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….
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.
How can we develop great content online for the Spanish-language world in the years ahead? Much like the Madrid-based blog networks in my previous post, we can answer this question by looking to one of the leaders of publishing in Spain: Gumersindo Lafuente, who founded SoiTu.es, a truly innovative content portal, previously ran the newspaper site ElMundo.es and as of January, 2010 became a co-director of ElPais.com.
Mr. Lafuente feels that news organizations must do a better job of integrating information and technology to figure out new ways to distribute and consume content. This is why he hired programmers to work in-house to develop SoiTu’s own back-end systems including their content management system, ad server, and UTOI, a Twitter-for-journalists that could scan text, suggest tags and create a better way to organize journalistic information. From the readers’ perspective, SoiTu offered search tools by keyword, theme and date and fully integrated social media style commenting, encouraging users to register on the site.
Here, you can see SoiTu’s weather, lottery, soccer and skiing widgets that they developed for consumers to use in iGoogle, Apple’s dashboard, on blogs or wherever you want to include the code. (However great RSS is, Mr. Lafuente admits that the vast majority of users don’t set up a custom RSS page on Google Reader.)
My friend Joshua Cody and I have been enjoying watching some of the videos on TED.com recently including this one from Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy, who argues that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider “real” value. He goes on to show how advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself, and gives some humorous examples from history. Take a look…
“Multicultural marketing is at the core of Western Union’s business,” said Gail Galuppo, EVP and CMO of Western Union at the ANA’s Multicultural conference recently. She shared with the attendees how Western Union launched their new “Yes!” campaign in 22 languages across 200 countries with the goal of making a more emotional connection with their consumers. Ms. Galuppo says that “Yes! is a culture, especially among immigrants who hear a lot of “No.”
Who is their target audience? It is the 200 million international immigrants from markets like Haiti, where remittance services represent 40% of GDP, or Mexico and India where transfers from the U.S. represent 3-8% of the local economy. In total, remittance services were a $368 billion dollars globally in 2008, growing 3x the rate of the global economy. Read the rest of this entry »
Scott Monty gave an insightful keynote presentation at the OMMA conference last week about how Ford uses social media to listen and respond to its customers. Check out his presentation below and their Fiesta Movement social media site where 100 “agents” document their 6-month trial of a Ford Fiesta via Flickr, Twitter, blogs, etc.
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