Just Wrote Two Articles for Dinero.com
During the past few weeks, I’ve had an opportunity to read to articles (in Spanish) about the web for a Latin American audience. The two articles include one about how Colombian politicians are using the web and another one about how people around the world are using the Internet for their news gathering using as a specific example the tragic passing of Michael Jackson here.
The first article is really designed show how compelling web strategies can be by providing an example close to home of a group of people (Colombian politicians) that need to get something done (get people to vote for them now). These people are looking for a tangible result and are basically voting with their pesos and choosing to invest heavily in the web for only one reason: they believe this channel is paramount for their getting elected.
It’s actually quite interesting to be in this type of emerging market (Colombia) where the Internet is just at the very early stages of being taken seriously. It’s really like Internet circa 2002 in the states. Online advertising is just over 1% (about USD $20 million) of the total advertising pie, but is expected to represent 8% of the pie by 2013. That is explosive growth and it’s quite an interesting matter trying to get corporate executives and small and medium business owners to understand the power of marketing over the Internet (if done correctly).