| I've been paying a lot more attention to the online | | | | except for Brazil (where Orkut still reigns supreme), |
| space down south of the US border and beyond. | | | | appears to be Facebook. |
| For the most part, it appears that social media outlets | | | | What does all this mean? |
| like Twitter and Facebook and making some decent | | | | To me, it means that there is a huge opportunity in |
| inroads into Latin America. | | | | Latin America. |
| No, I do not have empirical data for you to use to | | | | Recently, there was a social media conference in |
| verify my assertion, all I have is anecdotal data from | | | | Mexico City called "SM Latam." The conference |
| seeing more and more people tweeting in Spanish and | | | | looked to explore, teach and spread the word about |
| seeing more and more of my family members on | | | | social media and how to use it for creating |
| Facebook. | | | | connections and for increasing your business ROI. |
| I realize that this is not a representative sample, but I | | | | I didn't get a chance to go, and I only found out about |
| can tell you that on the surface, it appears that the | | | | the conference after the fact, but the fact the |
| people that are able to access the internet in Latin | | | | conference even happened makes me happy. |
| America are definitely getting on to the social media | | | | What didn't make me happy was that a lot of the |
| outlets, I'd almost dare say on a daily basis. | | | | speeches, as far as I can tell including the keynote, |
| Why is it important that my family is on social media? | | | | appear to have been delivered in English. On the |
| Because the majority of them had never been online | | | | surface, it looks like the majority of the attendees to |
| before. They'd never bothered with blogging, with | | | | the SM Latam event were at least bilingual. This made |
| Googling for anything, nor with buying anything online. | | | | me realize that most of the writing on websites that |
| The internet was not something that they were | | | | deal with social media is also written in English. |
| interested in. Now, because of the social media tide, | | | | My question became: What about the rest of the |
| most of my aunts, uncles and cousins, specially my | | | | people in Latin America that are not bilingual? |
| cousins, are online and using Facebook daily. | | | | Lots of people that have small to medium sized |
| I know that there are lots of other outlets out there like | | | | businesses of their own that could benefit from using |
| "Hi5" and the local Spanish language networks like | | | | social media don't speak English. Who's reaching out to |
| "q'oobole" and "quetal?" and several others all vying for | | | | them? |
| a piece of the social pie. | | | | From monitoring the #smlatam feed on twitter, I was |
| The big player making a move almost everywhere | | | | able to figure out how to say some terms in Spanish. |