The Latin American Frontier: Your Manifest Destiny.
“Believe that social media southern expansion is not only wise, but so very readily apparent and inevitable.” -Reymond
Follow @thepush_intl
Photos from Eric Ficher’s Photo Stream under a Creative Commons license. The photos by Eric Ficher are displaying only a piece of what South America has to offer in social media activity and it has never been seen like this before. He mashed up data from Flickr (the orange dots are pictures uploaded to Flickr) and Twitter (the blue dots are Tweets) to visualize that people Tweet more in urbanized environments and upload photos more in scenic surrounds. The white dots are locations that have been both Tweeted and uploaded to Flickr.
Latin America has 590 million unique people with 590 million different stories. You get 1 shot to make it count.
Launching a social media campaign with a home court advantage doesn’t guarantee success and there are several border-crossings standing between you and an effective launch in a foreign territory.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves and start talking about success; let’s talk about strategy & planning. Since you are a bright individual you understand that digital marketing is like any form of business and first you must have a plan before implementation.
Part of a digital marketing plan entails targeting your customer and defining what problems you will need to solve. If you have envisioned that Latin America can benefit from what you have to offer then taking the next step will require prudence. What I offer my clients is a market advantage. The strategy package I put together is exceptional in that it includes a comprehensive analysis with recommendations from first-hand accounts, experiences, and cultural insights designed to take full advantage of your integration while minimizing cultural over sites.
“The strategy package I put together is exceptional in that it includes a comprehensive analysis with recommendations from first-hand accounts, experiences, and cultural insights designed to take full advantage of your integration while minimizing cultural over sites.”
Borders between Latin American countries are more than real and some countries are so distinct they might as well be separated by oceans. To group South and Central America as two market segments would be a devastating misunderstanding of the region. I like to use the tortilla to illustrate a cultural difference leading to a misunderstanding. This example holds true between Latin American countries and between the US and Latin America. Most North Americans have a Latin American culture understanding from our resident descendants and immigrants from Mexico. From this we have a pretty good idea of what a tortilla is and how it is used. Mexicans as well have a pretty good grasp of the concept, as you can imagine. Interestingly, most of Central and South Americans have a completely different understanding of what a tortilla is. In fact, to most, a tortilla is more similar to what we call an omelet. This may seem like an arbitrary detail, but if you depicted a latin family eating flour tortillas in Chile, they wouldn’t identify. There are a million cultural differences that can lead to costly misunderstandings eliminating any chance of survival for your digital media campaign and you require a specialist that deals in digital marketing social media, strategy, and Latin American culture.
Hire a specialist. First, you will need to decide how many ways to segment your marketing campaign which will vary on a number of factors unique to your business. As I mentioned before, each country in Latin America is independently unique ranging from a lot to nothing in common with their neighbor. Marketing is communications and getting this right is an obviously critical component in any campaign involving social media. This marketing “of the people” success depends on the ability to communicate with and in the style of the people, not merely “at” the people. Simply hiring an agency is not going to make the strategy come any easier. Agencies outside and within Latin America are posed with the same problems you face and are not immune to the same strategy analysis required for international integration. Of course they may know what a tortilla is; however, they do not know what a tortilla means to you. This disconnection would penalize you financially and emotionally.
Bridging these gaps requires a very dynamic person who has experienced living on both sides of the world to protect all parties from demoralizing efforts and shattered relationships. Is this combination hard to find? Yes, but lucky for you I know just the person.
For all Postings on Latin American Markets Go here [ Social Media in Latin America-ALL ]
For all Postings on Latin American Media Stats Go here [ Media Stats for Latin America ]
