Tweet Do you write down your annual or five year goals? I started writing mine down when I was a teenager. My father encouraged me to do so at the beginning of every calendar year. In reviewing mine from a few years ago, I included “write a book” in my five-year plan. Little did I know that that dream would come to fruition so quickly. Paramount Books published my first book, Latino Link: Building brands online with Hispanic communities and content in October of 2010. It’s

Tweet Which region will provide growth for your business in 2011? Paul Gunning, the Chief Executive Officer at Tribal DDB, recently told me, “Latin America is another China” because it has “millions of consumers with rising purchasing power.” A number of recent articles support that claim: This article from Forbes – Forget China, Look To Latin America – highlights that, “with inflation a concern in the Far East, commodity and consumer-driven economies like Brazil and Chile may be 2011′s biggest winners.” It goes on to

Tweet How many photos does a National Geographic photographer need to take in order to capture just the perfect image in their magazine? On average, about 1000. In other words, it takes a lot of trial and error, editing, and experimentation to get to perfection…about one in a thousand attempts for National Geographic. When writing my book – Latino Link – I brainstormed and evaluated hundreds of title and subtitle ideas, in order to encapsulate the ideas in my book as succinctly as possible. How

Tweet Recently, I read two books on innovation with two entirely different approaches. The first, Change by Design, was a disappointment even though it is the better known of the two. It actively sells the concept of innovative design. The second, The Victorian Internet, provides greater insights into the process of innovation and the pitfalls of new technologies through a historical context. It tells “the remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth century’s on-line pioneers.” You would think that the book written by the

Tweet The following article first appeared on Fox News Latino. For years, Latinos have been held back by the “digital divide,” an information and technology gap relative to wealthier audiences that enjoy greater access to expensive computers and broadband connections. But two Internet trends will close that gap in 2011 and beyond: mobile and social media. In fact, experts predict that Hispanics could actually become leaders in adoption of new technology. Today, we still see a digital divide in home computer ownership. Six out of

Tweet I watched this presentation on TED.com months ago from photographer, Phil Borges about the loss of endangered languages and cultures and I couldn’t get it out of my head. The photos, personal stories, and statistics that Borges shared blew me away, especially the opening paragraph: A fact came out of MIT, couple of years ago. Ken Hale, who’s a linguist, said that of the 6,000 languages spoken on Earth right now, 3,000 aren’t spoken by the children. So that in one generation, we’re going

Tweet This article originally appeared on MediaPost. Last week, the leading advertisers convened in Miami for the ANA’s annual Multicultural Marketing & Diversity Conference. Historically, Hispanic, African-American and Asian-American marketers have fought hard for budgets even though demographic trends point to the fact that today’s minorities will become the majority in the coming decades. Hence, the summit was subtitled, “Multicultural – The New Mainstream.” One marketer who clearly sees the growth of multicultural audiences converging with the growth of social media is McDonald’s. Rick Wion,

Tweet Hispanic marketers and researchers often discuss the growth of the U.S. Hispanic audience and their acculturation process into American society. But rarely do we analyze the opposite side of the same coin. How do Caucasians learn the Spanish language, acquire information about Latinos’ native countries in Latin America, and “acculturate” to a more Hispanic America? As the Hispanic population grows, speaking Spanish becomes more useful than ever before. Many American students choose to study Spanish because of its usefulness here in the U.S. or

Tweet How can you incorporate social media into your marketing communications? Here’s a perfect example of how to do that. Juan Antonio Vargas Barraza, a PhD candidate in marketing communications at the University of Madrid and University of Guadalajara, showed me these two videos on YouTube from his home country of Mexico. The first video shows a young teenager taunting his chubby friend while attempting to cross a stream, walking across a makeshift bridge. A third friend videotaped these two, documenting the fat kid’s unfortunate

Tweet Here’s a great story about an illustrator, originally from Barcelona, who moved to the U.S. to work as a journalist and the evolution of his career via his blog. Gabi Campanario first started blogging for the user-generated news portal – SoiTu.es – based in his home country of Spain (as I wrote in my book – Latino Link – and in this previous post The Story of SoiTu.es: Community + Technology + Editorial). Gabi’s columns on SoiTu.es, which featured his scanned illustrations from his