Unravelling The Grid

By Saadiyah Marks, 2nd year PR student

On Saturday, October 18, students and guests at the CPUT annual media conference were introduced to a new mobile social network service called ‘The Grid’. Vincent Maher, portfolio manager for social media at Vodacom, introduced the innovative service and demonstrated how you could use The Grid to stay connected with friends.

The Grid (Groups Radar Identity Dropzone) is, is similar to ever-popular mobile social network, MXIT but has location based advantages such as viewing on an actual map exactly where you are and what your friends found interested at that particular place. This service allows your cell phone to be located by triangulating its position between cell phone towers. It has been dubbed “Google Earth meets Mxit” and means that you could be at a party and send a picture, video, text or sound clipping to a contact and they would see your exact location as well as if the party is worth attending or not.

Video clips, photographs and comments you drop on The Grid is called ‘blips’ would be made available to your contacts to view. The Grid is that the usage is free although network data costs as charged by your service provider therefore you could minimise costs by making sure the file size of your data is small. The creators of The Grid has really upped the standard of social networking allowing users to stay connected with their friends by showing each other where they are and what they doing.

The Grid was initially launched in South Africa last year by invitation only through the country’s leading mobile network, Vodacom. The reason for the creation of The Grid is to buy into a share of the Mxit market, which as we know, is a huge population. Vodacom has incorporated social networking, differentiating The Grid from Mxit. The service is continuously improving as you can see on The Grid Blog and growing as it reaches more and more of its target market. By using the built-in radar function the user is able to find the content they are looking for as well as forward it to their friends, comment on it or rate it. In the pipeline for Vodacom and The Grid is an international launch so before we know it we would know more about the hotspots in other countries than in our very own.

The good news for public relations and marketing professionals is that The Grid is allowing small businesses the opportunity to advertise through the social network. The Grid allows people to share their experiences and stories, a perfect medium for creating an brand awareness.

For more information about visit http://www.thegrid.co.za/, The Grid on Facebook, The Grid Blog, or watch The Grid video on YouTube
To register for The Grid simply SMS “grid” to 33313 (Please not The Grid currently available to SA mobile phone users only)