Do you know the japanese sns marketing ? MiXi, Gree and others?

MIXI, GREE and are most successful in Japan and SNS, this is the most dominant single registration number, SNS has become a leading company.

Mixi is Japans most popular SNS service with a claimed market share of close to 70%. When conversation in the media come to SNS, Mixi is also the most mentioned Social Network Service. Mixi had around around 15 million in September 2008 a quite impressive number achieved in less than 3 years. After going public the stock value doubled within 12 hours. Mixi turned into the Japanese showcase for 2.0 success. So far the good part. But looking a bit deeper into the service reveals that the glory days of rising users numbers seem to reached its limit sooner or later. More and more users move and will move away from Mixi looking for alternatives. The reasons: too much little time, too much advertisement, too little added value.

Competitors like Gree, Mobage, S!Town and others offered a wide range of feature right from the start: the possibility to upload and watch videos, other platforms allow users to play games, listen to the playlists of people in their network, locate friends using GPS or even enter into mobile 3D worlds.
Mixi tried to keep-up by introducing video and music functions a few month ago but still Mixi stays what it is: a pure SNS service with some extra services attached to it

All of these services did not start as a SNS service but they offered a unique value on its own with SNS as an added value to its users. And this is where the trend goes.
For example LISMO, KDDI AU’s mobile music service started to offer a function called “Utatomo” in 2006 for finding people with similar interests based on a users individual play list and their general interests helping the company to increase their overall music sales by 15%.

The time of SNS only services will soon be over. (Expect for maybe specific B2B or special interest SNS offers). In the future a SNS service will not be able to survive simply by providing a social networking functionality as a core service. Instead SNS functions will become part of other services helping to drive personalization (through the data gathered), drive loyalty and in the end to drive sales and generate revenue.