I totally stumbled on it. I didn’t even know about it until a few minutes ago. I saw a Google Ad on some random web site which brought it to my attention. I’m really grinning! Yes, finally, after getting battered on a good number of blogs and online forums for not “getting” social media, Safaricom has finally done something notable that’s “with it”. Safaricom is running a Facebook marketing campaign called “Safaricom Live Faceoff” (Safaricom Live is Safaricom’s 3G internet service).

The way the campaign works is that you join the Safaricom Live’s Faceoff Group on Facebook and post a comment on the wall to which you need to get as many responses to your comment as possible. Thereafter, depending on the results, you can be crowned the King or Queen of Facebook if you have the highest number of comment responses. The incentive to participate is quite high since the grand prizes to be won by either King or Queeen winners are an Apple Macbook Pro, a PS3, a Samsung Jet and one year unlimited access to Safaricom Live (yes, unlimited instead of the pricey data-limited bundles). In addition to the grand prizes. there are daily prizes to be won when one dials *554# from their Safaricom connected handset.

The Faceoff campaign runs till Saturday the 24th of April 2010, culminating in the Safaricom Live Faceoff Party at the Kenyatta National International Conference (KICC). Some key observations from the campaign are that when you dial *554# on your Safaricom you get a Facebook USSD menu. This enables you to the navigate to short cuts to get to Facebook pages or services of interest. The second interesting thing to note is that the Safaricom Live Faceoff Facbook Group now has over 10,000 members as of this writing. This is quite impressive since the campaign only started running last week. However, after a search, it still seems that Safaricom (still) does not yet have an official fan page on Facebook even though they have over 15+ million subscribers in Kenya.

Interestingly enough, its seems that apart from running Google Adwords (and old school radio promotions), Safaricom has also developed a mobi site for the campaign which you can view here. Considering that this campaign is largely targeting the Kenyan youth market, this is certainly a brilliant move as most of them probably go online via their mobile phones anyway. So, in a nutshell, Safaricom finally got some social media mojo! Now they need to push this initiative to its logical conclusion with a full social media Safaricom brand immersion!