calls
• Consulting
• Medical
• Educational
• Buying and Selling
• Jobs
• Polling

9. Bringing Social Element in the Media with Mobile Phone
(TV, Radio)
• Breaking News Alerts
• Cable operators block some channels broadcast in sensitive areas
• Communities for the TV shows
• Story Prediction, letting people discuss the stories
• Engage during Commercials (again Mobile is doing the job for you!)
• Polls to win prizes
• These communities help you
• to know the rating of a show/channel
• Currently the TV channel rating is done through special
devices in Pakistan
• advertise the SMS traffic
• Following for the Anchor Persons

10. Social Element for the Corporate Sector
• Instead of spamming, engage your customers
• Incorporating call to action in all sort of advertisements
• Send “LAWN” to 8001
• Get the demographics and build the database
• Measuring the ROI by assigning different codes to different channels of
advertisements
• It’s through mobile phone you can engage your customers for
feedback, for ordering etc
• Legitimate way to reach out to customers, opt-in and opt-out
mechanism

11. Case studies from SMSall
• Political Activism
• Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf adopted our platform to run it’s membership drive
nationwide
• Over a million members in less than 6 months
• Going to hold Intra party elections across the country
• Never happened before in Pakistan or anywhere in the world on this
scale
• 3 Other political parties have joined the network for mobilizing the voters
and activating them for the elections
• Education
• English Messaging Service (EMS) grew to 100,000 members in 2 years
• End users involvement (400,000 communities created, around 150,000 are
active, how I felt when I shared my number)
• News Alerts
• Pakistan’s leading TV channels are broadcasting alerts and important
updates in various groups
• Corporate side
• Customer database building by various brands

12. Interconnectivity between operators
to build upon a very large
infrastructure
If it is launched with all the telecom
operators out there, a typical group
message may find the following path
Same is true for every developing
country!

13. An easy and quick way to capture the market of 5 billion is to make
the SMS social for them. Let them find each other get connected
with their phone
Telecom operators should focus on creating more value for their
existing subscribers to bind them into a network and generate
more and more traffic. This will prolong or may strengthen the
revenues coming from the traditional mode of communications
SMS transactions should be very cheap (affordable) for
broadcasting and should be monetized through other
means such as demographically targeted advertisements
Why can’t we develop the applications that don’t restrict
the connectivity on a platform rather let anyone be
connected from anywhere in anyway (Web, Smartphone
or a Dumb Phone!

14. Questions?
Thank you