Our team performed a cross-platform coverage through Social Media of the Sixth Summit of the Americas held in Cartagena, Colombia, gathering 34 Heads of State and Government. We also developed an application for mobile devices specially conceived for participants for staying up to date and networking. It was a great joy to work for the most important political event in the hemisphere.
he Summit of the Americas is the highest level meeting in the Western Hemisphere. It is the only one at which all the democratically elected Heads of State and Government of the Americas discuss common policy issues, reconfirm their shared values and assume the commitment to carry out concerted actions at national and regional levels. Therefore, rather than simply a meeting, the Summit of the Americas is a process involving several entities: the Governments of the region, certain international organizations and financial institutions, the organisms of the inter-American system and the social actors. That’s why our job was as interesting as complex, bringing together and managing online communication of every event of the Summit, including the non-official cultural and social developments.
Our first task consisted in creating a strategic plan to make the Summit visible through Social Media to support the event’s Communication Office. But visibility means nothing compared to the value of generating social engagement to the conversation about the Summit and its main subjects by common citizens. That’s why we built the event’s channels in major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Flickr) but we also encouraged alternative/new social platforms such as Instagram and Storify. We used every tool to bring the Summit down to Earth for the peoples of the Americas. We showed non-traditional aspects of such an event. In other words, we told the story in a different language than traditional media, making the event more friendly and the conversation more attractive.
These decisions we made raised the challenge in matters of content adaptation, brand personification, and technological solutions. Therefore, community management demanded a large amount of hours and personal dedication, and the mobile application we developed became crucial to integrate the vast diversity of participants.
The application for mobile devices was built to fit almost every smartphone and tablet there is available today in the market. We developed special versions of the app for: iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch), Android devices, Blackberry and Blackberry Playbook. It served thousands of people for networking, thanks to a built-in tool we designed that enabled participants to search and contact other people registered in the Summit.
It was a very demanding job, not only because of the dimension and the high profile of the event per se, but also because of the standards we set with the Communication Office and the Organization Committee to make a breakthrough in the way to address the public.
Read the newspaper article about our work for the Summit [Spanish]
