Reaching out to Latinos? Digital Video Paves your Way in

On January 27, Google announced its strategy to tap into the U.S. Hispanic market (as they call it). Since then, you can still feel the shockwaves of their efforts across the blogosphere. For more details, you can read ClickZ’s Giovanny Rodriguez recap or Chiqui Cartagena’s coverage of what when down in the event. I was also lucky to be among the attendees. However, of all the panelists, TV Azteca’s Director of Innovation Juan Manuel Rowland did the most striking presentation of the afternoon.

As Cartagena explains, “The TV Azteca presentation blew me away — although it mainly focused on what the company is doing in Mexico, I believe the next big thing in the Hispanic market is video online. And I don’t mean putting TV clips online; I mean creating original content for the online audience.” This is exactly the point that I want to highlight in this blog post.

TV Azteca’s project is called IrreverenTV. They basically identified the most talented YouTube video bloggers across Mexico, put them together under one roof and gave them all the resources to create quality content for YouTube. Do you think this idea could be a risky bet with no tangible results? Look for a chair before you keep reading, you’re going to need it.

First, TV Azteca made an alliance with Google, who owns YouTube. That was an excellent way to start. Since December 2006, according to their YouTube page profile, they have harnessed jaw-dropping results. Check them out:

TV Azteca on YouTube:

• They upload 70 percent of the content they produce daily.
• They have more than 30 active channels today.
• 650 million streams to date. (The presentation was done January 27, 2011)
• Over 2 million stream per date.
• From all their traffic, 15 percent belong to viewers in the United States.
• AzAmerica is the number one channel in Latin America by streams and revenue. Yes, I said revenue (although, we don’t know how much but they seemed pretty satisfied about it at the event).
• It is also the number one Spanish-language YouTube channel in the United States.

(Source: Google US Hispanic marketing Forum Event Sizzle Reel video)

But what does all this mean for the emerging video bloggers, small business owners and even big companies that have not cracked the code on how to connect with Latinos? For all of you, go rescue your digital camera from the bottom drawer and charge the batteries. Digital video will definitely help you break some old barriers you have with your audience and build new bridges. If you are not exited about the power of YouTube, check Mashable’s “10 YouTube facts that may surprise you.”

In my next blog post, I will discuss how companies must move away from the language paradigm when marketing to Latinos. It is all about the culture baby!

This article was originally published on Being Latino Online Magazine.

Five Reasons Why Groupon Could Hit Gold with Latinos

Groupon

Plenty of cash flows for start-ups like Groupon, a company that sells daily discount deals using their website and social media sites. In a bold move, they rejected a whooping $6 billion takeover bid from Google. Instead, they are working the details to offer their first I.P.O. with a market valuation of $15 billion. In the meantime, they also raised $950 million from private investors, according to The New York Times. These numbers show how confident investors are in the power and potential of collective coupon sales.

But how does this work? In a nutshell, Groupon and other companies like LivingSocial design tailored daily discount offers with merchants, and then offer them to a growing database of more than 24 million people and 150 cities in the Unites States alone. Shoppers sign up on their website and provide their ZIP Code to receive daily promotions. The trick to offer anywhere from 50 up to 90 percent discounts is that a determined minimum amount of people must commit to the sale before it is activated. Once that minimum is reached, the deal is on. The sweetness of this service for small business owners is that they can deploy marketing campaigns with no money upfront. Also, it is a gateway to the growing online market for small businesses that don’t have an established web presence.

Imagine what this service can do for Latino businesses nationwide. Let’s enumerate the best five reasons why the Latino market is fertile ground for Groupon:

1. Economic growth is led by Latinos: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “the number of Hispanic-owned businesses in the United States increased by 43.7 percent to 2.3 million, more than twice the national rate of 18.0 percent between 2002 and 2007.” Like most immigrants, Latinos are natural entrepreneurs.

2. Social media is dominated by Latinos: The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project determined that 18 percent of Latinos use Twitter compared to 13 percent of Blacks and 5 percent of Whites. Also, Latinos are closing the gap on Internet usage. Just ask Being Latino or Latinos in Social Media (Latism) for some traffic data. Your jaw may drop.

3. Purchasing power: A recent report from the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia Terry College of Business says that despite the recession, the Latino market is expected to grow 50 percent, from $1 trillion in 2010 up to $1.5 trillion in 2015. We are working and spending, a lot!

4. Acculturation levels: The old notion that Spanish is the only language to connect with Latinos in the United States has been debunked. A white paper from comScore says that 70 percent of Latinos prefer to surf the Internet in English. Companies like Groupon just need a little seasoning on cultural intelligence and voila! This could be one of the best business opportunities of the decade.

5. Mobile Internet is also our turf: Sharing the top spot with Blacks, English-speaking Latinos are “the most active users of the mobile web.” So far, we text, take pictures, and access the Internet, among other things. The next frontier? Shopping online using our smartphones.

The original article was published on the Being Latino blog.

Latinos in 2012: Vote out Loud!

With a new holiday season kicking in and facing a last push to get a vote on the DREAM Act, the November 2^nd midterm elections seems like a distant memory. The results show the growing influence of Latino voters in swing states like Florida and New Mexico. They also secured key races for governor and the U.S. Senate in California for the Democratic Party by repelling GOP advances in the state with most Latinos in the nation. Most notably, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) retained his seat by winning over Tea Party favorite Sharon Angle thanks to  “her inability to stop saying crazy things” like advising young rape victims to make “lemons into lemonade.”

Despite these important milestones, campaigns from grassroots organizations like the National Association of Latino elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) among others, left the aftertaste of being too little too late. They were effective, no doubt about it; however, they failed to motivate Latinos voters to achieve their true electoral potential. According with the Pew Hispanic Center, Latinos represented the same eight percent of all voters in 2010 as they did in 2006. However, the number of eligible Latinos to vote this year grew to approximately 19.2 million voters from an estimated 18 million in 2006.

As the national Spanish-speaking media started to turn up the volume and “banging the drum of [the] ‘you have to go vote, you have to go vote,’” the enthusiasm among voters picked up traction starting only until the first week of October, Latino Decisions reported. Once the campaigns were in full swing, social media also played a key role on reaching wider audiences. On November 28, Latinos in Social Media (LATISM) invited Univision’s Martin Berlanga to participate in a Twitter party on the importance of voting for Latinos. The tweetchat achieved an impressive 8.1 million impressions in one night, according to LATISM’s Vice-Chair Elianne Ramos.

(For the not social media savvy, impressions means how many times people saw tweets about the party’s hashtag.)

They all seem like successfully calculated efforts given the positive election results against the most radical anti-immigrant candidates. However, imagine what they could have accomplished if the media heavyweights had devoted their full resources to these campaigns way earlier in the game. This fast-and-furious approach didn’t spark enough interest among many freshmen citizens who may suffer psychological roadblocks thanks to years of discrimination and disenfranchisement. Let’s not forget that the naturalization process is long, hard, and expensive plus many have to deal with their own negative preconceptions on civic participation. Also, the high educational gap between Latinos and Whites remains disadvantageous against the former.

For the 2012 presidential elections, we should expect that the traditional political parties will diligently work to enfranchise Latinos. However, neither party seems to have even a remote idea on how to tally our votes. Right now, they are busy putting down their own fires rather than making a sincere effort to reach out. Democrats have lost their luster with the electorate and face an uphill battle to reelect President Barack Obama on 2012. On the flip side, Republicans remain overconfident between their trepid loses and surprising gains thanks to a new lot of conservative Latino politicians. For illustration, read the opinion from Representative (TX-R) Lamar Smith and a counter argument from columnist Edward Schumacher-Matos on the Washingtonpost.com.

So what to do next? As NCLR’s Director for Immigration Clarissa Martinez-De-Castro writes, a “meaningful outreach is essential.” For sure, both parties will make their best effort to win the Latino vote; at the same time, grassroots leadership must capitalize on their media partners’ increasing clout. Univision is already the number five national network in the nation and seem poised to “surpass the Anglo networks in seven years, even without the boost provided by growth in the Hispanic population,” AdWeek reports. What a better opportunity to rev up their campaigns starting today and entice every able Latino to go out and vote.

This article was originally published in the LatinoPoliticsBlog.com.

Facing the Integration Challenge AS/COA Online 07/24/08

New U.S. citizens take the oath of citizenship on July 4, 2008. (AP Images)

Since U.S. Congress failed to approve comprehensive immigration legislation last year, states and local governments have proposed or passed a myriad of immigration laws. While the typically strict laws fall short of providing a national policy to resolve the fate of roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants, legal residents also face setbacks and hurdles to integration. Immigration raids occurring in factories and companies across the country have affected legal and undocumented workers alike, even as business leaders warn of a dearth of workers.

Reports of citizens and legal immigrants wrongfully detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) have increased in the last six months. USA Today reported last month that 114 citizens have sued the federal government because they were wrongfully arrested during a raid in a California factory in February. A letter sent to Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff and ICE Assistant Secretary Julie Myers by the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law accuses ICE with the “blatantly unconstitutional use of ‘group detentions’” during such raids. The Dallas Morning News recaps a sampling of situations through February 2008 in which citizens or legal residents—usually of Mexican background—were arrested and even deported in some cases.

But not only offended citizens respond to the repressive methods used by ICE or punitive laws approved (44 state legislatures approved immigration laws in in the first quarter of 2008 alone). A recent article in the New York Times examines how business leaders are fighting to soften harsh anti-immigrant laws in states such as Arizona and Oklahoma, where employers face a shortage of unskilled labor. They also express frustration with the controversial E-Verify system put in place by the federal government to check the authenticity of workers documents, saying the system is prone to errors based on faulty information in the databases from which it draws information.

In addition to the anxiety created by raids, legal immigrants face other obstacles that hinder their advancement in the workplace and in their communities. Many Hispanic immigrants must overcome limited English proficiency, modest financial literacy, and a lack of cultural familiarity. A new white paper as part of the AS/COA’s Hispanic Integration Initiative documents private sector best practices in workforce and community integration and serves as an opportunity to build support for their expansion. Presented at bipartisan Capitol Hill event on July 24, the white paper demonstrates a collective commitment by private sector leaders to integrating immigrant communities. The Hispanic population—the biggest and fastest growing U.S. minority—has a collective purchasing power that surpassed $800 billion in 2007. This year, the nearly 2.2 million Hispanic-owned businesses are expected to generate an estimated $389 billion in revenues.

Hispanics find themselves targeted not only for their growing economic might, but also their electoral power. Even in this area, legal immigrants face hurdles: Delays in processing immigration documents could keep tens of thousands of Latinos awaiting citizenship from voting in November presidential elections. Though immigration reform remains a political hot potato that many politicians remain reluctant to handle, presidential hopefuls have been courting a Latino vote that could serve as a decisive. Some swing states that previously voted Republican appear to lean toward presumptive Democratic candidate Barack Obama, based on a recent poll conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center. NPR provides extensive coverage on the Latino vote and its importance for both candidates.

In the Summer 2008 issue of Americas Quarterly, President of ImmigrationWorks USA Tamar Jacoby analyzes the current immigration reform conundrum and advocates for restructuring the U.S. visa system to avoid perpetuating a cycle by creating another generation of undocumented workers.

Read AS/COA’s analysis of the ongoing campaign to secure the Latino vote and how the state legislatures tackle immigration.

Read the article as originally posted at the AS/COA website.

Download a PDF file here.