PulsoSocial has partnered up with Startupi in Brazil to create a bridge of collaboration between entrepreneurs in Spanish speaking Latin America and Brazil. Below is an excerpt from startupi
““This partnership with Pulso Social will help readers of both publications gain a more complete understanding of the Internet in Latin America and enable opportunities for dialogue and cooperation.” – Michael Nicklas
via Startupi
Full Article in PulsoSocial
Full Article in Startupi
After three months of development, we have released the open beta for MarcaSocial, a community driven customer service and feedback social app for Latin American brands and companies. Here is the original release in Spanish:
MarcaSocial, la plataforma para el manejo social de branding enfocado al consumidor llegó a Iberoamérica
Martes, 15 de septiembre de 2009.- MarcaSocial es la plataforma on line para el intercambio de información y opiniones entre los consumidores y las marcas que operan en Iberoamérica. Basada en la colaboración, independencia y bidireccionalidad, MarcaSocial es un lugar de interacción que parte del principio de beneficio mutuo entre empresas y consumidores.
“En Iberoamérica la opinión del consumidor acerca de una marca se pierde y muchas veces queda sin respuesta. Pero cada vez los consumidores se conectan y comparten más sus opiniones en Internet”, afirmó Andrés Barreto, co-fundador de MarcaSocial.
Con un formato limpio, fácil de navegar y dinámico, cada consumidor dispone de 500 caracteres por mensaje para compartir en la red sus preguntas, opiniones o quejas basadas en su experiencia con una marca en particular.
Así, el consumidor final podrá conocer a otros clientes con las mismas inquietudes que él, obtener respuestas personalizadas al comunicarse con los representantes de una marca y valorar la marca que usa, entre otros.
En tanto, las empresas podrán conocer los problemas, opiniones y percepción de los clientes, saber el nivel de satisfacción y expectativas de los clientes, responder a las inquietudes de estos, monitorear y obtener reportes de las acciones de los clientes con sus
“Nuestro método de desarrollo es guiado en su gran mayoría por nuestros usuarios, ya que estamos utilizando nuestra misma herramienta de comunicación de ideas, problemas, halagos y preguntas para desarrollar el producto”, explica Leo Barrientos, co-fundador de MarcaSocial acerca del desarrollo de la aplicación.
Esta herramienta permitirá a las empresas trabajar, medir y rentabilizar el marketing persona a persona generado en Internet, y ser más auténticas frente a sus clientes.
Acerca de MarcaSocial
MarcaSocial es un proyecto de Socialatom y OpenDesarrollo, co-fundada por Pamela Castro, Leo Barrientos y Andrés Barreto. Está disponible al público de América Latina a partir del 15 de septiembre en su versión beta 0.6. MarcaSocial promete ser la nueva herramienta de marketing y relaciones públicas de la región on line.
Para darnos feedback y contribuir en el desarrollo de la aplicación, comunícate con nosotros en MarcaSocial
[ http://www.marcasocial.com/marcas/marca-social ]
In March 2009 I presented in Guatamala two talks, one about social media marketing and another one on social apps and plug-ins. The conference was organized by the leading newspaper of the country, PrensaLibre and it was a great experience.
Considering that most newspapers are withering in the U.S. in the face of social media and new technologies, it is very refreshing to see that the internet movement in Guatemala is being made possible by the newspaper there. The hospitality and logistics was flawless and I am extremely grateful to the organizers for putting the event together and inviting me.
I leave you here with the slides of my presentation (In Spanish):
http://www.slideshare.net/andresbarreto/mercadeo-social
http://www.slideshare.net/andresbarreto/plugins-y-aplicaciones
At socialatom we saw a need for a medium where new artists and music industry trends could be discussed and discovered in Latin America. Using a similar strategy to that of PulsoSocial, in creating an industry publication and community for technology, entrepreneurship and social media in latin america, we hope to offer up and coming indpendent latin american artists, a place to be featured and talked about in the web.
Unlike the opportunities for U.S. based artists, where there are online communities and blogs even for the obscurest niche genres, in Latin America, artists have very few alternatives to mass media. Combining what the world of technology and social media has given us, we will be using Grooveshark and Wordpress to power this new community. With this said, Socialatom is proud to present PulsoBeat – el nuevo beat de la música latina.
PulsoBeat entra en la escena como un grupo creativo regado por toda América Latina y Los Estados Unidos que vive y respira musica. Buscamos abrir mentes a nuevas maneras de ver la industria de la musica. Hay un mundo desde los barrios de Bogota hasta los clubs de Japón que están creando un sonido que nos toca los corazones y aunque no se escucha en la radio, es igualmente importante.
Estamos en un momento de gran transición y acá le abrimos un espacio a aquellos que se han caído por la grieta que produce el cambio. La grieta que separa la vieja manera de ver las cosas, de la nueva.
Como ustedes, nosotros también somos amantes de la musica latina con un alcance global. Pero nos hemos quedado en seco con la llegada de la era digital. En vez de abrir puertas a nuevos sonidos, como se esperaba, seguimos con los mismo sonidos en rotación diaria.
Donde esta la mezcla de culturas que produce la era digital? No se están rompiendo barreras y cruzando fronteras globalmente? Se dice que cabe el mundo en la palma de nuestras manos, pero no aprovechamos el momento para crecer musicalmente. Esta comunidad existe para que se enteren de lo que esta tocando y creando tu vecino.
Estamos por todo el mundo buscando sonidos nuevos, grupos innovativos, gente despierta. Queremos q sientan un poco del pulso de cada ciudad q le presentamos. No hay otro sitio que te abrirá un portal a los nuevos sonidos latinos de una manera tan original y refrescante.
PulsoBeat
-El pulso de la musica latina.
We will be attending BlogOrlando on September 27th. BlogOrlando is an unconference that will cover various topics ranging from journalism 2.0 to wordpress and politics.
Hope to you see you there:
BlogOrlando
If you want to meetup just follow us on twitter:
Mark Whiting
Andres Barreto
Pulsosocial Social Media and Entrepreneurship in Latin America
What has been keeping us busy in the last couple of weeks has been a socialatom project called pulsosocial, a blog covering social media, technology and entrepreneurship in Latin America, written in spanish and soon in portuguese.
Why latin america?
We see a lot of growth and opportunity in social media in general, but even more so in Latin America because it has a steeper adoption rate of new media and technologies such as social networks and mobile phones. The game is still up for grabs as social networks like hi5, sonico, facebook and orkut battle it out for the growing latin america market.
While at the same time, we see a lot of potential in latin american startups that has come with an increased interest in entrepreneurship in general. In recent years we have seen more unConference events like BarCamp spring up in countries like Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and others. Argentina for example has Palermo Valley, Barcamp and StartMeUp Argentina.
The Purpose of Pulsosocial
Taking into consideration the rapid growth and adoption of technology and an increased interest in entrepreneurial efforts, pulsosocial aims to become the go-to source for what is going on in the industry as well as to bring together and highlight entrepreneurs and their companies to showcase the explosive growth and opportunitis in Latin America
A humble beginning
The project is still in its early stages, right now we are focusing on producing consistent high quality content and growing our team to eventually have journalists in various latin american countries. We will keep you posted on the progress and be sure to check out pulsosocial.com
The evening of August 14 was a sold out “full house” with over 200 of South Florida’s leading business representing various industries as well as marketing and advertising professionals. The evening kicked off with presentations from the South Florida Interactive Marketing Association members that helped sponsor the dinner banquet.
The main event of the night was an hour presentation from keynote speaker and Emarketer CEO Jeff Ramsey, CEO of Emarketer.com. Armed with numerous statistics and studies of web trends, his presentation was informative, humorous, and extremely enlightening. Being that we are on the forefront of a changing industry, WEB 2.0, this new frontier has many challenges for business to overcome as they decide how to invest the resources in the new paradigm of social media online communities.
Jeff presented numerous statistics which point in multiple simultaneous directions as to the success of these communities to promote brand identity, trust and loyalty. Overall it is very subjective as numerous research firms try to make sense of the direction of the online world given sketchy measurability; but one thing is certain. Online communities are consumer driven and are striving to maintain a level of transparency between members and that is future of the web. In our next post, we will examine some of the terminology and criteria mentioned here to help you understand and digest these emerging communities.
Facebook has failed miserably in Japan, but succeeded tremendously in Chile and Colombia.
Japan
Facebook has been unable to gain any significant traction in Japan because they have fallen into the trap of thinking that what works in the U.S. can also work in Japan. Mixi, the locally grown social network ranks at #6 in traffic while Facebook does not make it to the Top 100. Serkan Toto, a contributor for Techcrunch, notes that the reason why facebook has not fared too well include:
- Failure to adopt to cultural differences: Different from American social media consumers, japanese culture places more emphasis on community than on individual self-promotion. And that what Zuckerberg heralded as a value proposition of showing real names and pictures, is actually something that Japanese users try to avoid.
- Lost in translation (Without Mobile, You’re Dead): Facebook is not optimized to work with Japan’s handsets, a big flaw, considering that people use the handsets to access the internet more than they do a PC.
Eventhough myspace and facebook are failing in Japan, they are doing great in Latin America, and we will take Chile and Colombia as examples.
Colombia:
Facebook has had tremendous growth in Colombia
- 2,691,760 Users on Facebook
- Number 1 in number of facebook users in Latin America
- 5th in number of facebook users globally (excluding the U.S.)
- Approximately 25% of all Colombian internet users are in Facebook
Why such vast and exponential growth? My theory is that its growth can be attributed to the Colombian expatriates in the U.S.
Between 1998 and 2000 it is estimated that more than 1 million people left Colombia and moved to the U.S. for economic and political reasons, many of those people had children that would eventually enter college around the time that facebook was getting it start and opening up to all colleges and high schools. Thus, by the time facebook opened up to anybody with an e-mail address in 2006, there was already a large population of Colombians living in the U.S. that were members of Facebook, and they invited their friends and family in Colombia to join facebook.
Another significant event that helped the growth of facebook was the utilization of facebook as a tool for organizing a social movement. A group was created in facebook called 1 Million Voices against FARC (FARC is a marxist-guerrilla movement considered to be a terrorist group, one of the factors that forced so many people to Colombia in 1998-2000) and it grew very fast gathering coverage from the national press, media and radio, it eventually culminated in a protest February 4th 2008 in which 4.8 million people showed up to the streets in Colombia and 10 million people worldwide.
Chile
Facebook has grown 2,197% in Chile
- Between February and August grew in Chile from 106,960 to 2,456,480 a staggering growth of 2,197%
- Approximately 33% of internet users in Chile have facebook
One of the reasons why facebook was able to grow so fast was because they made a spanish version in February, which coincides with the start Chile’s growth in facebook.
Although Facebook has had more success in Latin America than In Japan, it is by no means a declared victory because local rival sonico.com is gaining ground in places like Argentina and Brazil.
Sonico gains significant market share in Argentina
Sonico beats facebook and myspace in Brazil
In future posts we will explore what local competition means for American social media sites and how social networks like Friendster have a new hope in emerging markets rather than in the U.S.
Links:
Hong Kong Street at Midnight
A significant factor in social networking is giving consideration to how people naturally communicate and build communities. In this way, looking at off-line community trends can shed some light on how online communities will perform and interact.
China Off-Line
In China off-line communities form and behave in very different ways to those in the USA or other western countries.
First and foremost is the sense of family. Due to the One Child Policy, most young people, born after 1979, have no siblings by birth. Instead, groups of children who were close friends from a young age and have lived near one-another for many years form relationships which they referrer to as familial. That is to say, much later in life, someone may refer to another person as their brother or sister in passing conversation although they are not related by birth
Similarly social relationships are often built out of immediate necessity and thereby used to maintain some sort of serviceable relationship. In China social circles aim to include people with a convenient set of influences but are often built purely by exposure to or participation within a community, as opposed to active networking in the way it is found in the USA. In this respect the network structure can be stagnant for a large portion of the population, though people tend to have very reliable networks and are very willing to participate and contribute to the community.
An interesting phenomenon in China are the ad-hoc summer evening social activity involving large groups of people congregating around parks and paved areas where they can simply sit and chat, or do exercise or allow their children to meet others. The dynamics in a situation like this are very different from those found in similar social scenes in the USA. People in this context are also quite willing to cross communicate and interact on an informal level. It is a highly connected network with little functional significance associated with the strength of a specific, human to human connection.
China Online
Online community trends in China are similar to the day to day habits there. For instance most people are interested in expanding their networks when they get the opportunity, even in situations when in the United States people might shy away for various social construction related reasons. People seem really happy to connect when they can. However, most services online are not designed around creating new connections with people whom one does not know, or at least, people with whom one does not have an inroad to know. It is almost as though, if you meet someone without the appropriate context it is not a significant meeting.
One potential area of growth for Chinese web communities is a platform which allows its users to easily build casual relationships with other users, within the framework of their social building methodology, without the restrictions of a overwhelmingly structured user identity, or the confusion of too many options and immediate networking opportunities. Interestingly, further growth, after gaining a proportionally small threshold group of users, is relatively easy as the Chinese market is very thick with real life social networks and existing communities. The high population density and a culture of social activity lead this to be the case.
Consuming Together
An important aspect of this situation that should not be forgotten is the expectation of high accessibility to media and media related interactions such as sharing. The Chinese web experience includes a lot of media consumption and on some occasions this is a group experience. An example of this is a common situation in internet cafes in which users will watch online movies, often at HD resolution, and simultaneously engage in two person video chats with many friends scattered around the region, presumably doing the same sort of thing. The market for tools that help people consume what is free or easily available is already quite crowded. Media as an inroad to community building, however, is a market that is largely untapped.
HalfBaked Project Competition - Photo by TechZulu
Miami is one of the cities that is creating awareness about social media and the way this is playing an important role through the internet for many communities, organizations, and most importantly people. Last weekend, Miami hosted SocialMediaCamp, an event that “brings together the brightest minds in Social Media with people interested in learning more about the power of Community Based Marketing”. One of the characteristics of this social media camp was the constant interaction among the audience members who shared their knowledge to inform others. Some of the presentations were very productive and the attendee always had the choice to leave the room if the topic was not of his or her interest.
During the event, Erica O’Grady mentioned that social media is based on relationships and dialog. However, This creation of new relationships are based on trust and an embedded culture where social capital is the key point to maintain it. She used a quote by Mahatma Gandhi, ” You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Social Media is a powerful tool that is being used and can be used to create change because there is a new influence where people exchange ideas, engage in dialogue, and change their minds.
Matthew from Clearcast Digital Media shared how social media is changing the old way of thinking. One of his examples was the impact of social media in engaging voters for local elections. The turn out was the increase of the number of voters from a ten percent to a twenty one percent thanks to the use of social media. He added that internet users and bloggers have an online community that consumes positive content that has useful information.
Overall, Social Media Camp was successful because it generated a social platform to establish real relationships. It generated dialog and it served as a vehicle to exchange information. People paid attention to what they thought it was new and important. Some people in the audience were twittering about some interesting points made in some of the speeches. Everybody had the chance to present a product, a service, or an idea that maybe was useful for someone in the audience.This was an opportunity to interact and build relationships that in the long run will help to consolidate the social media movement and learning community in South Florida.
