Miami SES Latino 2007
It was a last minute trip that materialized over the course of a few hours and ended up being a great event full of those nuggets that can only be found when a bunch of search engine geeks get together with booz.
Many thanks go out to Matt Williams of Prominent Placement for hooking me up and helping me with a guess pass. Once I was there, I met Li Evans who is a bit of a social media expert and a really good somebody to know. She introduced me to Mike Grehan, and the next thing I know, we’re all having dinner and discussing the future of the web and search engine marketing.
When I say “discussing”, I mean “listening”. Mike is truly a forward thinking, insightful, and downright brilliant SEO guru. Sitting at the table with him was like sitting and discussing basketball with Michael Jordan. You listen. No wonder Bruce Clay recruited him to come onboard.
The conference itself was the smallest of any SES event that I have ever attended and I found myself being addressed in Spanish quite a bit. My Spanish is quite rusty but I managed well and met some really cool folks from Spain, Mexico and Costa Rica.
What did I learn? “Trans-create” instead of translate. If you try to translate your English site to Spanish, expect it to flow with the genius of a 10th grade high school student. By having a native speaker do the initial writing, translating quirks are minimized. I also learned that the Latino market is largely a mobile market. Computer saturation is minimal in Latin America, but everyone has a cell phone. If you want to get into the game, expect to go mobile.
The Latino market is just beginning to flourish. One of the best quotes that seemed to encapsulate the landscape came from a speaker who said, “it’s like going back 5 years in the United States…banner ads still work in Mexico because the average user there isn’t jaded yet.” Sweet.
Sphere It