NewsTaco

[Editor's note: This post was originally published on March 9, 2010.]

By Melissa del Bosque

An explosion of violence has occurred in the state of Tamaulipas in the last few weeks, and also around the city of Monterrey in Nuevo Leon. From what I hear from friends and family in Mexico is that both the Mexican and U.S. press are only reporting a fraction of what is happening.

Mexican journalists are being tortured, killed and kidnapped along the border to the point where much of the news about narco violence goes unreported.

The Committee to Protect Journalists yesterday demanded that the Mexican government investigate kidnappings and killings of journalists covering the cartel violence in Reynosa just across the border from McAllen, according to a San Antonio Express-News report Monday.

Increasingly, Mexicans are turning to Twitter, Facebook and online chat forums to document the violence erupting around them. Mexicans have distrusted the media for decades since it has a long history of being co-opted by the government which hands out mordidas “bribes” like candy. (The brave and trustworthy reporters who do exist and do an admirable job are being killed, or threatened with death). Mexicans also don’t trust their government to release reliable information. Often they don’t release any information on the gun battles between cartels and the military anyway.

Increasingly, Mexicans are circumventing the old modes of information and relying on the Internet. The other day I received a mass email from a friend in Durango asking that others in Mexico join her in documenting the violence around them with cameras and putting it online.

“An ignorant people is a people condemned to failure,” my friend wrote. “We use the computer to entertain ourselves with silly things but we can also create citizen networks like they created so many years ago in Colombia, only in Internet form.”

To give an idea of how profoundly social media is shaping the psyche of Mexicans, I canceled a trip to Matamoros two weeks ago because a viral email was circulating there that gunfights were going to erupt between Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel that day. People in Matamoros were staying home, keeping their children out of school and not going out.  I felt like a real wimp for not going, but the paranoia was starting to overtake me as well. Why go, if I didn’t need to?, said a nagging little voice in my head. And so I succumbed to the “Psychosis en el Pueblo.”

Grupo Reforma, a chain of newspapers in Mexico, has started chat forums for different Mexican states along the border to give citizens an outlet. Grupo Reforma writes at the top of the forum:

“With the increase in violence in border cities there has been a flood of rumors of gunfights with little information from the authorities. This has created a psychosis among the people. What is reality?”

Good question. What in the hell is going on in Mexico? On February 28, a pretty extraordinary post was uploaded to the Reforma site. Who knows if it is real or not, but it has gone viral in Mexico.

Apparently, the post is from the “The New Federation.” In the post it says the cartels have banded together to stamp out los Zetas and “bring tranquility back to the people.”

The Zetas are former U.S trained government special forces that went into the drug business a few years back. Their territory is around Reynosa and Matamoros, across from Brownsville and McAllen. They’ve split form the Gulf Cartel and hence the gun battles that have erupted in the past month.

Things have been especially awful in Reynosa, across from McAllen. The post says that the turning point for the formation of the cartels against the Zetas was the brutal killing of the teenagers in Juarez in January.

“The water that broke the dam for society was the death of the children at the party in Juarez,” they
write.

They then direct people from Reynosa to keep their children out of school and to not go out into the streets until further notice.

They tell people in Monterrey to go about there business and to not get too paranoid.

“El Chapito, CDG y la familia in this agreement  are going to respect the plazas, they are not going to charge more fees and they are going to prohibit the kidnappings,” the New Federation writes.

They also write that the media is remaining quiet as part of the agreement.   Then they give a tip of the hat to Reforma for its chat forum “We give applause to Grupo Reforma for this space. There is no other, this is the only form.”

Apparently, the media that is not remaining quiet in Reynosa is being kidnapped or killed?

Members of each cartel are marking their trucks so that everyone knows who they are. Friends tell me it’s not uncommon these days to see  a line of SUVs filled with masked men with Ak-47s driving down the street. No one knows who they are or who they work for.

What will happen next? Chances are Mexicans won’t tune into their radios or turn on the TV to find out. Instead they’ll turn on their computer and start looking for answers.

[Photo By @lasantamuerte]

Online connectivity has magnified our ability to accumulate social capital and convert it into other forms of power. If you cannot find a way to use this social capital, then it’s hard to make it work for you. My recommendation to you is to map your contacts and convert this information into knowledge that you can apply to your advantage.

Now that you have consolidated all of your contact information into a single spreadsheet, as I discussed last week, you can launch communication campaigns that convey new ideas, information about upcoming initiatives and emerging opportunities for collaboration. Begin with one preliminary announcement and you will see how easy it is to activate your social capital through affordable on-line tools.

Cook Time: 30 minutes

Preparation Time: 15 minutes

Yields multiple servings of useful information.

Ingredients:

• Your consolidated spreadsheet of contact information.
• Free trial membership to email marketing software like Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, etc.

Directions:

• Import your spreadsheet of contact information to your email marketing account.
• Design a basic letter that summarizes your new initiative and provides your current contact information.
• Personalize your “mass email’ by including your contacts’ first and last names.
• Confirm the clarity of your text and the functionality of any embedded hyperlinks.
• Preview your letter and make any necessary final adjustments.
• Circulate your first message to all of your email contacts.

Once you launch your first communication campaign, the software will inform you about the delivery rate of your email. Email accounts do not live forever and you will be surprised how many of your contacts’ personal and professional email addresses have changed. Instantaneously the software will be able to provide a listing of inactive email addresses that you can download for your records. Take the time to remove inactive email addresses from your spreadsheet of contact information and follow up with your contacts through other means to determine another working email address.

It only takes less than an hour to reorganize your contacts and launch your first message. However, within 24 hours you will be able to determine your readership rate as well as how readers interacted with your message (i.e., by clicking links or forwarding the message to others). Aim to achieve a greater than 10% readership rate  and then analyze who among your contacts distinguished themselves as the first ‘active readers’ of your initiative.

Now you are ready to launch a more complex on-line communication campaign that links your other social networking tools like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Joseph P. A. Villescas, Ph.D. is an independent consultant, writer and instructor. He conducts extensive investigations on Latino and other multidimensional populations that explore trends in their educational development, media consumption, internet usage, voting behaviors, racial categorization, organizational capacities and readiness for future leadership roles in community settings. He is also the founder and owner of Villescas Research, Media & Instruction, LLC.

[Photo By WebWizzard]

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project issued an interesting report this week that found, among other things, that Latinos are more likely to use video sharing sites like YouTube than whites or African-Americans. Interesting, ¿no? Here are a few highlights from the report:

• As of May 2011, 71% of online adults reported watching videos on a video-sharing site such as YouTube or Vimeo.
• That’s a 38-point increase from five years ago when the Pew Internet Project took its first reading on use of such sites.
• Rural internet users are now just as likely as urban and suburban users to have sampled video at video-sharing sites.
• Some 68% of rural internet users have gone to such sites, compared with 71% of online suburbanites and 72% of online urban residents.
• Non-white adult internet users have higher rates of video-sharing site use than their white counterparts, a consistent finding since 2006.
• Specifically, among those who reported having used a video sharing site the day before: 25% were white, 28% were African-Americans and 39% were Latino.

Neat, right? Are you one of these video users? I know I am.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD

By María Cardona

A mobile phone screen gives a woman in Latin America a glimpse of the son she hasn’t seen since he immigrated to find work in the U.S. over 15 years ago, while another Latino mobile user logs on to Facebook from her device to update her business fan page, and yet another takes the words right off the sticker handed to him at the election poll and tweets “I voted.”

It’s hard not to speak of Latinos and social media in the same sentence these days. Perhaps the biggest story to come out of 2011 will be that the U.S. Latino population surpassed 50 million, but close behind that is the story of how social media is helping turn that raw number into empowerment for Latinos.

Recent studies show that Latinos outpace other demographic groups in the United States in the use of social networking sites, especially via their mobile devices and they’re not slowing down, for a number of reasons. In 2010, 87 % of English speaking Hispanics owned a cell phone compared to 80 percent of whites, according to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The same study found that 18% percent of Hispanics online use Twitter compared to just 5% of whites—that might explain why I see a spike in Twitter followers every time I tweet in Spanish. And a Nielsen study also found that 62% of Hispanics online engage in social networking activities versus 38% of whites.

Why are Latinos such social mediaites?

Because the power of social media is profound. Latinos are increasingly using social media because it has many functions and they are taking advantage of them more than ever to advance their position in American society. Social media is crucial for Latinos’ growth and prosperity in this country in all aspects, from staying connected with family and friends, to searching for jobs and growing their businesses, and for entertainment and civic engagement.

A recent report by the Hispanic Institute highlights Latinos’ civic engagement through social media since back in 2006 when thousands of protesters, organized by texting and social media, flooded the streets in all major cities calling for immigration reform. Think about the first time you ever logged on to a social networking site and the most recent time (it was probably just a few minutes ago but most likely it occurred within the last hour). When you first became a citizen of the worlds that are Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube, etc. you were probably looking to socialize with friends and family. Fast forward to your last social networking session—after you checked in on your primos and primas from south of the border and scanned your friends’ statuses for particularly interesting posts, you probably also indulged in a video (or two) to alleviate the humdrum of the day and then quickly dropped by the Voto Latino fan page to leave a comment over your latest political wanderings, then maybe perused the Univision homepage for the latest chisme on hot telenovela stars.

In a sign of the times, it seems more likely that the next big political movement will take place not in the streets, but on the World Wide Web. It’s already happening around the world in the Middle East and the Far East. Dictators in Tunisia and Egypt were toppled by their own people with the help of social media to spread the word of the injustices committed against them, and similar efforts are ongoing in Libya. In the U.S., Latinos are no different and are engaging in social media to make a difference in the top issues affecting their community.

In Los Angeles, the program VozMob is teaching immigrant workers to use their mobile phones to record and upload stories about their daily lives onto the internet. These types of initiatives are now more important than ever in the wake of Arizona’s anti-immigrant legislation and other copycat laws. These public stories will help combat the hateful rhetoric and anti-Latino sentiment being spewed around the country today.

This is our time. Let’s take advantage of it to the fullest by speaking our minds using these powerful tools. So let’s tweet, facebook, and youtube not just about JLo and La Reina del Sur, but about why our elected officials need to pass the DREAM Act now, or about how the Republican Party will speak to Latinos once they have a nominee. Let’s push each other, challenge each other, young and old , to become architects of our own destinies. Let’s make our voices heard, but not just to complain. Let’s vote and let’s be a part of coming up with solutions. If we do that, using all the social media tools at our disposal, we will help regain, redefine and rebuild the American Dream for all our communities and get “#Latinos #Winning.”

Maria Cardona is a principal at the Dewey Square Group and a Democratic Strategist.

[Photo By NASA]

Descuento Libre is a new daily deals site that is totally and wholly focused on Latino customers. The service launched last fall in Mexico City, and has since launched in Chicago and Austin, Texas, with San Antonio soon to follow. Essentially the service’s focus on Latinos shows in the types of deals offered — while you may not see skydiving packages you will see children’s summer camp or dentist discounts for example — and the business model, which requires much more face-to-face conversation with vendors than other deal services, said Boris Portman, Descuento Libre co-founder and CTO.

“Just 3% of the social deals traffic is by Hispanics and Latinos,” Portman told News Taco. “The deals we offer are much more family-oriented, about relevant entertainment, relevant restaurants. They’re about the daily things that they’re already going to do.”

Calling cards to Mexico, Maná concerts, discounts on dentists or sweet bread, these are the types of deals one sees when visiting Descuento Libre. Portman told News Taco that the bilingual site has made good use of Facebook and Twitter, and hopes to grow in the area of mobile in the future. In another difference between mainstream deal sites and Descuento Libre, Portman pointed out that one way the company spread the word about its products is via Spanish language radio, the hosts on those shows, as well as non-profits and other Latino community organizations.

While the current customer demographic for Descuento Libre tends to be both immigrants and assimilated, middle class Latinos, Portman told us that the conversion rate from one-time deal buyers into loyal customers is much higher for Latinos than for other social buyers.

As a potential customer, I really enjoyed Descuento Libre’s site because it’s easy to use and navigate, share with friends, and purchase. It will be interesting to see how companies like Descuento Libre flourish in the future, given the growing Latino population and consumer market.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD

A report from comScore found that mobile display advertisers have more than doubled in the past two years, given that this trend is largely driven by the adoption of smartphones, and that almost half of all Latinos use smartphones, this trend is sure to hugely impact the Latino consumer and mobile markets.

Although only about 31% of mobile users in the country use smartphones, this figure stands at 45% for Latino mobile subscribers. That’s not even to mention that we’ve reported that Latinos are more receptive to online advertising, which is to say, they are more likely to click. Here’s a snippet from the comScore report:

More than 80 percent of smartphone users accessed their mobile browser (82.3 percent) or applications (85.0 percent) during March, while just 19.1 percent of feature phone users utilized their mobile browser and 15.9 percent accessed apps. Smartphone users were also far more likely to see web or in app ads (27.5 percent vs. 5.0 percent) due to their heavier usage of mobile browsers and applications and were also more likely to respond to SMS ads (7.7 percent vs. 3.5 percent).

Translation: smartphones mean people brows the Internet more, which means they are more likely to see ads. And since almost half of Latino mobile users has a smartphone, and they are a group more likely to surf the web on their phones than on a computer, companies like Google and AT&T are catering their services to Latino consumers.

It will be exciting to see how brands, marketers, developers and the whole bunch of Internet people scrambling to make a buck off the growing Latino consumer market will address this potential Latino smartphone web browsing market. We’ve seen that about half of brands ignore Latinos on social media campaigns, I wonder what will happen with mobile advertising?

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD

[Photo By stefanoost]

I stumbled across an interesting post today that I initially found offensive, then realized was tongue-in-cheek, but nonetheless made some valid points about how it is that Latinos flock to the Facebook platform.

Companies are taking to social media platforms like Facebook to get after potential Latino consumers more and more. But it’s figuring out exactly what’s driving these Latino social media users — English vs. Spanish, mobile vs. computers, or how exactly to go about doing so — that seems to hamper these marketing efforts. All Facebook’s Ruth Manuel-Logan wrote a post this week entitled, “4 Reasons Why We Latinos Love Facebook” in which she attempted to answer some of these questions. She made some really valid points:

• Because Facebook is online, it allows Latinos in the U.S. to communicate with Latinos in Latin America.
• Facebook, unlike TV or radio, can be used in English and Spanish simultaneously or separately, so no one is left out for their linguistic proficiencies.

The point that struck me as strange is that Latinos are particularly apt to express themselves on Facebook versus everyone else. Studies have been done to prove what we all pretty much know to be true: Facebook is all about vanity. Manuel-Logan writes:

We Latinos love status updating and commenting with a no-holds barred ‘tude. We call it as we see it, with a hands-on-hips way of letting you know, exactly what we think.  Since we are very gregarious, Facebook tends to bring out our social butterfly side to the fullest extent. We also don’t mind getting personal and even sharing nitty-gritty intimate details, moreso than other users.

Whatever the case, it’s likely that Facebook will continue to be a place where companies make their pitch to the $1 trillion Latino market. Figuring out the best way to do so, however, is more than likely going to be an experiment that we’ll be talking about here at News Taco.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD

[Image Courtesy News Taco]

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About 1 in 5 Latinos who use the Internet also use Twitter, according to an updated study released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. This statistic shows that Latino tend to use Twitter more than the general U.S. population, of which only 13% are on Twitter, according to the report. There were some more tid bits from the study:

• 54% of U.S. Internet users on Twitter use their phones to access it
• Non-white internet users continue to have higher rates of Twitter use than their white counterparts
• On a typical day, 5% of Latino Internet users are on Twitter

Here’s a chart of the study’s results:

Contextualizing this information is also important. As we’ve reported, Latinos love smartphones and almost half Latino mobile customers use these types of phones. This enables Latinos to use location-based services at higher rates than other groups, as well as Twitter, social buying services like Groupon, and generally be ideal social media consumers.

If you want to know more about Twitter yourself, check out our list of the top five tips on that platform.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD

[Photo By joshsemans]

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Mobile Tech, Social Media Spur Engagement For Latinos

Perhaps because the Internet, social media, and technology in general has given me access and opportunities I never could have hoped for, I’m kind of a fan. Nonetheless, occasionally I do come across critics who insist that the Internet has either ruined their livelihood or somehow threatens to destroy their way of life. I may be exaggerating just a bit here, but you get the idea.

What I think these critics fail to understand is that the Internet is just an additional tool we can all use in our daily and professional lives. You don’t have to understand the Internet from top to bottom, or even know every single one of its uses, to benefit. I think where people go wrong with the Internet is assuming that things are black and white: you either use the Internet, or you don’t. But, that’s not the case.

As I wrote before, I wasn’t always very comfortable with technology, either. When I started down the path of a blogger, I had a lot to learn, and no one to show me. So, I did what anyone would do when they’re confused — I Googled it. Using Google, asking questions, experiment, trial and error and learning from my mistakes all helped me figure out what I know now. Which, in my opinion, isn’t that much, but increasingly I realize is much more than lots of people.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the Internet is only your enemy if you choose it to be. Sure, it’s different, it’s change and it’s unknown — but that could describe any aspect of our lives, from love to parenting to learning to walk. Navigating the Internet and its myriad of uses  is not easy, but it’s not impossible, if you really want to learn how to use it, you can.

If I could convince the world to see the Internet as a tool, and not an enemy, I would. But as we all know trying to control others is fruitless. What I hope to leave you with here is the hope, if not the knowledge, that the Internet can be as accessible to you as to anyone else. All it takes is a little bit of work, an open mind and forgoing the belief that you simply can’t do it.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD

[Photo By aubergene]

Latinos love sports, sports teams love Latinos, it’s an economic match made in heaven. Yet, a report from The Root shows that Latino reporters in the sports world are extremely and increasingly rare. The Root reported:

“. . . According to a study released recently, some 320 websites and newspapers that belong to the Associated Press Sports Editors slightly improved their racial hiring practices last year. The report showed that 97 percent of the sports editors at APSE newspapers and websites in 2010 were white, and 94 percent of sports editors overall were men.

“Just 5.5 percent of sports staffs, moreover, are black men, and only 3 percent are Latino men. Latino and Asian men increased by an average of .54 percent in sports desk job categories, except as sports editors.”

Mind you, this is going on at the same time that nearly every single large sports organization in the entire country is working to recruit Latino fans.

• The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) just launched UFCLatino.com
• The NBA is hosting Noches Latinas across the country, renaming teams Los Lakers or Los Suns for an evening
• Latinos are key to the NBA’s growth strategy
• The NFL is pushing to grow its Latino fan base
• Latinos also love baseball and hockey

So, when you take all of that into account, none of this makes sense. Unfortunately, it’s part of a bigger problem, that nationwide journalists are only 4.5% Latino. When you take it to a more specific market — sports in this case — that number is even smaller. This is a tragedy not only because many athletes are Latino, not to mention the fans, but it represents a pretty blatant prejudice in corporate media towards having white men cover sports almost exclusively.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD

[Image Courtesy Iconspedia]

I came across an interesting Facebook application this morning that seems to have far-reaching implications for how we as Latinos use technology, social media in particular, and how this in turn changes the way we communicate with each other. Not to get all philosophical on you, but for my morning post about growing Facebook applications by daily active users for Inside Facebook, I came across an app called Tarjetitas.

Tarjetitas is a simple app that allows users to share greeting cards in Spanish to the Facebook walls of their friends, and also to publish a card to their news feed. What was interesting in the story I wrote for Inside Facebook was that the number of users had grown just about equally between the U.S. and Mexico. In other words, people who use Facebook in Spanish and people in Mexico were using the same application just about equally.

As we wrote previously, there are about 2.7 million Facebook users in the U.S. who list Spanish as one of the languages they speak. Combine that with the 18.1 million Mexican Facebook users, and there’s ample opportunity for Spanish speakers to be engaged on Facebook. But as I mentioned earlier, it’s the way technology fits between people who speak Spanish here and people who speak Spanish there that’s really interesting.

Because if you look at Tarjetitas, it’s actually not an outstanding application. The greeting cards feature animations and bright colors reminiscent of MySpace and the early days of social media. Rather, it’s what’s hidden between the glitter that’s important and what half of companies not engaged with Latinos on social media platforms aren’t seeing: communication in a common cultural context.

If you look at the cards themselves, it’s the phrasing, the branding, the manner in which these cards communicate their simple messages of “hello” and “I’m thinking of you” that are at the heart of Tarjetitas’ popularity. It’s a language issue, but it’s deeper than that, it’s also a rhetorical one, a cultural one. The play on words, which is so common in Spanish, is present in these messages, as is that wry sarcasm that I never fully grasped when I was in Mexico.

Which is to say, if you can find a way to give people what they want how they want it, you can find yourself at the top of their list. It worked for Tarjetitas.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD

Facebook is the largest news organization to have ever existed, this according to a story in the Harvard Business Review. We’ve written consistently that Latinos are big on Facebook (2.7 million speak Spanish, btw) and yet, companies seem to be ignoring them largely on this platform. What the HBR story points to, is the fact that Facebook and its news feed provide the most hyper-localized content ever created for each of its 500 million-plus worldwide users and their networks.

News organizations do two major things, commercially speaking: they use news to grab attention and then sell that attention to advertisers.

Facebook provided a platform whereby individuals became reporters, editors, and publishers…

News media analysts are making an error by not viewing Facebook as a core part of the industry, sharing exactly the characteristics of many of the traditional players. That’s why they don’t comprehend Facebook’s apparent market value and its position at the top of the media pile.

This seems especially apparent for the 2.7 million Spanish speaking users in this country: more than half of companies in a recent survey ignore Latinos on Facebook — despite the fact that Latinos are overrepresented (proportionally speaking) on Twitter, MySpace and YouTube. So the big takeaway is this: increasingly we are consuming our news on our own especially catered news organizations: our Facebook feeds. And, as Latinos, we have yet to be targeted by large advertisers like we are on TV or the radio.

So, in a sense, Facebook is one of the only places Latinos can go without being ceaselessly bombarded by targeted advertisements. Interesting, no?

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD

[Image Courtesy News Taco]