Tag Archive for 'safaricom live!'

Safaricom (finally) “gets” some social media mojo with “Faceoff”.

Published on April 22, 2010 in Uncategorized. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

I totally stumbled on it. I didn’t even know about it until a few minutes ago. I saw a Google Ad on some random web site which brought it to my attention. I’m really grinning! Yes, finally, after getting battered on a good number of blogs and online forums for not “getting” social media, Safaricom has finally done something notable that’s “with it”. Safaricom is running a Facebook marketing campaign called “Safaricom Live Faceoff” (Safaricom Live is Safaricom’s 3G internet service).

The way the campaign works is that you join the Safaricom Live’s Faceoff Group on Facebook and post a comment on the wall to which you need to get as many responses to your comment as possible. Thereafter, depending on the results, you can be crowned the King or Queen of Facebook if you have the highest number of comment responses. The incentive to participate is quite high since the grand prizes to be won by either King or Queeen winners are an Apple Macbook Pro, a PS3, a Samsung Jet and one year unlimited access to Safaricom Live (yes, unlimited instead of the pricey data-limited bundles). In addition to the grand prizes. there are daily prizes to be won when one dials *554# from their Safaricom connected handset.

The Faceoff campaign runs till Saturday the 24th of April 2010, culminating in the Safaricom Live Faceoff Party at the Kenyatta National International Conference (KICC). Some key observations from the campaign are that when you dial *554# on your Safaricom you get a Facebook USSD menu. This enables you to the navigate to short cuts to get to Facebook pages or services of interest. The second interesting thing to note is that the Safaricom Live Faceoff Facbook Group now has over 10,000 members as of this writing. This is quite impressive since the campaign only started running last week. However, after a search, it still seems that Safaricom (still) does not yet have an official fan page on Facebook even though they have over 15+ million subscribers in Kenya.

Interestingly enough, its seems that apart from running Google Adwords (and old school radio promotions), Safaricom has also developed a mobi site for the campaign which you can view here. Considering that this campaign is largely targeting the Kenyan youth market, this is certainly a brilliant move as most of them probably go online via their mobile phones anyway. So, in a nutshell, Safaricom finally got some social media mojo! Now they need to push this initiative to its logical conclusion with a full social media Safaricom brand immersion!

Embracing Digital Marketing Presentation at Kenya Music Week 2009.

Published on December 13, 2009 in Uncategorized. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Earlier today I was at the Kenya Music Week (KMW) 2009 event to make a presentation titled “Embracing Digital Marketing”. This is the third year in row that I have made a presentation at the KMW and its amazing to see how much changes every year in terms of the Internet and Digital Media in general. This time last year, there was no (real) broadband in Kenya and the Internet was really really slow and expensive. We also did not have the current low(er) Internet access charges as well as an ICT Bill that is going to support the growth of local e-commerce.

Going forward, because of all these developments in 2009, and more to come in 2010, things are only going to get better for the Kenyan Music Industry where digital music is concerned. This will lead to dramatic changes in Kenya’s digital music development, marketing, distribution and monetization for all stakeholders. Already, many seem to be ready to cash in on the digital music scene in Kenya. For sometime now, Safaricom has been offering mobile music and ringtone downloads via its Safaricom Live portal. There have been other players like Cellulant, Interactive Media Services and Adtel who have also been in the mobile music and ringtone downloads space for sometime now.

Today, I also learnt of Vuma which is an online music portal dedicated to Kenyan music and operated by the Music Copyright Society of Kenya as well as Liberty Afrika. Vuma is operated as a joint venture that enables Kenyan musicians to market and sell their music online in a revenue share model. Vuma is fully e-commerce capable and currently offers the ability to buy music online using credit and debit cards. Currently, Vuma is charging an average of Kes. 60.00 per song downloaded. Vuma also has a mobile version of its web site which makes a lot of sense considering recent research shows that mobile Internet access is the fastest growing segment in Kenya.

However, at this time, Vuma does not yet offer mobile based payments using either Safaricom’s M-Pesa or Zain’s Zap mobile payments systems – this will be very key if Vuma is to have any chance of achieving critical mass in Kenya amongst over 18 million mobile subscribers. I now know of at least three online mobile payment systems in Kenya that are being operated by Verviant (PesaPal), Intrepid Data Systems (iPay) and Symbiotic Consortium that work with M-Pesa and Zap. I also understand that NairobiNet Online is working on an online mobile payment system. Vuma could easily work with any one of these providers to achieve this objective.

To download my Kenya Music Week 2009 presentation on Embracing Digital Marketing for the Kenyan Music Industry, go here>

Orange Kenya’s “Niaje” Tariff and Safaricom Live

Published on June 24, 2009 in random. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

In the newspapers today, Orange Kenya has launched a new tariff, “Niaje”. The new tariff clearly demonstrates that Kenya’s mobile networks are not yet done with their “tariff wars”. Niaje has a very competitive per minute rate of Kes. 4.00 for both Orange to Orange calls and Orange to Telkom Kenya calls. It also costs only Kes. 8.00 per minute to call other mobile and fixed line networks in Kenya. Going forward, what remains to be seen is how Safaricom, Zain and YU will respond to the Niaje tariff but at the end of the day its the customer who wins with inexpensive call rates!

Also in the newspapers today are full page ads promoting Safaricom Live. Safaricom Live is Safaricom’s mobile content portal which has all sorts of downloads including ringtones, videos, wallpapers, games, etc. I had written about this service a couple of months back and was very concerned that Safaricom was basically competing with its value added services (VAS) partners – It seems to me that they are going full throttle (anyway) with Safaricom Live as a way of growing their data-based revenue. I tried getting into the service this morning, both on mobile and via my PC – It took ages to pull it up and timed out often! Looks like their subscribers are banging to get in and Safaricom may have underestimated online traffic after they ran the full page ads!

Safaricom Live!

Published on May 10, 2009 in telecoms. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

Just found out that Safaricom has quietly launched its mobile portal, Safaricom Live!. The site is located at http://www.safaricom.com and features premium mobile content and services in the form of ring tones, wallpapers, videos, information services, email and games.

I have been hearing rumours for the past couple of years that Safaricom has been working with a certain leading telecom services provider to build a mobile portal so I guess that Safaricom Live! is the final outcome.

I wonder how this will position Safaricom with their various value added services (VAS) providers such as Cellulant, Interactive Media Services and Mobile Planet who presumably will now be competing with Safaricom with their offerings. However, considering that Safaricom is investing considerably in pushing their  internet/data services, this is an obvious play to build traffic (and incremental revenue) using with proprietary content that they own/market to their customers.

On the way forward, what remains to be seen is how many of Safaricom’s 10+ million subscribers will sign-up for Safaricom Live! This will be a test of how much affinity Kenyan mobile internet users have for premium content and services, especially directly from an operator. In addition, it remains to be seen how well Zain, Orange and YU will respond to Safaricom Live! in launching their own mobile internet portals. All in all, its good to see progress happening on the mobile content and services front in Kenya.