(Was a) Deacon's Blog

Friend, Dr. Felipe Korzenny, Director of the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication at Florida State University, and Senior Strategy Consultant for the Captura Group, and Lee Vann, Founder and CEO of the Captura Group have several new articles out examining different ethnic/cultural groups in the United States and their use of social media.

In The Multicultural World of Social Media Marketing social media usage patterns are explored. The study notes:

We aggregated information to find out what ethnic/cultural groups are more likely to visit social networking sites. We found broad diversity in social media behaviors among different ethnic/cultural groups and that emerging minorities visit social networking sites more frequently than non-Hispanic whites.

We then broke out the data for leading social networks, MySpace and Facebook, to see if there are any groups leading usage of the most popular social networking sites—”again, minorities lead the way, with English Preferring Hispanics being twice as likely to visit MySpace regularly than Non-Hispanic Whites. The relative importance of emerging minorities as compared with the traditional majority points to a major shift in social influence…

The study goes on to state:

Culturally, ethnic minorities tend to be drawn to collectivistic values and often look to one another to help guide decisions and opinions. In addition, ethnic minorities are more likely to leverage social networks to communicate with groups of family and friends who are geographically dispersed. Social media facilitates such collective sharing of information and communication.

We can take this information and juxtapose it to the role of the faith as a key expression of these “collectivistic values” and as a centering point for leveraging social networks essential to communication and collaboration in the Hispanic community.

In Reaching Spanish Preferring Hispanics on Facebook the authors reiterate the cultural ethic — ethnic minorities tend to be more collectivistic and go on to note that there is a dearth of culturally relevant content online.. While a certain type of relevancy — that which is considered current and trendy — is not important in the faith context, the other type of relevancy — that which begins with understanding, and speaks the language of the heart — is important.

Bishop Hodur’s National model continues to be an effective means of communicating with those in need of God’s power and healing. God is best communicated, is most clearly understood, in a cultural, national, and linguistic context that relates.