If you are a multinational company with global customers, you could have the challenge in social media of understanding who your audience is and what they are talking about. This is especially true if part of your customers are Hispanics or Latin Americans. There are many differences when listening to this audience:

• Most of them speak Spanglish
• Others are bi-cultural but speak only English
• Some just speak Spanish
• Many of them are local to your market
• Spanish has many variations from country to country or city to city

These audiences are not identical, and geographical differences play a big role, including cultural differences. Listening to the Hispanic and Latin American segments should be versioned to the different segments or niches in your social media channels. This means that you need to understand how to listen to their social conversations and figure out which social channels are more effective to reach your Latino audience.

Let’s break this down into three initial steps to understand how to listen to your Latin American and Hispanic customers.

1.) Understand that Social Media is global.

Customers have the option to decide to identify their country of origin or location on Facebook or Twitter. For instance, I could be a Colombian living in Australia and tweet in both Spanish and English. While my Twitter profile states that I am in Australia, I could be a major influencer for key products in Colombia. What about this: A local blogger in Argentina writing in Spanish uses a WordPress blog hosted in the United States (but the configuration is still set in English). Even more, Nancy Ford from Alabama could have a Facebook page promoting Avon products in Spanish but her location setting is not set to a specific country.

As you can see, there is not a specific location structure to know where your customers are; therefore, here are some recommendations to help you understand these conversations (this assumes that you are already a Radian6 user):

• Include United States as part of your list of countries
• Use both Spanish and English but mixed common Spanglish and Internet terms in your searches
• Use “proximity, contains and does not contain” to exclude or include some of the Spanish word differences
• Use different profiles to identify the differences between countries
• Use keyword groups to look for conversations per product or types of conversations
• Use keyword groups to look for both negative and positive conversations including the RSS of the Facebook Pages you want to monitor in your filters
• Use a Conversation Cloud to identify new keywords that should be included in your profile
• Remember, not all conversations for the Hispanic or Latin American markets are on Facebook or Twitter – some of them are in forums, where the customers have more than 140 characters and can be anonymous

Note: All of the above implies that you most understand the nuances of the local Spanish and Spanglish language such as Puerto Ricans in NYC vs. Orlando vs. Puerto Rico, or Mexicans in Mexico City vs. Monterrey vs. Chicago.

2.) Understand the Social Graph of your customers.

Services like data.com can help you understand the social profile of your customers. With the email address of your customers, you can identify the social channels they used. These help in understanding where you can start listening first and adjust your social media strategy accordingly.

One thing that I have found is that many Hispanics and Latin Americans are still active in MySpace – you can find some “tribes” of customers due to their interest for the music and entertainment industries. Understanding the social graph can also help you identify other sites of relevance besides YouTube, Flickr and/or LinkedIn. For example, if you know that some of your customers are on Flickr, you can then identify other similar sites and add the RSS filter to your Radian6 profile. Before using any social profile technology, make sure you have covered any opt-in/opt-out issues with your legal department.

3) Understand your best customers.

If you are already using customer analytics and website analytics, you then need to listen to your analytics data to better understand your site’s visitors and trends of your customers – what are they buying, when are they buying, what words do they use to complain in your call center, etc. Use this data to help you define keywords for your Radian6 profile. If you are already using text analytics, use it to improve your keywords. And if your best customers are on Twitter and you are listening to your customer’s analytics, you can then better understand the nuances and trends of your Hispanics and Latin American customers.

Make sure you have objectives for listening to your customers, not just monitor the sentiment of your brand. Be ready to engage these customers and listen in Spanish, English and in Spanglish. These objectives needs to be measured based on your social media metrics and it is an on-going learning process to understand your customers conversations.

What will be your strategy to engage your local brand efforts vs. your global marketing strategy? Can marketing automation help you? How would you try to identify Hispanic vs. Latin American customers in social media? How does building a social customer profile in your CRM help you?

Jesus Hoyos is Managing Partner of Solvis Consulting, a Radian6 authorized reseller in Latin America. Follow Jesus Hoyos on Twitter at @jesus_hoyos.

Tags: advanced, hispanic, latin american, Listening