After writing the post about the Social Customer in Latin America, I started thinking about a few things that I noticed are happening in the region.
1) The first Social Media event for Latin America is next week in Mexico City. This event is special to the region since it is an event produced and organized by a social media practitioner, it is not organized by consultant company nor a media agency. The event is produced by Christian Lisogorsky. He has his own business and uses social media to generate new business. I met Christian last year to discuss the event and since then a few things are happening: the community is helping promote the event and he managed to bring some social media gurus to the event. Listen to my podcast in Spanish with Christian.
2) Speaking with some marketing agencies the demand to be on Facebook and Twitter is there, but also there is some demand to establish work-flow in order to analyze and manage conversations.
3) Many CRM vendors are on Twitter and Facebook, but they are not engaging customers on conversations. So far they are not true practitioners of social CRM and social media. I requested information about CRM promotions from MS and Oracle and have not heard from them. Social Media is global... your Social Media and Social CRM strategy needs to be global if you are a multi-national company.
4) I see a trend to listen to conversations, then establish your presence in social channels and some how to convert these conversations into transactions. But many companies are not ready to integrate a CRM application to social channels... and companies are not yet ready to establish their own communities.
Like a wrote before, Latin American companies need to be more digital. They need to break away from the 9-to-5 syndrome... there is a whole social world out there.