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.
Put yourself in the shoes of a bi-lingual or Spanish-preferring U.S. Hispanic and try searching in Spanish on Google, Yahoo or MSN and what do you find? A good portion of the results, sometimes approaching 50%, come from sites based in Mexico, Spain, and other Spanish-speaking countries.
Let’s look at some examples I found recently on the first page of natural (not paid) results on Google.com:
1) Vuelos a Nueva York (flights to New York): 9 out of 10 were foreign
2) Restaurantes en Los Angeles (restaurants in L.A.): 6 out of 11 were foreign
3) Recetas mexicanas (Mexican recipes): 5 out of 10 were foreign
4) Computadoras baratas (cheap computers): 6 out of 10 were foreign
Globalization of Information and News
However surprising this may be, we need to look no further than Google’s corporate mission statement to see why this is the case: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google and other search engines index sites globally while we marketers, agencies and media sellers work within the economic and political borders of the U.S.
A search engine robot ranks results in each language by keyword ranking, the quality of the content and the number of sites that link to that site (with a possible preference to sites based within that country’s borders). So, when a Hispanic searches for a niche subject that a Hispanic publisher hasn’t provided in Spanish, where will a U.S. search engine send them? Wherever else in the world that content exists online in Spanish: Mexico, Spain, Argentina, etc.
In a recent report from Pew Hispanic Center, U.S. Hispanics represented over 50% of the U.S. population growth since 2000. In our current economic climate, one would think that that be the kind of growth that marketers would aggressively seek out. While Hispanic media investment overall has grown considerably, especially television, the online ad segment has under-indexed relative to general market online spending even though the U.S. Hispanic audience is more open to brand suggestions and advertising messages, as shown in a recent eMarketer report.
Will Hispanic marketers shift their investments towards online as the general market has and as new tools and targeting technologies improve? Some leading agencies, online publishers, and technology companies have met marketers’ needs with new marketing approaches for this growing audience.
This article brings together experts in online marketing to U.S. Hispanics to share their insights on targeting options such as geo-targeting, behavioral, contextual, search, and others to more effectively segment and reach the U.S. Hispanic audience with multiple levels of acculturation across a fragmented online media marketplace. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently, an architectural firm in SF contacted me about using this photo of mine from Flickr: View from the Miyako Hotel in Japantown. Initially, I was really excited. Cool! Someone is willing to pay for a high-res version of my photo. Then, after sleeping on it, I realized…wait, who ISN’T paying for my photos? This of course scared me. I checked the license that I had established on my flickr account as well as the sharing capabilities on my account settings. At the time, my photos were a mix of using no rights, copyright, and creative commons. While I am a huge fan of using the 6 varieties of creative commons, as I documented on this post on my blog, the photographer in me got scared of allowing my photos to float out into the web world. I am still debating whether to use one of the creative commons licenses or full copyright.
From the user’s perspective, Google Images is just so easy to use. And it of course rewards webmasters who optimize their images for search with tags and keywords by delivering visitors to their web sites. But is it too easy? And does it encourage the stealing of images and an overall mindset that images should be free?
I agree with the environment that Flickr encourages on its Community Guidelines, one that enables sharing while requiring respect for the photographer creator. In contrast, the current copyright laws are so inflexible with such black and white views of what can and cannot be used, remixed, etc that they don’t really work in the era of digital media where remixing is all about attributing credit to their source via blogging, podcasting, linking and crediting. Yet, how many bad apples are out there stealing photos without the proper attribution? Will users really take the time-consuming and costly high road and reach out to photographers to ask for the photo?
If there’s one buzzword that has spread like wildfire through the entire media business in the last five years, it is blogs.
Universal McCann’s global “Power to the People” Social Media Tracker study says that “blogs are a mainstream media worldwide and as a collective rival any traditional media,” with 73 percent of respondents saying they have read a blog.
The majority of the 184 million blogs worldwide are of the personal nature, according to Universal McCann’s study, and a recent eMarketer report states that there are 25 million bloggers in the U.S. alone.
The eMarketer study says that 67 percent of the U.S. online population — 104 million people — reads blogs, showing that blogging has become a truly mass media.The number of blog readers will continue to grow to 145 million by 2012.
The growth in readership reflects the consumer’s desire to participate with information, not just consume it. Younger consumers especially seek edgier and more personal sources of content than what is offered by the formal approach of mass media.
While blog readership has exploded, advertising investment represented only 1.34 percent of online spending in 2007, and eMarketer estimates it will grow to 1.46 percent by 2012.According to that estimate, U.S. blog advertising will increase from $283 million in 2007 to $746 million in 2012.
Today, corporate marketers are asking “do we need a corporate blog?” and “how do we participate in the conversation?” Look at any major media brand’s website and you will almost always find featured blogs as a way to update the brand’s online persona.
As marketers become increasingly interested in participating in the conversation of the blogosphere and proactively focusing their customer service efforts on what is being said about the brand online, a number of blog advertising networks have emerged. These networks offer marketers scale and control in advertising on blogs and social media sites and have succeeded by quickly growing revenues in recent years.
The following is an overview of major blog networks including BlogAds, Gawker Media, Technorait, Federated Media, Google, Forbes’ Business Blog Network and Izea, owner of two blog advertising services: SocialSpark and Pay Per Post.
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