Tweet This article originally appeared on FoxNews. Venture capitalists take note, Latin America’s Internet entrepreneurs are ramping up. A recent panel at SXSW Interactive entitled “Accelerating Killer Latam Startups” featured three digital pioneers and start up investors from the region, each with a roadmap to finding and investing in new companies. Bedy Yang and her colleagues at 500 Startups, a seed fund and startup accelerator, have organized “Geeks on a Plane,” an invite-only tour of Miami, Sao Paulo, and Buenos Aires May 10-20. Together, they

Tweet This post originally appeared on MediaPost Engage:Hispanics. As the English speaking Latino audience grows in size and importance, how can marketers develop culturally relevant promotions for Hispanics? Bernardo Meza, Brand Manager for Wrigley Multicultural Marketing answered that question for me by describing his company’s Vive tu Música with 5 program, which aims to build awareness for 5 gum among bi-cultural Hispanic consumers. Following is our conversation about his work developing the online Latin rock and pop music talent competition. Why a music promotion? This

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 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

Tweet Following is a preview of Latino Link: Building brands online with Hispanic communities and content from Paramount Books. Bicultural Hispanics often switch back and forth between Spanish and English. To learn why, Elizabeth Perez, the Digital Insights Analyst at ImpreMedia, describes why she chooses content in English or Spanish based on the cultural and political orientation of the news in each language. In-Language media is simply written in a consumer’s native language whereas in-culture media provides news from the perspective of the viewer’s native

Tweet This article originally appeared on MediaPost and is a preview of Latino Link: Building brands online with Hispanic communities and content from Paramount Books. The new report from the Pew Hispanic Trust — Latinos Online — shows that 64% of all U.S. Hispanics use the Internet and that foreign-born Latinos have crossed the tipping point with 52% online. As the Hispanic audience grows, they seek new content and increasingly find and regularly visit foreign web sites. Why is this happening? “Search engines and social

Tweet This article originally appeared on MediaPost and is an early preview of Latino Link: Building brands online with Hispanic communities and content from Paramount Books. How much do Mexicans spend annually on trips into the U.S.? Forty billion dollars annually, according to Jennifer Stefano, CEO of Border Billboard, who spoke at the Hispanic Retail 360 conference recently, citing a number of Scarborough and chamber of commerce studies.Do retailers credit this revenue toward a U.S. Hispanic audience or a foreign, Latino (Spanish-speaking) consumer? Either way,

Tweet With computer prices falling, Internet users skyrocketing and no borders on the Internet, how can marketers turn their international Spanish-language web site visitors into revenues? That is the question that Juan Tornoe and I will answer in our panel discussion at SXSW Interactive in 2010. Please submit your feedback, suggestions and vote for the panel here on SXSW’s panel picker: Some of the questions that we will answer include: 1. How do consumers cross geo-political boundaries to find, read about and buy what they

Tweet Christine Webster-Moore, the VP of Business Initiatives at Best Buy, recently outlined three goals for how Best Buy wants to increase their sales among Hispanics and Latin Americans at the Hispanic Retail 360 conference: 1) We need to be more fluid in how we invite Spanish-language users to our web site including US Hispanics, Mexicans and visitors in our border stores. 2) We need to provide more creative ways to have our customers buy. We need to experiment more with programs like Flexicompras, our