• Hispanics are early adopters of new technology, especially within the social media realm (we’re basically dealing with an “early adopter” consumer segment)
• Traditional Hispanic marketing is fairly predictable with clear steps to execution and predictable outcomes (you create a print ad and if you get it into the publisher before a certain date it will run it in a magazine with a certain circulation and will be viewed by x number of consumers)

So essentially, Hispanic social media marketing, even more than traditional social media marketing, is highly unpredictable. It is realm chock full of unknowns. An experienced social media marketer will tell you that they never know what will work before they’re actually in market, so it’s a game of trial and error. You have to be willing to fail before you succeed.

Unfortunately, the way most marketing programs (including social media programs) are planned, developed, launched, measured and optimized is based on a linear model that depends on the accuracy of numerous assumptions and emphasizes the planning artifacts (usually in the form of documents like “strategic plans”, creative briefs, and media plans). It is “waterfall” sequential process (as its described in the software development world):

By contrast, over the last few years, a new, more flexible approach to marketing, based on the tenets of Agile methodology (again, an approach pioneered in software development), has been evangelized by many organizations that stresses speed to market, rapid iteration, and embraces the notion that marketers don’t know what works before they’re actually in market. Because of the unpredictable nature of the Hispanic consumer and their use of digital media, and the “wild west” nature of social media marketing, an agile approach is critical to success.

So what does this approach look like? It helps to contrast it to the way most of us have gone about developing marketing programs (and ironically, the waterfall method I proposed in last year’s Hispanic Social Media Guide)

So how do you get started with this new agile approach to Hispanic social media? Follow these simple steps:

#1 Assemble a small team and assign roles – Focus on “doers.” If you planning on producing a lot of Spanish content, get a Spanish copywriter on board. If you will be building an app, get a developer on the team. Give everyone clear roles and make sure you have all the resources to execute on your program.

#2 Decide on the duration of the first project (or “sprint”) – Emphasize short cycles, ideally 2-4 weeks. Anything longer than that means you’re overplanning or don’t have the resources you need to build what you want.

#3 Set goals for the first project / sprint – Flesh out your goals from a user perspective in the form of “stories.” E.g. “I want Hispanic moms to visit the Facebook page, ‘fan’ us, and download a printable recipe.”

#4 Set regular project/sprint meetings – Set short (10-30 min) meeting daily or a couple times a week to discuss the stories, review tasks and estimate time requirements.

#5 Project / sprint retrospective – After you’re in market, evaluate and discuss with the team what went well and what went didn’t.

#6 Start project/sprint planning again (for the next project/sprint) – Go back to step #3 and start again.

This approach to Hispanic social media isn’t about discarding all planning, but instead about condensing into short cycles, where documentation and assumptions are replaced with living programs and actual results (and data).

While I wouldn’t suggest this agile approach for all Hispanic marketing programs, particularly those with hard deadlines and highly defined deliverables (like event marketing, direct mail, or print/OOH advertising), it’s perfectly suited to social media marketing. Social media provides near instant feedback – you’ll know within a few days or weeks whether a program is working. Social media is also relatively inexpensive (particularly of the hard costs of media necessary with most traditional advertising), allowing for easy testing and learning.

One final note: agile Hispanic social media marketing is perfect for companies that are just getting started in the Hispanic market. Success in the U.S. Hispanic mark often requires investments and changes in other aspects of a company’s operation – such as customer service, human resources, and product / service development. Trying to predict them all upfront would be difficult if not impossible

The advertisers were many of the usual suspects you would expect to see during a big sporting event – beer companies, automakers and big consumer goods companies.

The spots were generally great – effective, culturally relevant and entertaining. Many of them were developed specifically for the Copa de Oro tournament, or at least soccer themed. So they were even contextually relevant, something rarely seen in TV spots outside of the Super Bowl.

What struck me the most, however, was how heavily they played on and integrated “digital” themes. Most of the ads incorporated elements of the digital lifestyle in their concepts. The ads take for granted that digital media is a big part of the U.S. Hispanic reality, whether it was people using the Internet, connecting on Facebook, or using their smartphones. I would assume the account planners at the agencies that created the spots were looking at the same data we see all the time in writing their creative briefs – the data on Hispanic digital media behavior throughout all the trades showing that Hispanics are heavy users of all kinds of digital media.

Watching all these “digitally” themed Spanish language TV ads reminded me of the 2010 AdAge Hispanic FactPack. I wrote a blog post a year ago about how the annual report on Hispanic advertising was full of ads emphasizing digital media – whether by the Hispanic ad agencies or Hispanic media companies. However, the irony of the Fact Pack was it had statistics showing that only 4.8 percent of all Hispanic media spend went to online media.

Obviously the folks planning and developing all this traditional creative felt digital was an important theme to incorporate into their ad concepts. Yet the overwhelming majority of Hispanic media dollars continue to go to traditional media – 95.2 percent to be exact. That is the irony and contradiction.

A cynical view would be that the key parties involved – i.e. the Hispanic ad agencies and the big Hispanic media companies – have a huge incentive to keep most Hispanic advertising programs going to traditional media, specifically TV. The costs per thousand are much higher for the media companies and the production budgets are many magnitudes larger than they would be for digital ads. Moreover, for most Hispanic ad agencies, big TV productions are still their cash cows, and one they are not interested in “putting to pasture.” Add in the fact that many Hispanic ad agencies still outsource digital creative concept development and production, and it’s clear going “too digital” would hurt their bottom lines.

A less cynical assessment would be that Spanish TV delivers larger U.S. Hispanic audiences, at scale, and without overlap with the general market, than any other medium. Therefore, it makes sense for the bulk of Hispanic media and production budgets to be allocated to this more expensive channel.

However, it’s clear there is some major inefficiency in how most Hispanic advertising is being executed and allocated by channel. Depending on your view of the situation, there is clearly a market opportunity for fresh thinking on the Hispanic ad agency side or for new business models in the media business.

(an edited version of this article originally ran on MediaPost’s Engage Hispanic blog on 7/7/2011)

More importantly, I promised an attempt at the billion dollar question of how marketers could successfully utilize social media to reach Hispanics. In anticipation of an answer to that question, we need to start with the right research and approach. In an article I wrote last September I noted that “our industry needs more robust qualitative research and behavioral models… to smartly ‘go to market’ with Hispanics in social media.” I think personas might just be the right framework.

Personas are user archetypes that help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions and visual design. Since their introduction in the late 90s, they have grown in use from being a tool used mostly in the software industry to becoming a central planning tool within the Web and digital advertising community. Personas, in their traditional form, are synthesized from ethnographic research with real people and then summarized in one- to two-page descriptions that include behavior patterns, skills, attitudes and environment combined with a few fictional personal details to bring the personas to life.

I think personas provide an effective tool that can be evolved to include psychographic data (among other types of qualitative research) to help brands effectively navigate the Hispanic social media waters. It is for that reason that our team at Sensis undertook what we are calling the Hispanic Persona Project.

The Hispanic Persona Project is a primary research effort aimed at creating personas that represent the U.S. Hispanic Internet population. The project methodology consisted of over 60 ethnographic interviews with Hispanics across acculturation levels, geographies, and nationalities. Understanding the inherent complexities of clustering 30 million diverse Hispanics into 4-5 personas, our goal was to introduce a new framework to guide Hispanic marketing across the POEM (Paid, Owned, Earned Media) spectrum. We also wanted to start a robust discussion about new market research and planning tools to use in a world of over 50 million Hispanics, more than half of which are U.S. born.

We will be unveiling the results of the Hispanic Personas Project during a live, interactive session at the 2011 Hispanicize Conference in Los Angeles, CA. In addition to publishing a report with the Hispanic Personas at Hispanicize, we will be providing attendees with a unique opportunity to interact with the personas, via an interactive panel of live consumers representing each of the Hispanic personas.

In advance of unveiling of the formal research, I can share information on three of the Hispanic Personas we have created:

As you can see from these high level personas, they focus on digital behavior and mindsets, not demographics. While personas have historically been used only to plan digital “experiences” in owned platforms – such as Websites, kiosks or apps – they clearly provide important texture to plan earned media initiatives, particularly in interactive and two-way social environments.

Finally, I’ll leave you with some interesting topline results from our research:
• U.S. Hispanics are heavy social media users – almost all of interviewees noted that the first thing they do when they go online is check email and Facebook – very often from mobile devices.
• “The young teaching the old” – younger Hispanic ‘super users’ are teaching the late adopters how to use new technology and introducing them to new digital trends.
• Evolution from old social media platforms to new ones – U.S. Hispanics have migrated from Hi5 and MySpace into Facebook. The only people who are still on MySpace are artists and musicians.
• Online Advertising – Interviewees mentioned they are likely to click on online ads if they are relevant to their interests or contextually relevant, particularly hyper-targeted Facebook ads.
• Mobile Internet – most interviewees had smartphones. Those who do not have one are considering buying one.

In my last installment of this 3-part discussion, we’ll take the final results of the Hispanic Persona Project and talk about applying them in the real world of Hispanic social media.

As digital continues to turn the advertising world on its head, you’ve no doubt heard digital marketing evangelists talk about the need to “lead with digital.” What they are typically referring to is 180 degree change away from the common marketing approach of starting with traditional marketing programs and then extending them to digital channels. The argument being that as digital media (including Web, social and mobile) takes a larger piece of consumers’ media consumption pie and fundamentally changes how they interact with advertising that advertisers must fundamentally change their marketing strategies to align with new digital realities.

There are countless and growing examples of marketers embracing this philosophy – including extreme cases where marketers have completely forgone traditional channels in favor of digital or brands have hired digital agencies as their lead (or only) agency of record. Less extreme examples can be seen in trend towards traditional creative (TV and out-of-home for example) that looks and feels increasingly like online banner / rich media ads or the trend towards driving to the Web or mobile as the primary call-to-action on direct response offline campaigns.

What if a rebellious brand led their Hispanic marketing efforts with digital? The prevailing wisdom in the Hispanic marketing world has always been that digital is important, but not that important, what with a majority of Hispanics still digitally divided or lacking tech sophistication. What would be the fate of such an anti-establishment brand? What would “leading with digital” even look like in the Hispanic market? Let’s deconstruct a Hispanic ad campaign and see some examples of what a digital-driven approach might look like:

Campaign Planning

Campaign Objectives – During the “Mad Men” era of advertising (which I would argue continues to this day in Hispanic advertising), campaign objectives were always a “one-way street” – with objectives like increasing awareness or same-store sales. Digital made advertising a two-way game, and as such, effective advertising has to do so much more. Yet most Hispanic advertising objectives are still about being the loudest megaphone. If a Hispanic campaign started with digital, objectives such as interactivity, engagement, utility and word of mouth would inevitably take center stage (this is not the case for most Hispanic advertising today.) This new set of digitally-relevant marketing objectives lends themselves well to marketing frameworks, such as marketing funnels or consumer journeys, with corresponding metrics and the ability to establish pre-launch campaign projections.

Research – Every good ad campaign, regardless of target audience, starts with sound research. Yet most Hispanic ad campaigns start with analog research (traditional focus groups, consumer research panels, etc). Are their purely digital alternatives? I would argue that there is an incredibly powerful insight “fountain” currently available using social monitoring tools like Radian6 to listen to Hispanic consumers online. Think of it as the world’s largest focus group, except completely organic. With Hispanics heavily engaging in social media, there is a real opportunity to uncover powerful and actionable Hispanic insights. Unfortunately, it’s more work that just hiring a research firm to recruit participants for 4 focus groups or subscribing to a research tool. Taking it one step further, if you can build an online community of Hispanics tied to your brand that you nurture over time, you have the potential to continually tap into a new kind of focus group indefinitely (at a much lower cost)

Concept & Copy Testing – One of the biggest benefits of leading with digital is the ability to make quick and inexpensive mistakes. This is particularly important for brands or companies that are new to or have been out of the Hispanic market for some time (and will need to fine-tune their initial Hispanic programs). While copy testing is anything but new, utilizing text-based ads targeted to Hispanics (by market if appropriate) on Google, Bing and Facebook can provide quick and cheap feedback on concepts, copy and keywords that will resonate with Hispanics. Taking this approach further, creative testing using multiple iterations of banners can provide art direction feedback from a real-life “lab” of online Hispanics. If focus groups are a must, online versions provide valuable qualitative results at a fraction of the time and expense.

Campaign Development

Content Development – A sound digitally-driven Hispanic marketing campaign with objectives such as engagement, utility or word of mouth activity requires a different approach to creative development. A perfectly executed .30 second TV spot combined with a series of radio, print, and out-of-home ads will not be enough to achieve such interactive goals. Instead, creative production must be replaced with content development – a different approach that emphasizes multi-form creative that can live in various formats and lengths that tells a longer story. The content development approach emphasizes producing all forms of content (video, imagery, textual) that can deepen Website experiences, drive social engagements and spur viral communication – all while still providing for TV, radio and print ads. This nuanced, by significant change in approach, is akin to brands thinking like publishers and media companies.

Campaign Launch

Changes in how brands and companies launch and manage Hispanic ad campaigns represent the biggest opportunities in this digitally-led approach.

Digital Pre-launches – Most Hispanic advertising starts offline and then migrates online. Why not do the opposite? Digital creative typically takes less time to produce and digital media can be quickly planned, bought and trafficked, so why not launch pilot campaigns online before extending offline to more expensive, time-consuming and inflexible channels like TV, radio and out-of-home?

Digital pre-launching not only provides an opportunity to test concepts and copy as noted above (including all important questions of language – Spanish, English or both?), but can also provide invaluable data that can inform Hispanic campaign objectives, market selection, and media plans, both offline and online! Pre-launches can be run from a few weeks to a few months, but the benefits can be significant.

Digital Measurement – Most Hispanic marketing programs are evaluated post-mortem: “that network TV buy performed well in Phoenix” or “that print ad failed to drive call-center activity.” Taking a digital-driven approach means prioritizing real-time measurement tools such as third-party ad serving, Web analytics, and social media tracking tools to impact and influence campaign decisions mid-stream. This approach yields info on which top performing digital creative that can influence creative placements and rotations. Web analytics data on campaign microsites and landing pages can provide important geo-market results that can impact media weighting offline.

Hopefully you can see from this quick analysis that leading with digital in the Hispanic market is not about irrationally abandoning traditional media channels. Instead, it’s about drastically changing how Hispanic campaigns are planned, developed and managed. Keeping in mind that a large number of Hispanics are still not online, a thoughtfully executed digitally-driven approach to Hispanic advertising can bear significant fruit and take our industry to the next level.

The event was billed as the first stop in a multi-city tour of California by LATISM. LATISM bills itself as “the largest organization of Social Media profesionals of Hispanic origin. Our members are bloggers, twitters, social network group leaders, e-commerce owners, marketers and more. ”

If you’re like me, you’ve probably heard of LATISM, and maybe the Latino2 tour, but were not really sure what the group is about?

While I have generally been supportive of LATISM, and agreed to participate in the Latino2 LA event as a panelist, I truly did not know what to expect. In fact, whenever people ask me about LATISM, I have a hard time giving them a succinct description of the group (or “movement” if you prefer).

So I attended the entire conference and tried to take it in, observe the attendees, and “listen in” on conversations as much as possible to try to size-up LATISM.

First, a couple of observations about the event:

– There was a decent sized crowd in attendance (I “ball parked” it at around 150-170 people)

– A lot of the attendees were bloggers and social media power users (i.e. people with 1,000+ Twitter followers, etc.)

– 95% of the attendees were Hispanic.

– More interestingly, I would say the majority of the Hispanic attendees were fully bilingual, probably best described as “partially-acculturated”

– The major and most visible corporate sponsors were large technology companies (e.g. HP)

– Local PR firms had a strong presence at the event

Listening to the conversations and discussions both during the formal program and during networking breaks, I noticed a couple of interesting things:

1. There were countless anecdotes about attendee older family members recently jumping into social media (e.g. stories about Spanish-dominant “abuelitas” and older parents recently signing up for Facebook and “friending” them)

2. More specifically, a lot of these stories had an interesting twist – that using Facebook was the impetus for these older Hispanics to begin to use the Internet in general.

3. A lot of the bloggers in attendance started blogging because they felt a dissatisfaction with mainstream media and content that was irrelevant to them. Simply put, they didn’t identify with most Spanish-language media (“it’s for recent immigrants”) and feel that general market media has failed to connect with them culturally.

In summary, the event was best described as a early-stage version of a Hispanic “BlogWorld.” It’s also clear that there is a large and growing Hispanic social media world (bloggers, twitter users, amateur content producers, etc.), and that a lot of growth is coming from older, less acculturated Hispanics.

It’s also clear that a lot of the most vocal members of the LATISM community are looking to fill gaps they see between the traditional media and social media spectrum.

Sounds a lot like the early days of Spanish TV…

If you’re like me, you’ve probably seen innumerable reports and studies stating that Hispanics are more social.

Most of the data backing up this catchy headline focuses on social media usage. Hispanics are active users of social media platforms, particularly social networks like Facebook, micromedia such as Twitter, and the reading and writing of blogs. Research firms like Forrester have gone further and looked at what type of social media users Hispanics are by understanding where they fit into their well-respected social technographic ladder (“Inactives” vs “Creators”, etc.). Again, the data paints a positive picture that Hispanics over-index the general market in terms of their engagement level. In plain English – there are a lot of Hispanic social media users and they are more active.

All of this quantitative data is sound and the conclusion is pretty straightforward – Hispanics use social media, as much or more than their general market counterparts. That’s great and all, but it doesn’t really help a marketer figure out how to use social media to market to Hispanics.

Why not? Isn’t the data enough to support most brands and companies investing in Hispanic social media?

Unfortunately, the tools aren’t there. Hispanic marketers only have a two-dimensional prism to understand a three-dimensional world. Put another way, all the great data I referenced earlier just confirms that Hispanics are consuming/producing social media, but that isn’t enough information to understand how to engage them in this space Why? Because social media activity cannot be simply filtered as Hispanic unless Hispanics behave differently than non-Hispanics in this environment.

The problem lies in the simple premise at the heart of the multi-billion dollar Hispanic marketing industry – that most Hispanics are culturally and linguistically different from the “general market” and consume different media (i.e. Hispanic media, 90 percent of which is in Spanish). This premise is the reason why two symbiotic sectors exist:
• Hispanic advertising and PR agencies that create culturally and linguistically relevant communications for Hispanic consumers
• Hispanic media that provides Hispanic consumers with linguistically and/or culturally unique content they demand (where Hispanic ad agencies can buy media on and PR firms can “earn” coverage in)

When we talk about reaching Hispanics in social media the aforementioned premise no longer holds true. Specifically, the second part of the premise breaks down – Hispanics are not consuming different media – they are on the same Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other large scale “connected” platforms as everyone else. That is what makes social media so powerful – you can connect 500 million people on the same network, even though they may be in 100 different countries speaking 150 different languages.

The concept of segmenting one ethnic group – either based on language, culture or media consumption – becomes fundamentally more complex when everyone is on the same site, network or platform. You can’t simply cling to differences in the language of media consumption. You can’t look to Facebook “en Español” (ask MySpace how that worked out for them) when the content is no longer asymmetrical – you don’t have a single, centralized content producer (think Univision or SBS) being consumed by large scale masses. The “content-creation-to-content-consumption” continuum is peer-to-peer (with companies/brands mixed in at the same level of peers), so it’s very difficult to depend on only contextual relevance.

What we’re missing is qualitative data about if, and how, Hispanics use social media differently. Do they consume, comment on, or produce social content that is different than the general market?

Language plays a part, but when you are connecting 100s of millions of people on the same platform, there is a lot of cross-language media consumption taking place. More simply, do Hispanics exhibit different behavior on social media? Part of this qualitative question is whether they demand – and therefore consume – different content. But that’s only part of the behavioral equation.

Do they produce different content (e.g. talk about different things)? Do they comment differently (i.e. are they more likely to comment positively than the general market)? Do they exhibit different attitudes towards brands and companies in social media? Do some of the generally excepted models of social media behavior apply “apples-to-apples” to U.S. Hispanic consumers (i.e. does the Hispanic social technographic ladder have different rungs)?

I have anecdotal evidence from client campaigns that they do behave differently, but our industry needs more robust qualitative research and behavioral models to provide the 78 percent of hesitant marketers (according to an Orci report) with the intelligence they need to smartly “go to market” with Hispanics in social media.

Although the research looked at women both in the U.S. and Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil (where they likely represented higher socio-economic demographics), the data on U.S. Hispanic women was particularly interesting:

The most powerful take-away from the research was that “a majority of respondents across the US and Latin America agreed that they trusted comments on social networks more than ads.”

If you took out the words “social networks” out of that statement you wouldn’t find that claim all that interesting – it is consistent with what we know about Hispanics and their strong and influential offline social networks. What this research does show is what many of us have been preaching for the last few years – that offline Hispanic WOM activity is migrating online thanks to the growing omnipresence of social networks in U.S. Hispanics daily lives.

The Hispanic groundswell has arrived…

An encouraging sign that could indicate the economy is on the mend is increased interest from diverse organizations (Fortune 1000, government, non-profit, etc.) in recruitment advertising and outreach.

One area of significant interest is diversity recruitment. More and more organizations in a variety of sectors are beginning to examine ways their staff can represent the changing face of America. Looking at diversity recruitment, heavy emphasis is being placed on reaching qualified Hispanic talent. A number of organizations have mentioned to me Hispanic recruitment is a strategic priority for the next one to five years – particularly companies seeking specialized talent and skill sets, such as recruiting Hispanic STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) professionals.

I don’t think I will offend anyone by stating Hispanic recruitment has been a fairly formulaic business for decades. In most cases, organizations have managed Hispanic recruiting with three tactics:

1. Attendance at Hispanic career fairs / conferences, such as the National Society of Hispanic MBAs (NSHMBA) Annual Conference, National Council of La Raza (NCLR) Conference, etc.

2. Participation and sponsorship of Hispanic professional and trade organizations, such as the Association of Latino Professionals in Finance and Accounting (ALPFA), Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), etc.

3. Placing job postings on Hispanic-focused job boards such as LatPro.com or iHispano.com.

In many cases, these tactics are bundled by one organization – for example, companies recruiting Hispanic MBAs often turn to NSHBMA for sponsorship packages which include a booth at their annual conference job fair and the ability post positions on the NSHMBA job boards.

While the aforementioned tactics remain valid ways to recruit Hispanics, the rapid adoption of digital media – particularly heavy Hispanic social media usage – represents a seismic shift in how companies (and many of the organizations listed above) should approach Hispanic recruitment.

A review of two of the largest social networks in the U.S. – Facebook and LinkedIn – should provide a sense of how social media is changing Hispanic recruitment. Starting with Facebook:

• As of June 2010, Facebook reports they reach 1.4 million Spanish-speaking U.S. Hispanics.

• A quick search of Facebook pages shows there are:
o More than 1,000 “pages” with the word “Hispanic” or “Latino” in their name.
o More than 1,000 “groups” with the word “Hispanic” or “Latino” in their name.
• Facebook ads provide organizations the ability to launch cost-per-click ad campaigns micro-targeted to users based on such metrics as languages spoken, age, likes and interests (e.g. you can reach 60K people ages 30-64, who speak Spanish and have a college degree).

Jumping over to the professional social network LinkedIn reveals equally compelling opportunities:

• Searching “people” with the word “Hispanic” (in their profiles) returns 46,000+ professionals who can be filtered by location, industry, groups, company, seniority level, function and company size.

• There are currently 507 “groups” on LinkedIn with the word “Hispanic” in their name (the largest has 3,602 members).

• There are currently 417 “groups” on LinkedIn with the word “Latino” in their name (the largest has 2,191 members).

• Looing at nationality specific groups, there are as many as 150 Mexican groups, down to two groups for Costa Ricans.

• Linkedin’s Direct Ads platform allows advertisers to target users based on criteria such as age, gender, geography (e.g. a company can easily create ads targeting experienced hi-tech professionals ages 35+ in hi-density Hispanic markets)

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Twitter, custom social networks (on Ning, etc.), and a variety of other social media platforms present equally compelling opportunities to reach even the most targeted Hispanic groups.

There is obviously more to effective Hispanic recruitment than hyper-targeted media channels or leveraging existing online communities. As with any type of advertising program, research is necessary to identify key insights from which to build Hispanic recruitment messaging and creative. In addition, most organizations already have access to the most important asset in developing effective Hispanic recruitment advertising – Hispanic employees. These assets, as well as leveraging key Hispanic insights, should drive the creation of content and creative that will drive awareness.

However social platforms like the ones previously identified, represent an opportunity to drive engagement through paid and earned media activity. This is critical to effectively activating Hispanic talent and getting the most out of the offline partnerships with organizations and event activations that drive highly successful Hispanic recruitment programs.

AdWeek published an article on their large, integrated, and ambitious social media programs.

Missing from all the buzz is any mention of Hispanic digital media or social media programs. Particularly H&R Block, who is using the Web and social media to answer consumer questions and create an “educational” halo around their service and brand.

Seems like a perfect platform to extend to the Hispanic market through social media, as tax preparation is usually more of a long term relationship based on education and trust in the Hispanic market. Screams social media to me…

I have posted a longer form version of the blog here on ThinkMulticultural.com.