THE BIG ONE: SAFARICOM PUTS GINA DIN PR ACCOUNT INTO PLAY

Gina Din Kariuki, Managing Director, GDCC

Gina Din CC decade-long grip on possibly the most lucrative public relations account in the country is under threat after Safaricom decided to open it up to bids this month.

Not only will the reported Sh7-8million retainer-per-month contract be floated but apparently it will be broken up EABL style with possibly different firms handling different publicity roles like corporate, Safaricom foundation, events etc.

PR firms in town are currently filling out the forms to pitch for the lucrative contracts next month as the telecoms giant continues to shake up the way it does business.

GDCC is said to be preparing its pitch with stiff competition expected to come from the likes of Ogilvy, Africa Practice, Tell-EM, Hill and Knowlton, Apex, Silver Bullet, Energy Source, Yolanda Tavares and so on.

Ogilvy has lately become the 800-pound gorilla in the room bagging such accounts as KCB and Kenya Airways from GDCC along with the numerous others it runs from Orange to Barclays and so on.

Hill and Knowlton, like Ogilvy now a part of Scangroup, has also snagged LG from GDCC.

The pitch comes at a pivotal time for Safaricom as it will also mark Victoria Kaigai's entry into Safaricom as the Head of Communications at a time when the department has seen the departures of Washington Akumu and Wachira Kang'aru (who left to take up a posting as Business Editor at Daily Nation) as well as Gina Din's seconded staff to the green giant, Cedric Lumiti (who left for Hill and Knowlton) and Soshe Oyalo (events - who is now at Multichoice). Another Gina Din veteran who worked closely with Safaricom in the past, Rodgers Wabito, also left for Hill and Knowlton last year while Francis Ochieng who has lately handled Safaricom's account for Gina Din has also left for Ogilvy.

In other words, the Safaricom communication and external is essentially starting on a clean slate and will probably be one of Nzioka Waita's (Director Corporate, Legal and External Affairs) major tasks as Safaricom 2.0 era completes its first year.

There could be positives and negatives given that much of the institutional memory so to speak is gone particularly as relates to media relations.

Positive is that Safaricom could use this to completely re-orient its communications function and redesign the way it manages communication about itself amongst its various publics.

This could involve developing a PR strategy from scratch designed to fit in and support the new corporate structure and also mainstream new media more fully into this function.

In particular, communications could develop its own vision and mission aligned to the corporate one but more importantly, it may be time to introduce segmented communication given that already the company has stated its intention to carry out segmented and targeted marketing for its different products which may appeal to different demographics.

This will involve having to ask themselves who their audience is and what sort  of communication they relate to and what sort of media they expose themselves to and at what times.

It will not do to have mishaps like the Valentine's day one.

It will also be perhaps a chance to properly position Maryann Michuki's digital and social media section to support the whole organization rather than act as a branch of Customer Support.

Essentially, a few folks should have been trained to do what that section does for Customer Support and left to run their show while Digital Media concentrates on introducing support functionality for other divisions such as Marketing, Events, Corporate Communications, CSR, Investor Relations, CEOs office etc etc.

It will also be time to roll out a social media policy and strategy throughout the corporation so that for example an employee say who happens to be friends with a non-employee on a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter, knows how to answer probing questions or respond to statements without compromising the organization's strategy.

The negative could be the loss of so much institutional memory at once. One of the main reasons GDCC was successful in using ex-reporters was their familiarity with news desks as well as the country's correspondence network.

Anyone can hold an event in Nairobi and get decent press for it but try doing it up country. Some of the newsroom veterans in PR Houses are adept at one trick; having a point man in major towns. This is usually a correspondent who can be relied upon to mobilize journalists for an event, know the police and probably carry out some logistic work on the ground. They are crucial to getting an event off the ground in a place like say a school in Kakamega or Kisumu and getting it coverage in the press.

The other issue is that by working with the company, many of the PR guys already knew Safaricom's products and services well and could do a beyond-the-press-release explanation.

So a new agency will have a steep learning curve although with the movement of personnel around the industry chances are that a person who handled Safaricom before may happen to work for that agency.

With a new HOD Comms who has to show performance and has the pressure to deliver, whichever agency gets any of these contracts will feel the full heat of to perform to unimaginable expectations.

I can bet a million bucks people at an agency will come to dread the sound of Victoria Kaigai at the other end of the line before too long.

That said, is it a good idea to split up the contract?

That is debatable although some companies seem to be going for it with KCB said to be considering it.

While of course it will force each agency to focus on an area and deliver, the question may arise as to singularity of the communications message when different entities handle different aspects of the same organization.

This goes back to Communications: They will have to come up with a full-scale communications strategy within which the functions of these different agencies will have to be aligned. The strategy itself will have to fit within the role of the Division of Corporate, Legal and External Affairs under the Safaricom 2.0 structure meaning the rationale for forming the division in the first place will have to be looked at and the communication strategy aligned with that - the assumption of course is that the division has also defined its role within the Vision and Mission Statement of Safaricom.

EABL which has separate agencies cannot claim to have suffered from it but also cannot say its communication message has been amplified by it.

It took a tepid performance last year for the company to publicly acknowledge it was adversely affected by the so-called Mututho rules when it could have sounded the warning earlier.

Agencies begin to pitch next month.

AIRTEL 3G SERVERS DISABLE CALLS?

Airtel calls could not go through for much of this morning although some calls from other networks and international calls were able to terminate on Airtel. Calling from Airtel however, was another matter.

All signs point the problem to the newly deployed Airtel 3G network.

The reason calls could not be made apparently was because of problems within the Mobile Switching Centre - this is the modern day equivalent of the old telephone switches (PTSN) - which apparently could not route calls properly.

Typically, the (VLR) Visitor Location Register,  a table of active mobile users that have been detected by the network that day, and the Home Location Register (HLR), the database of all Airtel SIM card users should have the same information since the VLR is linked to the switching centre which regularly updates the HLR.

But for some reason, while signalling seems to have been working okay, the forwarding plane which in some networks is a table that has the addresses that the router needs to look up and forward the signal/message to was not.

By around 2PM it seems the problem had largely been dealt with.

That being said, it can only lead to one conclusion: That the problem was occasioned by the deployment of a 3G Core Network when the company announced its 3G rollout.

Because it cannot arbitrarily migrate to 3G when so many Airtel users are on 2G/GSM handsets, Airtel must have decided to support 2G in its 3G core network.

Many Mobile Switching Centres (MSS) allow for implementation of GSM.

Ericsson which is the company involved in this particular case, runs what it calls a MSC_S, from where it runs the control and bearer functionalities of the switching centre.

It is here where it must have implemented support for Airtel's 2G/GSM.

Most likely, this was a configuration issue - growing pains so to speak.

Of concern however is that it is here that also billing functions take place and with such downtimes and general confusion, subscribers who didn't complete calls could have been accidentally billed and others not billed.

KENYA BANKERS DENY WEAKENING SHILLING

KBA chair Etemesi, CBK governor Ndung'u (r)

Kenyan bankers led by Stanchart CEO Richard Etemesi feel MPs who sit on committees like the one investigating the fall of the Kenya shilling should be well versed in such matters. Clearly they don't think the likes of Adan Keynan grasp the dynamics of banking and hence the damaging report they released on last year's free fall of the local currency is not well informed.

Electronic manipulation of the shilling for speculative gain and hoarding were dismissed as implausible.

Etemesi, the chairman of the Kenya Banker's Association, used KBA's 13th floor boardroom at International House to convene fellow industry chiefs to rebut the report which is set to be tabled in parliament tomorrow.

Among other things, the Report on the Decline of the Kenya Shilling, alleges massive upsurge in commercial banks borrowing from the Central Bank of Kenya to cash in on government securities.

It says three things caused the shilling's woes, economic factors and failures of certain human beings and institutions.

It zeroes in on human beings and institutions as more to blame.

Human being number 1 is identified as CBK governor Professor Njuguna Ndungu. The MPs chew him up.

He is accused of being asleep on the job, failure to act in time, and generally having a poor working relationship with commercial banks.

It calls for his sacking and recommends and tribunal to be set up by President Kibaki to investigate the man.

Ndungu and the Monetary Policy Committee are portrayed as toothless and need to be granted legislative spine.

The Bank Supervision Department is said to have failed.

Treasury is said to have failed to act when CBK wilted and is asked to grow a pair and act quickly and decisively in future.

Commercial banks were said to have borrowed money at lower rates from CBK and used it to make money from high interest rate government securities.

The report hits at banks for misbehaviour on the forex markets and calls for stiffer fines (Sh20million or 50 per cent of the value of "irregular" transactions") to be imposed on them.

Etemesi, KCB's Martin Oduor-Otieno, NIC's James Macharia, KBA's Habil Olaka, and the CEOs of I&M and Consolidated Bank took issue with the reports findings.

For starters they said the Sh600billion figure is taken out of context. It was cumulative and not an amount they just borrowed at once.

In any case, they pointed out, CBK's core capital is only Sh5billion therefore it cannot lend out 120 times the equivalent of its capital.

Moreover, the banks themselves have a combined core capital of Sh259billion meaning they cannot be in Sh600billion debt...that would mean they are insolvent.

In any case, Etemesi added, what banks borrow is made against their holdings of government securities.

The borrowing, he said, is overnight and has to be repaid the following day. Therefore, banks could not have borrowed overnight to lend out money for 91-day Treasury Bills.

In any case, the average figures in 2011, showed that while commercial banks borrowed an average of Sh4billion from the CBK Discount Window, they borrowed more, Sh12billion amongst themselves a day on the Interbank market.

That said, the Sh600billion cumulative was still way higher than what they took in 2010.

The bankers said this is because liquidity was tight in 2011 necessitating them to latch onto the discount window.

They ruled out arbitrage on the Discount Window and the Interbank where potentially a bank could borrow from CBK at a low rate and lend on the overnight interbank market at a higher rate.

That is illegal Etemesi said.

On hoarding forex, the bankers said their own customers decided to keep the cash in foreign currencies when they realized the shilling was under pressure.

The report will be tabled in parliament tomorrow.

AIRTEL TO LAUNCH 3G IN KENYA TOMORROW

After what seems like ages, Airtel is finally going to unveil its 3G network in Kenya at the Crowne Plaza Hotel tomorrow.

Staff have been running up and down doing testing and checking reports in the run-up to the long-delayed event.

As we've mentioned before, Airtel has not been good at capitalizing on opportunities that come its way. Since Safaricom raised its tariffs, subscribers have flocked to Airtel but unfortunately, many have ended turning right back.

In recent times for example, new subscribers or returning ones have not been able to get their SIM swaps because of issues with their AUC (Authentification Centre) - basically, old number that have since left the network have not been removed filling up the system and leaving no space for new subscribers.

Gladly, this has been sorted out now, albeit in the short term.

That being said, Airtel launching a  3G system is a big, big step that need not be gainsaid.

Not only does it mean that handsets on their system will now access the net faster and hence make the whole experience cheaper, but also folks will be pretty excited about their 3G modems when they introduce them and the kind of deals they will come with.

Say what you will about Airtel, but the prices Kenyans pay for voice and SMS today are largely due to them.

If a similar shakeup is seen in data, it may well tip the market.

But despite that, Airtel seriously need to deal with a lot of issues if at all they are to have a viable business in this country.

For starters, they must modernize their systems to state of the art, robust, and high capacity network systems that are easy to manage and easily yield business intelligence data and visualizations that support business decision making.

It is not feasible that Airtel in 2012, is still using some of the systems that Kencell developed almost 10 years ago.

Some of these systems have reached end of life, others have so many add-ons and workarounds that they are barely recognizable to the people who designed them in the first place.

A company as big as Airtel should have a serious Enterprise Resource Platform (ERP), Customer Relations Management (CRM) and a serious BI (Business Intelligence) module and even a SMMP (Social Media Management Program) that can serve as an early warning system to a problem that subscribers are experiencing and alert management to deploy resources toward the problem.

Safaricom and Orange have already taken this path. Orange which decided to reduce suppliers for its voice, SMS and CDMA platforms and gave it to ZTE, plans to do the same for its other services.

Airtel on the other hand has too many suppliers, to many outsourced parties, and every time there is a problem, it becomes a matter of passing the buck from this supplier to that.

All in all, congratulations for launching 3G Airtel.

TOP KENYAN FACEBOOK PAGES

Mwalimu King'angi aka Churchill (Daniel Dambuki) can claim to be the King of Facebook in Kenya. While his official Daniel "Churchill" Ndambuki is second to NTV in terms of fans, he also has the Mwalimu King'angi Facebook page which also ranks in the top ten in the country. Combined then, he is just behind the full power of the Nation Media Group with its NTV, Easy FM and Daily Nation brands coming in the top 10.


Uhuru Kenyatta ranks first among politicians with Martha Karua running a close second. Also with over 100,000 fans in Maina Kageni who is said to make more than Sh400,000 a month from Facebook.




According to statistics from socialbakers, Facebook penetration in Kenya is 3.26%compared to the country's population and 32.67% in relation to number of Internet users. This means there is a lot of unexploited potential among existing internet users even as hordes of teens come online daily.


 The total number of FB users in Kenya is reaching 1305340 and grew by more than 132800 in the last 6 months.

In the last one week, Uhuru Kenyatta's page has been the fastest growing adding over 5000 fans followed by Martha Karua at about 3000.

Safaricom, Mwalimu Kingangi and KTN Kenya follow in third, fourth and fifth place.

Yesterday, Safaricom added the most fans to its site, 353, followed by Uhuru 350 and Martha 319.

NOKIA CEO STEPHEN ELOP IN KENYA NEXT WEEK

Nokia global head Stephen Elop will be in the country next week in what will be a first. No CEO of the Finnish giant has been here before. This comes at a time when the handset vendor has downgraded its regional hub in Nairobi into a sales office moving other responsibilities to Jo'Burg.

It also comes at a time when at the top of the food chain, Samsung is increasingly asserting its dominance with the Galaxy line and rivals like Sony Ericsson and Research In Motion also seeking to increase their share of the pie. The iPhone 4S is also on sale through Orange although we are yet to see how they handle marketing for this latest iteration.

Nokia regional head Ken Oyolla who had announced his resignation before being made the global head of activations will no doubt welcome the opportunity to host Elop. Oyolla has been regional sales manager for Nokia before and together with Samsung's Amit Patel (formerly of Motorola) know the market trends as well as anyone in the business.

Elop used to be an executive with Microsoft and has steered Nokia toward Windows Mobile as it belatedly abandons Symbian.

OLGA ARARA OUT IN GOOGLE MOCALITY SAGA

The Google Mocality saga has drawn its first casualties. Kenya country lead for Google, Olga Arara-Kimani formerly of Safaricom has been let go by the company. Also axed is a technical guy in Zurich. Company officials contacted said they will issue a statement once investigations are complete. The statement will come from Nelson Mattos, he of, "mortified" fame. It is not clear how Olga was picked for the fall but as one observer noted, sometimes a sacrificial lamb has to be found for the brand name to weather the storm.

 It is unfortunate as the Google getting businesses online that ended up causing so much mayhem was one of the first major projects Olga oversaw.