An odd thing happened in August on Coca-Cola's Facebook page.
The post, written in Portuguese to celebrate Student Day, was evidently a geotagging glitch in the brand's global Facebook program. But the technical mishap set off such a vitriolic wave of xenophobia amongst U.S. fans that- according to AdAge Mobile - the global soft drink manufacturer was forced to remove the remarks from the page.
Evidently, not unprecedented, the Coke incident was preceded by a similar incident in 2009 when BestBuy asked its Facebook fans whether they thought it should have a Spanish site.
In an era of borderless global social media, Localspeak- a company that specializes in multilingual brand communications- was struck by the mono-cultural rage posted by American fans. This Facebook incident prompted us to reread the white paper Global Social Media Usage and the Language Factor, published by L10NBridge in 2010.
The white paper, which reported the findings of a large-scale, global survey of approximately 3,800 social media users, explored cross-national differences in business and personal use of social media; social media platform popularity by country; top languages used to create social media, and social media use preferences for English vs. local language. While local language preference in social media usage varied widely, the prevalent trend showed significant local language predilection over English among half of the top 10 countries surveyed: China 86%; Finland 38%; Italy 78%; France 63%; Spain 60%.
Yet, as AdAge Mobile reporter Matt Creamer also conjectured- that some people seem to think Facebook is a uniquely American brand-that thought is far from the truth:
"An estimated 80% of Facebook's active users are outside the U.S., with (Portuguese-speaking) Brazil and India growing at a rate of 23% and 11%, respectively, between February and May 2011, according to ComScore. That's compared to 4% growth in the U.S over the same time period. If Mark Zuckerberg and company want to get to 1 billion users, they'll need that international growth, and if they want to properly monetize the network, they'll need those global brands to be able to act globally."
As Creamer suggests:
"The episode provided an interesting glimpse at ideas of how geography-less social networks interact with ideas of nation, which is a doctoral dissertation waiting to be written if there ever was one."