Every time you turn over a stone there seems to be half-dozen mobile social networks lurking underneath. It’s a shame because they’re all fascinating in their own special way, but if you don’t have time to put them under the magnifying glass, they all look a bit similar (from a mobile marketing point of view).
But this one leaps right out… and bites you.
The Grid is a location-based mobile social network in South Africa. The stunning thing is that it is owned by Vodacom (the SA mobile operator owned by Telkom and Vodafone), but you wouldn’t know it. It’s totally cross-operator. It’s also open (i.e. anyone can write applications for it) like Facebook.
Watch this marketing video on The Grid and see Gridstar for a cross-operator mobile talent competition run by The Grid.
At first, mobiThinking was surprised that a mobile operator parent would fund a cross-operator social network and resist the temptation to ruin it stamping the brand all over it. But if you think about it:
How big would Facebook be if it was only accessible from one ISP (in one country)?
Why would Vodacom want to be a dumb pipe for Facebook (see: facebook.mobi), MXit (see: mxit.mobi), a popular social network in South Africa, or the next big thing in social networking?
And who would pass up the opportunity to gather data on all your competitor’s customers?
The mobile-marketing story is good too.
The Grid knows the sorts of things about customers that will make brands drool. Sex, age, preferences, locations at different times of the day and night, friends, what they like, their friends on Facebook even… Vincent Maher, who runs the show at The Grid, reeled off so many things, mobiThinking lost track. And seemingly, it has all the appropriate customers’ opt-in permissions to do seriously targeted campaigns for marketers.
But The Grid has mobile-marketing vision too. And, despite what other folks say about location being “fool’s gold”, location is the critical part of the story.
The Grid has run a campaign with a Cape Town winery where wine bottles were buried in the middle of nowhere, and customers had to follow the mobile map to find it. This treasure hunt concept will be tried next on perfume products – folks will follow a trail into a store where the promotional items are available.
The example that really sold the location angle to mobiThinking – it may have been hypothetical – was BMW dealerships. Maher explained that in South Africa dealers have strictly defined territories, so there’s always strife when one dealer does a promotion in a local paper, TV or radio and it’s inevitably heard by customers outside the boundary (let alone the people who aren’t remotely interested in BMWs). With The Grid that doesn’t happen.
So The Grid, in common with dozens of excellent Mobile Social Networks, has a great story – but the hard part is getting the brands, or rather the media agencies to catch the bug.
Maher was presenting at the Mobile Social Networking Forum, mobiThinking suspects he’ll be appearing on the agenda at an event near you soon.
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