The new report from the Pew Hispanic Trust — Latinos Online — shows that 64% of all U.S. Hispanics use the Internet and that foreign-born Latinos have crossed the tipping point with 52% online. As the Hispanic audience grows, they seek new content and increasingly find and regularly visit foreign web sites.
Why is this happening?
“Search engines and social networking are making it easier for [U.S. Hispanic] consumers to find and consume content outside of their home country,” says Rafael Urbina, the CEO of Batanga. “As a result, country-specific brands, such as newspaper domains, are generating a significant portion of their traffic outside of their home market.” Read the rest of this entry »
After reading Felipe Korzenny’s and Lee Vann’s column about Hispanics’ adoption of social media relative to other ethnic demographics, a question came to mind: how will social networks affect the acculturation process among Hispanics? The ability to keep in touch with family and friends from countries-of-origin via email, Skype and online newspapers back home makes it easier than ever. Travel costs are at historic lows. And computer and mobile phone prices fall every year.
Combine these questions with the fact that more communities like Miami and McAllen, Texas, are reaching the tipping point of having a majority of Spanish speakers, and the question about how online media affects acculturation deserves some consideration. Six experts discuss this issue, after which you are invited to leave your comments, links to research and additional questions below. Read the rest of this entry »
The following is a preview to the forthcoming book – The Spanish Net: How to reach and segment the 136 million Spanish-speakers online – from Paramount Books.
Miguel “Mike” Ramirez, one of the founders of MedioTiempo.com, tells me that their site was officially “born” on February 7, 2000. When it launched, the U.S. Hispanic market didn’t even enter their mind. They built Medio Tiempo for Mexico. Back then, only two options existed for Mexican-Americans to find news about Mexican soccer: the TV stations Univision and Telemundo. Typically, coverage for teams like Chivas, Pumas or Americas would last only a few minutes during sports shows and possibly be reported by a Colombian newscaster. Today, 500,000 unique visitors (according to Google Analytics) visit MedioTiempo.com from the U.S. on a monthly basis, or about 20% of their total audience, without having invested a cent in promoting their site.
“If you make the site appealing to the Mexican user and give them the feeling of what it’s like to be back in Guadalajara or Mexico City for the game, they will return again and again,” says Mr. Ramirez. “This shows the importance of good content. The user is one click away from leaving your site.” Here’s a sampling of their video content on YouTube….
Chris Fleissner of Translations.com shared this video with me about how you can open up your site to the world and go after different markets. In it, Matt Hauser, the Director of Technology Sales at Translations.com, presents a new product of theirs and shows how it can help you capture new customers and grow revenue in new markets. Even if you want to grow your business domestically with U.S. Hispanics, for example, you should consider translating your web site into Spanish. The U.S. Hispanic market will represent $700,000,000 of spending power in the near future, according to Mr. Hauser. One of the biggest challenges to translating web sites is decentralized translation assets where IT and CMS assets may live in different parts of the world, so products like this one may solve that. Take a look…
If you’re a blogger, and not a major site, then Google Translate is always an option, which is what I use on my blog. You can see it on the lower right of the main (blog) page.
This fall, Coca-Cola launched an educational marketing initiative with the goal of helping Hispanics fulfill their dream of learning English. This is an important customer base as Hispanics represent one quarter of Coke’s domestic U.S. sales. To launch the program, Coke partnered with Lexicon Marketing, the developer and marketer of Inglés sin Barreras (English without Borders), the video-based English learning program in the U.S.
Reinaldo Padua, assistant vice president of Hispanic Marketing at Coca-Cola North America recently explained the two elements of the in-store and mobile promotion: Read the rest of this entry »
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