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.)
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.
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.
Many U.S. Hispanic publishers and e-commerce sites find that when they launch a site in Spanish targeting U.S. Hispanics many Latin Americans find their site for a number of reasons:
1) Their site has been optimized for search and so other Spanish-speakers find the site
2) 136 million consumers read in Spanish online, most of whom live outside of the U.S.
3) Sites in the U.S. and Spain typically feature better-produced content than in Latin America
4) Since there isn’t enough content in Latin America, Internet users find foreign sites in Spanish via search
5) Many U.S. Hispanic sites don’t have a landing page for users outside of the U.S.
6) It really is the World Wide Web
Interestingly, publishers in Spain can teach U.S. Hispanic publishers and e-commerce companies about how to best manage cross-border content consumption and grow audiences internationally. During a recent visit to Spain, I learned what a number of Spain’s interactive publishing leaders had to say. Read the rest of this entry »
A few weeks back, I had the chance to see Sally Falkow of Proactive Report present “Social Media: Moving Beyond Trial and Error” at the University of Chicago’s Gleacher Center. Of all of the self-proclaimed “social media experts” (e.g. snake-oil salesmen), Sally brings seriousness to the social media PR business with her ten-step process, which you can see here below her presentation from SlideShare. Read the rest of this entry »
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=e36c1fc3-be96-4683-bffe-4197b67db4ae)
Subscribe by email »
Subscribe by RSS »
Follow me on Twitter »
Join me on LinkedIn »
Join me on Facebook »
Join me on Flickr »
RECENT COMMENTS