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Smart Communications is a wholly-owned mobile phone and Internet service subsidiary of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) with over 34 million subscribers on its GSM network. SMART has built a reputation for innovation, having introduced world-first wireless data services and mobile commerce services to the Philippines. “My Sandbox,” SMART’s new entertainment portal, brings content and services together in one place. It is an aggregation of music, entertainment, games, cinema club and news—all of which can be directly accessed via the web or mobile device.
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SMART’s challenges
SMART’s “My Sandbox” was a wonderful portal with plenty of great features, but it lacked a personal touch with customers and the ability to connect like-minded users to each other. They saw SNS as a potential solution, but didn’t have the experience to develop, launch or manage it themselves.
The Mostyle solution
We recommended that SMART introduce our white-labeled social network under their own brand, to provide the ideal tool for promoting “My Sandbox,” their new entertainment portal. Catering to both mobile and desktop users, we envisioned that the social network would be tightly integrated with the entertainment portal, providing a seamless experience for users and promoting the use of 3G mobile handsets in the Philippines.
The challenges we tackled
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We had to integrate our “MyGroups” social network service (SNS) with existing Sandbox entertainment portal services such as games, ring tones and movie mania.
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We also had to integrate the MyGroups SNS to the desktop portal, as well as the mobile portal, of Sandbox.
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We had to establish a “Single Sign On” (SSO) property in order to present a seamless user experience between Sandbox and My Groups.
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What we delivered to Smart
Working with our Branded SNS Platform, Mostyle tightly integrated a unique mobile social network, named “MyGroups,” with SMART’s entertainment portal. MyGroups includes most of the major functionalities of popular social networks such as Facebook. While MyGroups web access was free for all users, mobile access was exclusive to SMART customers. This innovative white label community concept was promoted by SMART using a major media campaign that appeared throughout the Philippines.
Software as a Service technology (SaaS) enables SMART to pay for Mostyle technology when and where it is consumed, reducing the overhead costs and in-house maintenance hours.
Benefits
The Mostyle Branded SNS Platform helped SMART to:
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Build deeper customer relationships with a loyal user base around SMART.
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Own user profile and information for marketing research and CRM.
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Increase data usage among existing customers.
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Create an interactive communication channel between SMART and users.
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Convert competitor customers and acquire profitable accounts.
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Update
MyGroups continues to be a resounding success for SMART. In fact, the SNS element is the part of Sandbox that is growing the fastest. Mostyle recently launched a brand new “MyGroups” desktop graphical user interface (GUI) for MyGroups with advanced social networking layouts. Mostyle continues to work closely with SMART in achieving groundbreaking results in the mobile space.
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