Monetary value of customer networks in Mobile Social Networking Services

Mobile Social Networking Services (SNS) are an emerging trend in which individuals of similar interests communicate with one another using mobile phones. In this paper, we calculate the monetary value of customers and their networks in mobile SNS using the official data provided by a service provider. The mobile SNS enable users to create their avatars to communicate with each other via blog comments and communities. The company sells various items for these avatars such as apparel and interiors. This service generates consumer purchase history data and user network data. In previous research, the value of the customer is often estimated using the purchase history, but the network value is neglected. In the field of computer science, the value of the network is evaluated via the network structure, but not much attention is paid to the economic aspect of each node. The aim of this paper is to incorporate the social factor with the customer purchase database and calculate the monetary value of each customer and his or her network. The results of empirical analysis show that our approach is useful in finding valuable customers for marketing activities and outperforms conventional metrics such as degree centrality.