At midnight tomorrow Vodacom starts a really cool campaign to grow mobile internet usage in South Africa by launching its customized version of Opera Mini 5 and making internet access through the browser free for the next four weekends.
As of this week my portfolio at Vodacom has been renamed to Vodacom Internet Services in order to align more closely with our UK counter-part Vodafone Internet Services (VIS) but the change is more than just a new label.
Today marks the one year anniversary of my leaving the Mail & Guardian Online and joining Vodacom to manage the social networking portfolio, so I figure its time for a little reflection.
I joined Vodacom with some trepidation. I was moving from a small and very dynamic company into one that is quite large and (I thought) pretty slow-moving. I was also worried about my media profile and moving from a spokesperson type of role to one where there are more prescriptions that determine what I can and can’t say. In a way I was afraid of losing my voice. I think these are all natural fears and as Daniella, my wife, explained to me on the day before starting the new job, I always act boldly then cower in fear a few seconds before the consequences arrive (which is precisely when it no longer makes a difference one way or the other).
This is not to say I wasn’t absolutely convinced I was doing the right thing. The media and web space was no longer shiny for me and it seemed pretty clear at the time that mobile media represents the (exciting part of the) future of the Internet in emerging markets like South Africa.
At the time when I made the decision to move I was perhaps less interested in taking over the Grid, the new location-based social network that had been brimming inside Vodacom for a few months, and more interested in starting some new projects that involved stuff I was used to in the UGC and blogging space. It took a long time, probably three full months, to wrap my head around what the Grid was and what it was going to become. During that first quarter a lot of things that I had sensed about mobile internet but never had fully articulated for me before clipped into position: things like how the structure of prepaid billing affects browsing patterns; how mobile internet users behave differently depending on whether they start using the desktop or mobile first; etc.
In that first 3 months we redesigned the look and feel of the Grid. It had a really clunky orange and black logo that didn’t work on mobile at all and certainly didn’t fit the identifiable style of the 2.0 movement. I could tell, during this stage, that there was a sort of collective groan wanting to emerge from our creative agency because the development of the logo went through a lot of iterations until it finally came out the way I wanted it. This new guy is one of those clients who has something specific in his mind, can’t express it in a proper brief, and can only communicate effectively what he doesn’t like. I myself had this fear of being a nightmare client but any new client-agency relationship takes a while to steep, this is what I learned after much pacing around the kettle.
The end result of that redesign process was diverse. It helped me take a sense of ownership over the product, it helped the team make a break with the past and look at things with fresh eyes, and it enabled us to present an image that felt right to us, one that was newly energized.
In parallel we stepped up the prioritization of our Java application and spent lots of time refining and getting it ready for launch. This happened in September and it was the catalyst for the massive growth we have seen over the past six months (the Grid user base has grown by 1400% since then). And from then on things have moved quickly. The product development process has been shifted in and out of an XP-type model and we have released five incremental versions of the Java application since then.
There were several marketing and publicity projects on the go, the biggest being Mobikasi and our integration with Idols on MNET and plenty of others that were much more targeted like competitions for the best skate photos, or the time we gave away a bar for 40 people and a DJ to the person who sent in the best party photo.
Now, at the end of a full year I can honestly say this has been the best year of my career. Within Vodacom there is a general culture of innovation that has made me feel very at home and many, many people who are passionate about what they do. I have made some great friends along the way and met some people who have incredible amounts of influence on the direction of the industry, especially as the interaction between us and Vodafone increases. Most importantly, I have had tons of fun and so has my team and I am loving every minute of it.
The Grid has launched in Tanzania and is showing some great growth in terms of registrations and usage already. This is a photo of a street-pole ad for the product run by Vodacom Tanzania.
He has worked in the online media industry since 1996, has presented papers at many international conferences and specializes in profitable innovation in emerging markets.
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