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….
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.)
Did you read this article – Malwebolence – from the New York Times’ magazine section this past weekend about the young “trolls” who harass and humiliate strangers? Scary. Wait a second. How much information about myself have I put online? Take a read. It will make you think twice about what information you put on your blog, Facebook profile, MySpace, etc. The term comes from the word malevolence.
To be fair though, the Times provides a good counter point to the scary trolls that they describe:
The news media continually present the online world as a Wild West infested with villainous hackers, spammers and pedophiles. And yet the Internet is doing very well for a frontier town on the brink of anarchy. Its traffic is expected to quadruple by 2012. To say that trolls pose a threat to the Internet at this point is like saying that crows pose a threat to farming.
Interesting article in the WSJ this morning arguing that Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” theory was incorrect. Instead, Lee Gomes highlights Harvard Professor Anita Elberse’s article in the Harvard Business Review called – Should You Invest in the Long Tail?
This quote really caught my attention from the WSJ article… Bloggers had a special role in taking up the [Long Tail] theory, which is no wonder considering how it held out the promise that even the most obscure among them could win a robust audience. The sad truth is that the blogosphere is as hit-driven as the rest of the world, with a tiny percentage of blogs getting a huge chunk of the traffic, and with many, many blogs simply going unread.
And this paragraph did as well… Prof. Elberse describes research showing that even in our cultural consumption we tend to be intensely social folks. We like experiencing the same things that other people are experiencing – and the mere fact that other people are experiencing and liking something makes us like it even more. Far from being cultural rugged individualists, most of us are only too happy to have others suggest to us what we’d like.
Also, thank you to my new friend Professor José María Álvarez Monzoncillo from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Mardrid for coming up with the term “The Short Tail.”
