Spanish Fever at XING

When Horacio E. Coronado strolls through the doors of XING’s Hamburg headquarters, he calls out a friendly hola and buenos dias to everyone in his path. Though Spanish has always been a widely-spoken language here, recent developments have elevated the world’s second-most-spoken-language to XING’s langue de rigeur. (The XING Group Hispano-Alemán <-> Deutsch Spanischsprachiger suggests that this may be a German-wide phenomenon.) Evidence includes the surge in native Spanish-speakers in our offices: Spanish-speakers Coronado and Daniel Benjumea Martinez recently joined the Members Relations team and Joaquin Moreno moved to Hamburg to serve as a TLC team leader. Daniel Silva, Antonino Avarello and Gloria Claros have been with XING for a while now. Learning Spanish, furthermore, has become a major XING pastime; once-a-week, in-house courses are packed every week.

The rising popularity of Spanish at XING is hardly a surprise. The language is the world’s second-most-widely-spoken tongue and, as an international, multilingual platform, it only makes sense for XING to take an interest. The more concrete reason, however, is XING’s purchase of two Spain-based networking platforms (eConozco and Neurona) last June. The aim of the move was to welcome one million or so Spanish-speaking members who live in Barcelona, Mexico City and everywhere in between to XING. eConozco’s members have already moved to Hamburg and Neurona’s members are on their way soon. Neurona team members, in fact, will visit XING this week to devise final plans for the “migration”.

Community Relations has played a major role in the Spanish love affair. One of Ulrike Gruel’s many tasks, for example, is to help coordinate the smooth move of Groups from the two Spanish platforms to the multilingual XING. She and Daniel Silva have already successfully overseen the integration of eConozco Groups and are currently working on the details for the Neurona shift. Thanks to their hard work (which also includes taking part in Spanish courses) Spanish will play a decidedly more prominent role in the XING Community. Indeed Groups like the Barcelona Community, Mexico Business Network and Negocios de Latinoamerica reveal that all things related to the Spanish-speaking world are caliente topics. If this trend continues, it is only a matter of time before hola replaces moin as the greeting of choice at XING.