Themes in Hispanic social media

Zia Daniell Wigder | June 04, 2008, 03:09 PM

I spent the day yesterday at ad:tech Miami, an event focused on the US Hispanic and Latin American marketplace. Very strong turnout, especially given it was only the second time they’d held this event.

During the afternoon, I moderated a panel on Hispanic social media with Jose Rivera-Font from Yahoo! Hispanic Americas, Rick Marroquin from Batanga and Lee Vann of the Captura Group. Great panelists and lots of good conversation with the audience.

A few takeaways from the panel:

Hispanics overindex in almost all categories of UGC, but especially social networking. Hispanics remain highly committed to social networks, whether general social networks (MySpace remains the leader among Hispanics in the US) or those with a Hispanic focus such as Batanga. Young US Hispanics are especially tied to social networks: almost one-half of Hispanic online teens in the US visit one or more sites daily. US Hispanics also overindex when it comes to podcasts, both audio and video.

Music content is especially essential. Both Yahoo! and Batanga cited their music offerings as core areas of focus within the Hispanic market. While MySpace has also carved out a niche for itself in the music category, their 8 million+ artists and bands means Hispanic users must weed through a lot of content to find Latin music.

Targeting remains key. Effective targeting will remain essential to monetizing user-generated content. Yahoo! pointed to their acquisition of BlueLithium last year as one example of their strong targeting capabilities, and said sophisticated targeting would be core to selling social media to advertisers.

No template exists for a successful social media campaign. Since the success stories on social media sites have varied greatly and been limited overall, it’s hard to point to any rigid set of guidelines for building a successful campaign. Marketers have devoted relatively limited funds to social media campaigns to date, and should continue to experiment at this stage.

Users won’t give out information without receiving something valuable in exchange. In discussing Facebook’s difficulties with Beacon, it was pointed out that users had received nothing in exchange for information on their purchases being publicized on the social network. One panelist felt that consumers would only give up personal information if incentivized, and Beacon hadn’t provided enough upside for consumers.

Localization is important on a selective basis. Although localization remains a mantra for targeting the US Hispanic market, localization does not mean creating entirely new offerings for this market. Companies must feature content that speaks to this audience, but should also realize that much of their site framework and core value proposition need not change as they roll out offerings for the Hispanic audience.

Finally, although most of the event dealt with the Hispanic marketplace, there were a couple of interesting points on social media in Brazil from a separate session held during the morning:

Blog advertising is virtually non-existent. There are very few professional blogs in Brazil, and almost no blog advertising. This differs greatly from social networks, which have gained great traction in the country.

Facebook is for adults. Although Orkut is responsible the lion’s share of social networking traffic in Brazil (43% of Orkut’s global traffic comes from Brazil), Facebook has begun to make inroads. However, unlike Orkut, which has done very well among young users, Facebook has become most popular among the adult population.