Tweet The following case study is an excerpt from my forthcoming book: A Five Step Process to Digital Marketing. The story of Souchi.com exemplifies the incredible effect that optimizing a website and the digital marketing that leads people to it can have on e-commerce sales. More specifically, it highlights how tapping into the right social network, Pinterest in this case, can dramatically grow a business online. In only five months, we grew traffic to the website over 1000% and e-commerce sales by over 630%. Here is how

Tweet This article originally appeared on Fox News Latino. eMarketer projects that between 2012 and 2016, Latin America will be one of the world’s fastest-growing regions for online advertising spending, growing from $3.62 billion in 2012 to $7.68 billion in 2016, a 112% increase in just four years. Yet, legacy monopolies like Televisa, creator of many of the world’s most popular telenovelas along with its competitor TV Azteca, still dominate media spending where 56% of advertising dollars go towards broadcast television while only 10% goes

Tweet This article originally appeared on FoxNews.com. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning,” said Bill Gates. And the best place to find those unhappy customers today is on Twitter, Facebook and across your social media channels. I recently flew on the Mexican discount airline, Volaris, and had an experience that highlights how not to manage both customer service and social media among an international, multi-lingual audience. Allow me to explain the details of what happened, and conclude with six lessons on

Tweet This post originally appeared on Acento.com How should brands adapt their communications and engage consumers in the age of social media? Surprisingly, a book first published in 1936 best highlights how to “win friends” on social platforms, written long before Al Gore “invented the Internet.” Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” outlines fundamental approaches on how to build long-lasting relationships with friends, colleagues, and consumers. Over the past eight months, our team here at Acento has had the opportunity to

Tweet This article originally appeared on FoxNews.com If you want your company’s brands to make 100,000 “friends” on Facebook, Tatiana Hansell can show you how. As Unilever’s Multicultural Marketing Manager of personal care products, Hansell developed its Vivemejor branded content initiative for Latina women online. First, she launched its Spanish-language website, ViveMejor.com, which provides helpful cooking and beauty tips for Latina moms. Today, with the explosion of social media, Vive Mejor, which means “Live Better” in English, distributes its content across the major social sites:

Tweet This post originally appeared on Acento.com Just over one year ago, the hottest device since the laptop – the iPad – first launched. One of the first websites the Acento Team checked (probably like many of you) was our own flash-based agency website – Acento.com. We discovered (as expected) that it appeared as a blank page. Steve Jobs famously attacked Flash, promising that his devices would never accept the Adobe-owned development platform. The Web was in transition (again). Gone were the desktops and even

Tweet This article originally appeared on MediaPost. How should marketers customize a Facebook initiative for the U.S. Hispanic market? State Farm’s Aymee Zubizarreta answered that question during our recent conversation about how the insurance giant found its voice and connected to its Latino audience with content about music, family and culture on the leading social network. Q: This past April, State Farm became the first national insurance company to create a bilingual (English, Spanish) social networking site for Latinos. Why did State Farm launch a

Tweet “Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent,” Steve Martin said, who recently released his 8th book – An Object of Beauty. Writing a book requires a great deal of persistence. But what about promoting it? I was surprised by how much persistence and work was needed after my book was completed. That’s what this third post in a series is about: how to promote your book. The first post discussed how to find a publisher or self-publish. The second post discussed how to

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 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,