Spreading the image of the Northwest homeland

Pham Thi Phuong Mai (far right) and local people apply digital transformation to introduce clean products from the Northwest highlands.

She has been attached to the land and people here and contributed to promoting and spreading the image of the Northwest to the community...

Before building the TikTok channel Mai Tay Bac, she was fortunate to accompany her husband on the volunteer journey of the Youth Union organization. Every time she went to the highland villages, she understood the difficulties of the people there. Mai realized that the highlands have a lot of clean, delicious, and quality agricultural products. However, the consumption market is still limited, people mainly buy and sell in the traditional, fragmented, small-scale way.

Mai started TikTok not to become famous, but simply to share beautiful images, delicious food, and unique culture of the Northwest highlands with more people. More deeply, with the enthusiasm of youth, she cherished the idea of building “a new market”, bringing highland agricultural products to more people, reaching further.

With just a phone and some basic skills in filming and editing videos, Mai tried filming videos introducing agricultural products of the people such as ginseng, cat's whiskers, wild honey... Videos about simple working life such as harvesting corn, harvesting rice, or videos about landscapes and people in the highlands such as terraced fields, indigenous festivals and traditional costumes...

After a short time, with the reception of many people, the videos began to attract tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of views, with some videos reaching millions of views. Not only watching videos for entertainment, there were people who wanted to order, ask to buy products, and even book tours to experience the village.

Mai realized that TikTok is a “digital marketplace” where people in remote areas can bring their products to more people. Mai built a strategy and clear content for each video, cleverly integrating local products, indigenous agricultural products, and highland specialties. She learned more, posted videos at the right times, and attracted many customers. In addition, she attached links and shopping carts on e-commerce platforms to support the consumption of indigenous agricultural products.

Since the end of 2022, many clean agricultural products have been sold by Mai at higher values, and have been well received by people across the country. Selling agricultural products through e-commerce platforms has also contributed to creating additional income for dozens of households, especially women and young people without stable jobs. The image of the locality has been widely promoted, creating curiosity and attracting tourists to experience.

Seeing her success, many Red Dao households began to learn from Mai. She organized experience sharing sessions for people in villages and hamlets. Notably, Mai was invited to train and educate people in many different provinces and cities. She instructed how to shoot videos with a phone, oriented how to create content when building a channel, guided how to confidently livestream, and put local agricultural products on e-commerce platforms. Many young people in the locality became "digital farmers", selling products, doing community tourism, and promoting their ethnic cultural identity through genuine, intimate videos.

Mai's personal page currently has more than 1.5 million followers on social media platforms. More than 150,000 orders have been sold through the TikTok Shop platform. Due to manual production with only seven workers, products such as dried buffalo meat marinated with sesame seeds, black pork fat, wild honey... are not in sufficient supply.

In December 2024, she was honored to receive the Luong Dinh Cua Award, a noble award for young farmers who have risen to become rich legitimately and support local economic development in the direction of clean agricultural products. At the same time, she received the Outstanding Young Face of Lao Cai Award in 2025, and the Advanced Youth badge following Uncle Ho's teachings in 2025, for her achievements in bringing agricultural products to the digital platform.

Mai shared that digital transformation starts with the people themselves, no need for sophisticated machines, just ideas and a spirit of learning. TikTok is a real opportunity for farmers to change their economic thinking. "Mai Tay Bac" herself is just an ordinary rural union member, but thanks to digital transformation, thanks to social networking platforms that successfully started a business, she has changed her own life, helped many people have jobs and more stable income, contributing to spreading the image of the beautiful, majestic Northwest homeland with many delicious and attractive products...

Article and photos: THANH SON

Source: https://nhandan.vn/lan-toa-hinh-anh-que-huong-tay-bac-post916158.html