Mobile in South Africa: 'Please Call Me' Messages
A prepaid mobile phone is only useful if you’ve got enough airtime to use it, particularly here in the U.S. where subscribers are charged for making and receiving calls. But for the rest of the world, subscribers aren’t charged for calls and texts that they receive, although running out of prepaid airtime is still a problem. For South Africa and its millions of pay-as-you-go users however, this isn’t an issue. If they have no airtime and would still like to contact a friend or a colleague, all they have to do is to send a free ‘Please Call Me’ message (PCM) to let the other party know that someone is trying to reach them. The recipient simply clicks on the PCM to call back the PCM sender.
A New Medium
PCMs were introduced by South African operator Vodacom in the early 2000s as a replacement for ‘beeping’ – the prepaid subscriber practice of ringing a party’s number once as a signal that they had no airtime left and would have to be called back. South Africans were sending millions of beeps a day, clogging Vodacom’s network and prompting the carrier to think up of a less resource-intensive means of beeping. They introduced a solution on a USSD platform – similar to SMS except that you can’t store and forward USSD messages – and thus PCMs were born.
Today, South Africa’s 45 million prepaid users send tens of millions of PCMs daily – Vodacom alone claims to process between 10 to 20 million a day. There are so many of them, in fact, that they’ve turned into a viable advertising and communications medium. MTN, Vodafone and Cell C initially attached short messages at the end of PCMs (which can handle about 120 characters) that announced carrier-specific promotions and activities. Eventually, they opened the service to mobile content providers and advertisers, charging fees or asking for revenue shares for every million PCMs they tagged with an advertisement.
A Relevant Message
The power of PCMs to influence an entire society became truly evident when it was used as a vehicle to promote HIV consultation and awareness in a social marketing campaign launched by SocialTXT and South Africa’s AIDS Helpline. During a six-week trial in which the Helpline was promoted on a million PCMs a day, the call center experienced a 136% increase in calls – over 1,500 additional callers a day. For the 5.6 million South Africans coping with HIV, PCMs are becoming a lifeline, quite literally. For more about the SocialTXT HIV campaign, see Corinne Ramey's blog entry at MobileActive.org.
- David Zarraga
