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.”

“A large percentage of Hispanics visit sites from their country-of-origin, to be informed, to keep in touch, to keep up on what’s going on in their countries and how that can affect their families,” says Marta Martinez, the CEO of StarMedia.

Because of this trend, a number of ad networks have opened shop to serve the needs of advertisers looking to reach these Hispanics visiting foreign (mostly Latin American) web sites. In this article, I will answer a few questions about and then compare the leading ad networks that focus on the U.S. Hispanic market in the chart below.

Do Hispanics online care where web sites are based?
“The reality is that the user is not very concerned with where the site is from. They are looking for content and services that are relevant,” says Fernando Rodriguez, the CEO of Terra. “U.S. Hispanics have very strong ethnic pride that translates into their interest for culturally relevant content. This means that they will visit sites from their country of origin, in addition to some from other countries, including of course the U.S.”

“Given that the Internet is a global medium, we believe the trend [of globalization] will continue for many years,” says Urbina of Batanga. “The abundance of relevant international content will continue to attract U.S. Hispanics while content created for U.S. Hispanics will in turn attract those in Latin America and Spain.”

What are the benefits of an online advertising network?

* Provide scale and reach for big campaigns

* Allow marketers to quickly and efficiently optimize campaigns

* Lower CPM’s

* Utilize behavioral and contextual targeting with access to multiple types of inventory

* Country-of-origin targeting

* Specialized networks can provide mobile and video ad inventory

What are the benefits of working with a premium site?

* Greater control of where your ad runs

* Content integration (beyond display advertising)

* Sponsorship opportunities (Adjacencies to premium content)

* Integration on emerging media like mobile and video

And what are the drawbacks?
In the case of ad networks, the main minus is limited transparency (depending upon the reporting of the ad network). Ideally, you want to ask for contextual and behavioral reports as well as reporting by site. “Being transparent allows the advertiser to know exactly where their ads are running, at all times,” says Martinez of StarMedia, which promotes itself as a completely transparent network.

In the case of premium sites, the drawbacks include higher CPM’s and limited inventory as no single Hispanic site reaches more than 20% of the Hispanic audience online. In addition, it’s harder to scale with individual sites because of the challenges in dealing with multiple points of contact.

While Yahoo en Español doesn’t offer a network per se, according to Chris Emme, Yahoo represents eBay.com, Comcast.com, Walmart.com and ATT.com and can behaviorally target U.S. Hispanic users across those sites and Yahoo.com (in English).

What’s ahead for Hispanic ad networks? Christopher Stanley, CEO and Founder of Alcance Media Group, says, “We have seen a significant number of requests from marketers and completed campaigns based on specific country of origin targeting.” Stanley adds, “I do see an increase in the number of sites for specific countries such as Cuba or Venezuela that are being operated from the U.S.”

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.

“Latinos have strong ties to their heritage and country of origin,” says Alvaro Palacios, the Regional Director of Business Development at Terra. “According to Pew’s Latino Youth report, only 33% of second-generation Hispanics claims to be American first, while 41% still prefer to name their country of origin. Even with third-generation Hispanics, only 50% consider themselves American first.”

“The Internet is definitely helping with the acculturation process among U.S. Hispanics, with new generations consuming English content on local sites and being almost 100% integrated into the U.S. culture,” says Marta Martinez, the CEO of StarMedia. “On the other hand, a large percentage of Hispanics consume Spanish sites here and from their country of origin. What the Internet brings to all of us is diversity and choice.”

“Being able to understand the culture and institutions in the country they are immigrating to will continue to be important,” says Tamara Barber, an analyst at Forrester Research. “But, these different avenues of connecting back home will certainly encourage stronger ties to their countries of origin and could develop into a phenomenon that we see among Hispanic youth, where they are very truly straddling two cultures. The beauty of social media in a cross-border context is that it can actually help immigrants develop more of a bicultural existence.”

“Digital technologies have made it much easier to stay in touch with friends and family from wherever they may be; however, I tend to look at acculturation as a choice,” says Christopher Stanley, CEO of Alcance Media Group. “If you live in a country for numerous years and need to live and work in the language, “acculturation” will happen. As a U.S. native living in Chile, I could have easily chosen to surround myself with other ‘gringos’ living abroad. However, I made the effort to learn the language and culture. Technology may make it more comfortable to stay in a bubble, but it ultimately is a choice.”

“Online Hispanics (excluding mobile) are primarily English-language dominant, meaning they are either U.S. born (second-generation), or came to the U.S. at an early age,” says Maria Lopez-Knowles, SVP of MRM Worldwide. “They also have the economic means to afford the technology that allows them to stay ‘connected,’ which in and of itself assumes some level of acculturation. Online Hispanics would have to be living in a virtual existence practically 24/7 for this to happen. Regardless of how connected they are, they still live in the U.S. So while I don’t think it limits the acculturation process, I believe that it impacts and reinforces the retro-acculturation process.”

“Acculturation by definition is not assimilation; it is the layering of native cultural experiences into a new cultural context,” says Kevin Conroy, president of Univision Interactive Media. “In other words, layering in ‘home country’ experiences over ‘U.S.’ experiences. This is the reason the use of the Spanish-language is still growing (77% speak Spanish at home) — Hispanics have not assimilated and lost their language identity, instead they have maintained their passion for their language and culture and woven them into their U.S. Hispanic experience. To that end, the Web brings value to this dynamic; it enables U.S. Hispanics to more easily stay current with their home country and cultural passion points while remaining very much members of the U.S. Hispanic community.”

What do you think?

When Facebook’s director of sales in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, Blake Chandlee, presented at IAB Spain’s conference last month, he said in order to generate new demand for products, marketers need to move up the consumer funnel. “The power of the social graph is changing the discovery process,” he said. “The network of real connections through which people communicate and share information is the most influential way to reach someone.” More specifically, marketers can tap into these networks by utilizing a variety of targeting methods with information from Facebook users’ profiles like age, gender, interests and marital status. He shared a few more insights gained from sitting atop the EMEA social hub with me after the talk.

You mentioned in your presentation that your banner ad sales agreement with Microsoft would end in December 2009 because it wasn’t working. Why didn’t it work and what advertising programs are working?
The agreement with Microsoft to sell IAB standard banners will end on December 31 outside of the U.S. market, which represents 14 markets. The agreement is ending not because the partnership wasn’t working. We have an excellent relationship with Microsoft and this will continue as they are both an investor and a partner of ours in search, but because we found that traditional banner formats were not as effective on Facebook as the formats we have developed.

On Facebook there are two types of ad formats that serve very different needs.

1. On our home page we have developed the engagement ad format that allows brands to take advantage of the actions and behaviors taking place between people every day on Facebook, including making comments, taking polls, becoming fans of pages, watching videos and joining events. By enabling brands to integrate into these via an ad unit served to relevant audiences based on a brand’s objectives, and then allowing those branded actions to then be organically distributed via the social graph, we are integrating brands into the daily lives of users in a very natural way versus the old broadcast model. This promotes discovery and engagement of brands within Facebook in a very powerful, predictable and scalable way.

2. Our second ad product focuses on the performance advertisers. We have built a highly efficient and scalable ad platform that allows advertisers to target users on all pages outside of the home page with a simple image and text ad referred to as an ASU (ad space unit). These ads are targeted via a range of criteria including age, gender, location [and] keyword interests and are served within an online auction model allowing agencies and clients to optimize based on roi. By serving hundreds of billions of ad impressions a month, we are now seeing advertisers around the world generating campaigns that, in cases, drive more efficiency and volume than paid search.

Are your ad sales products sold in the same way across the world or do you customize products for each market? Do consumers typically respond the same way globally?
We are a technology company that views the world on a global basis, and builds platforms to reflect this but provides tools to consumers, developers and advertisers to localize based on their needs and expectations. In the case of advertising this would be geographically based. From this perspective, our ad products are similar globally and provide tremendous efficiency for global advertisers. We do, however, understand there are considerable differences locally and therefore are establishing local sales organizations to reflect these differences. Depending on where you are in the world, our teams will educate agencies and advertisers as to the value of Facebook as part of a communications strategy, in a way that is consistent with that country’s stage of development. That said, brands have a universal objective of establishing closer connections with users to build awareness, consideration, favorability and loyalty. These are areas that we are seeing tremendous success with leading brands in most markets.

You mentioned that Zara, Real Madrid, Rafael Nadal and the Prado Museum all have Facebook pages. How do Spanish brands, people or organizations like these grow their fan base in-country and across the world?
In many cases today, brands, celebrities, politicians, television shows, local restaurants and businesses will most likely build a page on Facebook where they establish a community. The advantage is that activity that takes place here has organic and viral attributes that allow brands to expand their presence through friends and families of their fans. By having the ability to publish into the newsfeeds of their fans, and delivering a message or content that is compelling enough for their fans to share, the brands can become part of the social fabric of people’s lives. This requires a commitment from brands to have an ongoing relationship and dialogue with users, to be authentic, to bring value to users consistent with their expectations, and to listen as much as publish. Brands such as Starbucks, Adidas, Nike, Ben & Jerry’s, AXE and others benefit from building robust, active and thriving communities. To scale these communities, brands or organizations will often choose to run paid marketing campaigns to relevant users on Facebook, typically through our engagement ad platform. Our local teams will help brands understand the targeting capabilities that best meet their objectives.

You mentioned that Facebook has 30 million Spanish-language users, or 10 percent of its entire user base. How does the growth of the Spanish-language market compare to other languages?
We do not typically publish language-based numbers, but Spanish is one of the world’s most common languages. Today Facebook is available in over 65 languages, whereas 18 months ago we were only available in English. We accomplished this enormous shift via crowd-sourcing of translation services, allowing our users to translate for us in a very predictive and scalable way. Spanish was our first translation and therefore very meaningful to us as a company.

Spain has 7 million Facebook users. How does Spain compare to your other Spanish-language markets in terms of total users, growth rates and usage patterns?
We are seeing tremendous growth all over the world in many different languages, Spanish being one of them, of course. We are very proud of our 7 million active users in Spain, and what is often overlooked is that 50 percent of our users come back daily, which is an unprecedented number. Southern Europe in general has been a very strong region due to the very social nature of the cultures, and Spain is no exception. We are very pleased with the growth, and excited that there continues to be upside and growth in the country.

Facebook’s international traffic grew from 7 percent to 70 percent over the past two years. This shows the power of a great idea combined with a well-designed, useful site can spread quickly. Can you confirm that statistic and are your ad sales growing in conjunction with the international growth rate?
That is correct and actually the time line was only 18 months! Due to the translation-services exercise we began last summer, our user growth has become increasingly international, although our core English-speaking markets, including the United States, are still seeing strong growth as well. Given we just opened our international sales efforts in the beginning of 2008, we are still building the infrastructure and organization required to accelerate these, but we are well on our way, having opened our international headquarters in Dublin, and established local sales offices in London, Paris, Sydney, Madrid, Milan, Stockholm and Toronto. These efforts and expansion will continue into 2010. We have been very pleased with the high level of interest and subsequent investment we are seeing as we enter new markets. Obviously we are delivering value and will continue to do so. International revenue growth is an important priority for the organization and we are pleased with the results to date.

Is social media moving us toward to a world organized more by language than by country?
We believe that the world is increasingly becoming globalized, and I am as likely to be friends with someone in Germany as I am with someone in France, England or the United States. Given [that] the fundamental value of social media is interaction with friends and family, often this is dictated more by culture and language than by borders – at least in our world this is true. That said, there are specific rules and regulations imposed at a country level that require us to operate locally at times which is important for us to recognize, and we use technology to scale this around the world.

Scott Heiferman, now famous for starting MeetUp.com, and Adam Seifer launched Fotolog, a leading photo sharing site, in 2002 as an online community for their friends in Brooklyn, NY to post photos and share them. Instead of building up a domestic fan base, as they thoughts would happen, their user base took them down an unexpected path, according to Yossi Langer, Chief Product Officer, and Arne “Joe” Jokela, Chief Technology Officer of Fotolog.

In 2005, Scott and Adam’s friend, Cora Ronai a journalist from Brazil, visited New York and was impressed by their site. She returned home, wrote an article about Fotolog for O Globo, Brazil’s leading newspaper, and within two months, Brazilian users outnumbered American users. The popularity of Fotolog then spread like wildfire to Argentina and Chile in 2006 and then jumped the Atlantic Ocean over to Spain and Portugal in 2007. That same year, traffic took off in the North of Mexico, especially around Monterrey. Today, Spain is their number one country, in terms of users.

Because the site hosts user-generated content and photos, the site became a Portuguese and Spanish-language site seemingly overnight. U.S. visitors now represent less than 5% of their total traffic and 12 languages are offered officially on the site. According to ComScore (September 2009) Fotolog saw 9.8 million visitors across Latin America, 2.4 million visitors in Spain and only 389,000 in the U.S. Alexa shows Fotolog as the 12th most popular site in Argentina.

Why is Fotolog still based in New York if only 5% of their user base lives in the U.S.? Yossi and Jo say that New York affords them connections to the investment, media and technology communities and a global perspective from which they can put together deals as needed. If they were to move their corporate headquarters to the city where they had the greatest number of users at any one time, in early 2009 it would have been Madrid, in the summer of 2009 it would have been Buenos Aires and in early 2010, it would have been Santiago, Chile.

Fotolog’s holding company, Hi-Media, based in Paris, France has three main business units:
1) An online advertising network
2) A content network, including Fotolog, where users pay for premium subscriptions
3) Mobile payments, the fastest growing area of their business

Advertising was Fotolog’s main source of revenue until Hi-Media launched their mobile payment product, at which point their premium content subscriptions took off. Why? Not many young Latin Americans have credit cards. So, their mobile payment service enabled Fotolog users to charge their premium subscription to their cell phone bill.

Mr. Langer, Mr. Jokela and Fotolog’s marketing team regularly converse with their users by email, sometimes even meeting with them in person. One “Flogger” (short for Photo Blogger on Fotolog) in particular caught their attention. Agustina Rivera, who goes by the user name “Cumbio,” started using the site when she was 14 and says that Fotolog provided a good platform for figuring out her identity. (“Cumbio” is play on the word “Cumbia,” a tropical-sounding dance music popular in Argentina, Colombia and the Caribbean.) In contrast, Facebook felt like putting yourself in a box. She uses Fotolog to connect with friends and organize weekly get togethers at the Abasto shopping mall in Buenos Aires. The Sunday night events have become so popular that they have spilled over to other nights of the week. Argentinean teenagers gather to socialize but in addition, Cumbio invites sex educators to the events to inform her followers about sexual health.

After becoming Argentina’s first Internet celebrity, Nike asked her to endorse their 3DG customizable shoes, the makers of Big Brother approached her with a reality TV show series and a local political party asked her to run for office. While she accepted the deal with Nike, the reality TV show did not work out and she has opted to finish school instead running for office.

According to the New York Times (In Argentina, a Camera and a Blog Make a Star, March 13, 2009)

The Cumbio craze really took off after Guillermo Tragant, president of Furia, a marketing company, discovered Ms. Vivero and the floggers last April [2008] while scouting for fresh faces for a Nike sportswear campaign. Nike wanted “real people from the streets,” Mr. Tragant said.

“The power of the image for them is so strong,” he said, noting the afternoon “matinee” parties where floggers gather and walk a catwalk posing for photos of one another. “The sensation that the famous floggers are living today is like what Hollywood movie stars experience walking the red carpet.”

To use Malcom Gladwell’s term from “The Tipping Point,” can we call Cumbio a “connector,” or someone who brings together many people who share a common interest? Clearly, she has great influence over her followers on Fotolog, as the hundreds of mall-goers have turned into thousands and has written a best-selling autobiography telling the story of her rise to fame (without even having finished high school). She makes more for a brief nightclub appearance than her father, a plumber, earns in two days. Has your brand identified influencers among your target audience online in Latin America as Nike has with Cumbio? What social networks do they use? What do they discuss online? What events do they organize and attend offline?

Originally, Fotolog found that about 80% of their users know everyone on their list. After running survey in January 2010, they discovered that that rule of thumb seems to have changed. Mr. Langer says, “People have become more promiscuous about adding users as friends. Now, 18% of users say they know everyone on their list while 51% of them know more than 50% of users on the list.” So, most people on Fotolog know only half of the people on their contacts list.

To shed some light on this dynamic, Mr. Langer introduced me to Danielle Goldstein, a longtime community associate at Fotolog who shared her thoughts on the two types of “connectors” on Fotolog.

Generally, on Fotolog there are two kinds of ‘popular’ accounts: hubs and connectors.

Cumbio started as a connector in a local sense and slowly turned into a hub as the number of her ‘fans’ increased to an unmanageable level. As for reactions to these two types of users, hubs are generally polarizing: either you are a fan or you really don’t like them. Connectors, on the other hand, usually only get adverse reactions to whatever area of interest they happen to have as opposed to personal attacks. For example, if they run a Fotolog about Miley Cyrus, users will complain about it or we’ll see an ‘anti-Miley’ account as opposed to targeting a specific username. There are rarely attacks on specific accounts, but if anyone doesn’t like a particular account, it usually comes from within that interest area as opposed to outside the fandom.”

Do you know a “Cumbio” in your target market?

Here’s a great diagram/illustration from David Gray about Language. He says:

Language is more than just communication; it is the primary method by which we do things together. Language is the accumulation of shared meaning – of common ground.

1) One-way communication: message sent
2) Two-way communication: Both sides feel understood
3) Collaboration: Thinking, planning and making decisions
4) Co-creation: Joint activity, making and doing

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 U.S. users find the site via search and word-of-mouth to get the latest, in-depth news about the teams that they love. Mr. Ramirez says this shows two things: the power of the Internet and the enthusiasm of soccer fans. Their user base perfectly reflects where Mexican-Americans live in the U.S.: 60% live in California and Texas while Arizona, Illinois and New York make up most everything else. In addition, their 2008 site survey showed that the visitors were almost entirely young men, below the age of 40, with over 90% of them owning a computer and cell phone.

Comments from their U.S. survey reflect users’ passion for soccer and desire to find hard-to-get sports news. Here are three select comments (translated from Spanish):

• “I like [MedioTiempo.com] because it’s an informative sports site that provides updates about what’s happening in the world of sports. I hope that you can continue informing us for a long time about Mexican soccer, especially my team – Cruz Azul. Congratulations for being the #1 medium for sports online. Greetings from Houston, Texas!”

• “I am a sports journalist based in Los Angeles and I’m always checking out Medio Tiempo for what you post on your site. In fact, I would be delighted to contribute to your site from Southern California”

• “Hi, my name is Juan. I am pleased with your site. The news allows me to find out what’s happening in the world of sports, without yellow journalism or anything controversial. You represent the positive side of sports with a good, impartial view. My team is “America” [soccer team based in Mexico City] and I follow their games on cable TV. Thank you for your site and I promise to be one of the faithful followers of your web site. Viva México!”

Looking ahead, Mike says that the worst strategy would be to maintain their current Mexico-centered approach. Medio Tiempo, which was acquired by Grupo Editorial Expansion (A Time Inc. Company) in 2008, instead needs to show U.S. Hispanics that they care enough to develop new products for them. With this in mind, Medio Tiempo is planning to launch a U.S. version of their home page with coverage of Major League Soccer (MLS) events, Mexican National Soccer Team games in the U.S. plus their core news about Mexico’s soccer teams. They have also put together a deal with Soccer United Marketing (SUM) who will sell their banner advertising inventory in the U.S. and promote the site among Spanish-speaking soccer fans. [SUM manages the promotional and marketing rights in the United States for Major League Soccer, the U.S. Soccer Federation, the Mexican National Team games in the U.S. and Club Deportivo Guadalajara (Chivas).] In addition, Medio Tiempo will expand their popular fantasy league to include visitors in the U.S. where that they can now enter to win prizes, such as a trip to the world cup games, whereas prior to 2010, the prizes were mainly available in Mexico.

If we were to make a heat map of MedioTiempo.com’s visitors in the U.S., it would probably look pretty similar to the Pew Hispanic Trust’s map below (with the exception of Miami) since Mexican-Americans make up just about 70% of the U.S. Hispanic population.

Or better yet, wouldn’t it look like the maps of the old Mexico since the heaviest concentrations of Mexican-Americans live to the North of the U.S.-Mexico border in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas? Prior to the Mexican-American war of 1848, these five states comprised the northern portion of old Mexico when California was known as “Alta California.” Absolut Vodka with their advertising agency Teran\TBWA created this “map-vertisement” billboard campaign for Mexico that tapped into Mexicans’ desire to return to an “Absolut,” (i.e. perfect) Mexico. While the company received a lot of criticism from their neighbors to the North, the campaign resonated well in Mexico. Your can read Deborah Bonello’s article on the L.A. Times or Absolut’s blog to learn about the details of the campaign.

In the virtual world, couldn’t we say that we already live in the “Absolut” Mexico? Medio Tiempo’s visitor traffic suggests that we do. Many Mexican-Americans already live in this larger, virtual Mexico where they keep in touch with family, friends and soccer scores online in Mexico even though they live in the U.S. However much controversy this billboard ad created, it provides a window of truth into the growth of the Spanish-language Internet.

In conclusion, do walls along the U.S.-Mexico border really matter to Hispanics online if they can experience their favorite soccer teams’ games as if they were in Guadalajara or Mexico City?

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.)

Even though the site was shut down in October of 2009, you could compare SoiTu.es to Apple’s early PDA device, the Newton. While neither the Newton nor SoiTu live on today, the Newton forecast Apple’s iPhone, and future publishers and content companies will copy SoiTu’s innovations. Let’s take a look at a few examples here.

First of all, SoiTu’s color-coded navigation created a unique identity for each content channel.

Second, SoiTu developed “El Selector de Noticias,” or “The Selector of News,” a community-powered feed where SoiTu users could share and recommend articles from 3rd party sites. You could describe it as a more user-friendly version of Yahoo’s Delicious bookmarking service combined with Twitter. What was the benefit for SoiTu in offering links to competitive sites? It built trust in their brand via their community members, encouraging them to visit the site again and again.

Third, their “I Love Publi,” or “I love advertising” blog covered advertising, design and media trends. It attempted to integrate advertising into the community-oriented site instead of maintaining the usual editorial vs. advertising mentality within media companies.

Most importantly, SoiTu.es established a media brand across the Spanish-language world based upon the meaning of SoiTu, or “Soy Tu,” literally “I am you” in Spanish, whereby they created a community of pro-sumer reader-contributor-promoters of their site. Instead of Fox News or CNN, for example, feeding news to its viewers, SoiTu’s community developed content, shared it with friends and fostered new readers and fans. Mr. Lafuente remembers Gabi Campanario, an illustrator based in Seattle, who scanned illustrations from his moleskin notebook, explaining what he drew in accompanying articles. After gaining a following on SoiTu, he later started his own community site with other illustrators from around the world who wanted to share scans of their moleskin notebooks with readers.

Might this example of scans from moleskin notebooks forecast how the web will evolve in the future, as more of a community-based and visual experience with less textual information?

Unlike the mass media, which covers scandals, accidents and gossip, SoiTu focused its content channels around areas of interest such as movies, music, sex, trends, digital life, health, food, gastronomy, design and architecture. Over 150 writers from around the Spanish-speaking world including Latin Americans and Spanish-expatriates contributed to Vida Urbana, or “Urban Life,” writing about daily living, fashion and leisure trends. Writers, architects, students and professors pitched their story about their corner of the world to the editorial staff of Vida Urbana who would then approve and edit the stories.

SoiTu took some great chances with their editorial efforts, especially “Hartos del Coche” or “Sick of the Car” (in English), since the auto industry advertises extensively online. The channel documented how citizens can enjoy cities on bikes or in-line skates and reduce air pollution and traffic. Without cars, we can live a more sustainable, healthier existence and enjoy greater mobility.

According to ComScore, as much as 49% (November, 2008) and as little as 22% (September, 2009) of SoiTu’s visitors came from Latin America. Mr. Lafuente noticed that both at SoiTu and at ElMundo.es when you launch an editorial product or tool for Mexico, for example, the traffic there would immediately spike without any advertising promotion or support.

The big challenge in building up an audience in Latin America is selling the advertising inventory there. Mr. Lafuente does not see it as a profitable option and whoever can do that is very ambitious. (I will count myself as one of the ambitious ones then.) He says the Hispanic and Latin American markets are very complicated and countries like Chile and Peru, for example, are very different. In addition, even though Spanish companies like Zara, Santander, BBVA, Endesa and Repsol have expanded throughout Latin America, they do not advertise globally.

On the other hand, the movie industry launches films globally on the same day in order to avoid problems with piracy. Warner Bros., Universal and the other film studios were forced to develop global advertising, marketing and communication programs to fight this issue. For that matter, any virtual or intangible product like music, film, travel reservations and now books (with the Kindle) all must consider global sales strategies and advertising plans because of the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, many of the professionals in the media business lack creativity, good planning and intelligence overall says Mr. Lafuente, and so the Internet advertising system doesn’t work very well.

In the end, SoiTu successfully built its ad sales revenues to almost $1M USD in 2009 and was on track to become profitable in 2011. But when their bank representative changed, they lost their financing and BBVA decided to close the site down. SoiTu was a great experiment, mixing communities, technology and editorial with new design templates. Fortunately, the editorial and publishing companies that will succeed in the future can follow SoiTu’s lead.

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.

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.

CROSSING BORDERS TO VISIT BLOG NETWORKS AND ELPAIS.COM
WebLogsSL, a 40-site blog network and blogging consulting company based in Madrid, finds that some of their blogs see up to 30% of their visitors coming from Latin America, especially its technology and parenting blogs, according to Julio Alonso, their CEO and founder. Their auto blogs, on the other hand, see very little international traffic as the car manufacturers produce different models for Latin America than in Spain. Globally, WebLogsSL’s sites receive 13.5 million unique visitors and 56 million page views per month.

When producing health content in Spanish, for example, Julio suggests analyzing the composition of traffic by geography and asking what other companies produce health content in Latin America. If there is a lack of health content in Latin America, then sites from Spain and the U.S. Hispanic market will see more traffic to their sites.

Grupo Zeta, a newspaper conglomerate in Spain, sees about up to 20% of its traffic from Latin Americans who have become fans of niche subjects covered on their sites and blogs, according to Luis Rull, the founder of Evento Blog España and Mecus a corporate blogging design, development and hosting consultancy who works with Grupo Zeta.

Medios y Redes, a 10-site blogging network and blogging consultancy based in Madrid, sees up to 20% of its traffic from Latin America. With the help of a few bloggers in Peru, they recently launched Dogguie.com and now see a majority of its visitors to that site coming from Peru. WebLogsSL has also expanded internationally by launching a new division in Brazil with two new sites: MotorPasion Brazil and tRendências.

Interestingly, the reverse can also happen where Latin American sites attract visitors from Spain. Fayerwayer.com, a popular technology blog based in Chile, has built a fan-base of readers in Spain and shows how publishers can conquer new markets virtually, especially with lower labor costs for writers in Latin America. Fayerwayer.com gets over 2 million visits and 3.9 million page views per month and represents the largest site in BetaZeta, a blog network in Chile with 10 sites, 5.6 million visits and over 12 million page views.

While blog networks have grown their niche audiences across the world, the large newspaper sites have also grown their audiences globally. ElPais.es changed its name to ElPais.com in 2007 just as Grupo Prisa, the corporate parent, changed the paper’s tag line to “El Periodico Global en Español” (The global newspaper in Spanish). At the same time, Grupo Prisa opened their largest newspaper site up to become a free site after years of requiring users to pay for it and loosing audience to ElMundo.es. Visitors from Latin America represent over 50% of ElPais.com’s visitors and so ElPais.com launched a version of its site for the Americas in 2009, with ElMundo.es shortly thereafter following suit.

MOVING EDITORIAL OPERATIONS TO LATIN AMERICA = LOWER COSTS
If readers cross borders to consume content and bloggers can build audiences abroad, what does this mean for journalists? Luis Rull sees that fewer and fewer journalists at major newspapers will work in their office. Instead, they will work virtually from home, or writers in Latin America, where labor costs are much cheaper, will replace them. Medios y Redes, for example, pays between one and five Euros per post and up to 20 Euros for a sponsored post. While journalists in Spain cannot support themselves from such a pay scale, in Latin America, it can add up to a decent salary. In the U.S. Hispanic market, AOL Latino, ImpreMedia and Univision all produce content for the U.S. market from Mexico. Televisa of course has been producing TV content for Univision’s U.S. consumers for decades.

While outsourcing editorial is already happening, outsourcing Web development is a few steps ahead. Daniel Rodrigo of Medios y Redes says they outsource their development to Colombia, a trend that Daniel only sees increasing as the media business is forced to cut costs and look for cheaper alternatives. And if a web team speaks English, then they can outsource web development to India where it’s even cheaper than Colombia.

Luis Galan, the Head of eBusiness at ElPais.com and Box.net their ad network, says that freelance journalists will increasingly have 360-degree responsibilities where they each write articles, shoots videos and take photos. In addition, he says that they may offer a pay-to-blog model in the future where ElPais.com would allow influencers to blog on their site as citizen journalists and then promote their entries. While they offer that service for free today, since El Pais is the leading global brand for news in Spanish, Luis wonders how El Pais could sell services around their blogs.

UNIVERSAL VERSUS LOCALIZED SPANISH
Between the Spanish “discovery” of Latin America in the 15th Century and today’s growth of the Spanish-language Internet, the regional differences in Spanish have increased dramatically over the centuries. Even with those differences, millions of Latin Americans visit sites from Spain, which suggests that consumers can overlook a few differences in the Spanish language in exchange for reading helpful, big-picture democratic news and information. More importantly, it points out the need to have a Universal Spanish language online. Don’t most news organizations avoid writing in slang anyway?

Mr. Alonso of WeblogsSL recalls one funny story about how El Mundo reported a bullfight describing a “aparatosa cogida,” or “fatal stabbing” in Spanish from Spain. Unfortunately, that same phrase means “pompous goring” or “pompous f*#king” in Mexico. If you were the editorial director of El Mundo, wouldn’t you at least consider adjusting the Spanish used in your newspaper to make it less sexually offensive to an Internet market, like Mexico, that has more Internet users than Spain? And with a name like “The World,” wouldn’t you hope that the editors would encourage using a universal Spanish?

In addition, he cited The “Concha de Oro” (“Golden Shell” in English) film prize at the San Sebastian (Spain) film festival which provides another potentially offensive example of the differences in Spanish. How do you report who wins a major film prize in Europe when its name means “The Golden Pussy” in Argentina, for example?

Daniel Rodrigo of Medios y Redes cited a number of differences between the Spanish of Latin America and Spain.
Mexico Spain
• Laptop Portátil
• Video Vídeo
• Celular Movil
• Tomar Coger
• Computadora Ordenador

Mr. Rodrigo also gave examples of how the Real Academica Española (RAE) is stridently avoiding the English-isms or Spanglish that Mexico and Latin America have easily adopted, especially when it comes to technological terms. For example, RAE translates “CD-ROM” as “cederrón” and “Blue Jeans” as “bluyins” whereas in Mexico they would simply say “CD-ROM” or “Jeans.” Mr. Rodrigo suggested visiting Hoygan.com.es to see some funny examples of mis-spelled Spanish. (“Oigan” is the plural command of “to listen” but in this case its spelled phonetically as “Hoygan.”)

If individual words can be confusing, what about idioms, or slang in phrases? Mr. Rodrigo gave a few examples during a trip he made to Colombia to visit his programming team. Instead of saying “lo siento,” or “I’m sorry,” a few Colombians said “Que pena con usted,” which to him meant “what a pity with you.” Or when he arrived at the airport, they asked him, “Me regalas tu nombre,” or literally “gift me your name,” instead of saying, “Dame tu nombre,” or “Give me your name.”

The slang and idioms of spoken Spanish highlight greater differences between the 22 Spanish-speaking countries than the more formal, written version of the Spanish language. But even newscasters can speak in a formal, spoken Spanish via video. Naysayers of Universal Spanish, such as the language service providers (LSP’s) who translate web sites, say that the Spanish in each country is different. But reading a slightly different version of Spanish is still much easier than reading English online. As such, this points us in the direction of using a Universal Spanish online. Or, at the very least, the Internet just may be the biggest force to linguistically unify the former Spanish empire.

WHAT’S AHEAD FOR THE SPANISH ONLINE?
What does the future hold for Spanish-language media? Mr. Alonso sees combinations of editorial policy and technology that create new products, helping us to relate to and distribute content in new ways. Most media companies today are too focused on content he says. Mr. Rull sees a future with GPS-powered, geo-targeted local content on mobile phones with hyper-niche content.

Mr. Galan thinks that maps will power the next wave of online advertising on HTML pages as well as on mobile applications. By providing local services, sites can better localize their sites. In addition, he says we are in an age of massive disintermediation in the media business. Take a look at Happing.com, Coke’s social network in Spain, which shows how advertisers don’t need media companies as they did before. As such, he sees a future where the relationship between the employee and supervisor will go away and instead the risk will be shared between media, advertising and editorial partners.

In conclusion, during my visit to Spain the attendants at the front desk of the hotels where I stayed were from Latin America. Upon asking them what sites each of them visited regularly, the manager of my hotel in Seville often visited ElDeberDigital.com from his native Bolivia. And the attendant at my hotel in Madrid often visited El Comercio’s site from his native Ecuador.

And here is one of my favorite photos from my trip…

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.

1. Listen
2. Share of Voice/messaging
3. Set Goals and Benchmarks
4. Find communities/bloggers that matter
5. Identify Influencers
6. Create a content strategy
7. Choose tools
8. Create and deliver content
9. Engage and facilitate conversations
10. Measure

Also, be sure to check out here social media newsroom template here at Press Feed.