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.
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.)
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 »
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…
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