Interview With Creator of Twitteros, Matt Reyes
I’ve had the pleasure of bouncing some questions of Matt Reyes, creator of Twitteros. If you’re not familiar with Twitteros, think of it being an extension of Twitter, but Latino based.
Matt is an Austin-based digital media strategist and founder of the Department of Influence, the company behind Twitteros.
1. What is Twitteros? Twitteros.net has two purposes: 1.) It is a place to find and follow other Latinos on Twitter. 2.) It is also a place to extend the conversation from Twitter. For example, if there has been commentary on a particular subject, I’ll usually do a blog post or a podcast so that Twitteros can have a place to thoroughly discuss the issue.
2. Where did you get the idea from? Ever since reading books on bottom-up theory in college, I felt there was a need for something to exist that gathered digitally influential Latinos and showed our varied opinions and power on topics from business to politics. So, Twitter was the perfect platform since it had all of the principles I was looking for: unfiltered, public, and connected to the mainstream.
3. Where do most of your users come from (country/nationality)? Most of them are American-based or born with ethnicities varying from mostly Mexican to Puerto Rican backgrounds. Although, we do have a few members from Brasil and other South American countries.
4. How is the site doing in terms of growth? Doing well so far. This idea started as a side project of mine all based on word-of-mouth. We are now up to 400 members. I’m more concerned with trying to build community through quality than quantity though. I’d rather have 100 very active members than 20,000 somewhat-active members.
5. Why are Hispanics so inclined to social media? It’s in our blood to be social. I think Cristy Clavijo-Kish, VP of Multicultural Markets for PR Newswire, explained it well in the webinar I paneled with Manny Miravete, former MySpace VP, and Clara Shih, author of the Facebook Era. But, the principles of being transparent and collaborative (rather than private and competitive) behind this bottom-up movement are even more important to recognize as an extension of our culture.
6. What is the future of Hispanics and social media? I would hope that the future would be to make the outreach and the technology more available to Hispanics with lower-income levels. It’s a democratic issue in my opinion.
7. What purpose does Twitteros fill? The most simple purpose it fulfills is connecting Latino Twitter users, and even more so by their interests. You can search for Latinos who tweet about everything ranging from art to food to travel. Twitter doesn’t easily allow that sort of search.
8. By having a Spanish content social media site are you adding to online segregation? Not sure I understand your question, but I’ll try to answer. Twitteros is not thrust forward by its language (which is actually English-dominant with sprinkles of español and português), but moreso the culture, just as TwitterMoms does for mothers. The reason I wanted to connect digitally influential Latinos using Twitter as a platform was because it was already connected to the mainstream (the last thing we need is to be segregated from what is now considered the pulse of the world). One thing that has come out of this whole experiment, is that we have members who don’t consider themselves culturally Latino, want to learn more about us and actually connect with Latinos on Twitter as a result of the service Twitteros offers them.
9. Do you have any other sites? Purpose? You can visit my blog at http://mattreyes.com/ where I discuss bottom-up issues as they relate to organizations and my generation (Millennials).
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