Victor Montalvo Bilingual Realtor Sí, hablo español

According to Advertising Age, to reach Hispanic consumers, last year advertisers spent 64% of their media budgets on Spanish-language broadcast and cable TV networks, while Internet display ads garnered less than 5%.

The US Hispanic Media Usage report dissects the question of why advertising dollars have been so slow to follow Hispanic eyeballs online.

Hispanic consumers under the age of 35 are spending more time online than watching TV-and are often doing both at the same time.

In general, Hispanics are heavy users of all digital media, embracing innovations more rapidly than non-Hispanic whites.

Yet Hispanic-targeted ad dollars remain locked in TV budgets.

Source: emarketer

Not everyone is pokable.

More than one-half of adults surveyed in 17 countries do not know what social networking is, according to Synovat. The company said it asked over 13,000 consumers in Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the US if they were familiar with social networking.

Although such aggregate findings are useful in a directional sense (many consumers worldwide have yet to hear about social networking), Synovate noted differences in individual countries and among demographic segments. For instance, awareness was higher among younger users.

As for membership, 26% of respondents belonged to social networking sites. Membership was highest in the Netherlands, at 49%; UAE, at 46%; Canada, at 44%; and the US, at 40%.

Synovate also asked adult consumers if they were losing interest in online social networking. Overall, 36% of social network users said yes, led by those in Japan (55%), Slovakia (48%), Canada (47%), Poland and the US (45% each). Social networkers in Indonesia and France were the least likely to be losing interest, at only 18% and 21%, respectively.

An April 2008 Universal McCann study also found social networking to be a minority activity. As in the other survey, the Dutch had the highest percentage of social networkers. Based on the survey, more than one-third (36.4%) of the total population of the Netherlands said they used social networks at least every other day, compared with 23.4% of the total US population.

eMarketer predicts that 44.3% of Internet users in the US will belong to social networks by the end of 2008.

U.S.-based Hispanic consumers are significantly more likely to participate in online social media than their non-Hispanic counterparts, making a social media strategy a must for any marketer wanting to reach this group online, according to a new report from Forrester Research Inc.

"Hispanic Social Technographics Revealed," classifies 69% of 3,000 online Hispanics surveyed as Spectators, meaning that they watch, read or listen to what others have created online. That compares to 42% of non-Hispanics. "This is also the largest segment for non-Hispanic online adults, showing that this is where many consumers start their climb to more engaging levels of activity," according to Forrester's report.

At the highest level of online activity, 40% of Hispanics were characterized by Forrester as Creators, meaning that they take part in such online activities as blogging, publishing web pages and uploading audio and video. By comparison, only 12% of non-Hispanics online consumers participate in these activities.

Overall, Hispanic consumers taking part in some sort of online social activity make up 77% of online Hispanic adults. Forrester characterized this group as influential, reporting that on average 60% tell friends and family about products that interest them. In addition, more than 70% of all Hispanics surveyed said they stay with brands they like, suggesting that marketers who successfully build relationships with them now will have advocates for the long term.

Forrester notes that three aspects of Hispanic culture dispose Hispanics toward online social networking. For one, Hispanics are traditionally early adopters of entertainment technologies, which corresponds online to the use of video, audio and related social computing technologies such as blogging. Further, Hispanic culture emphasizes the group over the individual, making Hispanic consumers more likely to look to others to guide product choices, Forrester says.

Finally, according to Forrester, even though many U.S.-born Hispanic consumers prefer to use the Spanish language, many media publishers and marketers in the U.S. don`t offer this option. Social networking provides Hispanics with opportunities to fill that online gap by contributing their own Spanish-language content, Forrester says.

According to report author and Forrester analyst Tamara Barber, "Any company that touches online Hispanic consumers would be remiss not to include them in its social strategy. The focus should be on what technologies are a strategic fit and which social computing channels to use."

Source: Internet Retailer

It is not by accident that the month starts on the 15th day of September, rather than, more conventionally, on the first. Sept. 15 is independence day in five Spanish-speaking nations: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. (Mexico and Chile also celebrate the anniversaries of their independence from Spain during this month, on Sept. 16 and Sept. 18, respectively.)

When Hispanic Heritage Week was initiated in 1968, Congress required that the week would always include Sept. 15. Twenty years later, when the commemoration was expanded to a full month, the dates were fixed as Sept. 15 - Oct. 15 to help fix attention on an important date in the history of Hispanic America.

President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed the first Hispanic Heritage Week at a time when migration from Central and South America was beginning to expand. Yet, there have been Spanish-speaking people in what now is the United States for almost 500 years, ever since California, Florida and the Mississippi River were "discovered" by Spanish explorers in the early 1500s.

Although Spain was unable to establish enduring colonies in North America, the early attempts at exploration and settlement did have a lasting impact. Researcher Robert Suro, writing on the facts.com Web site, says that some 30 percent of today's Hispanic-Americans can trace their ancestry to forebears who lived in Texas, New Mexico and California, among other places, when those states were territories.

But the majority of Hispanic-Americans arrived in the U.S. more lately, though it is only in the last quarter-century that the U.S. Census Bureau has tracked that migration. In 1930, the Census Bureau added "Mexican" among the ethnic origins it included in the national headcount. In 1940, a category for "persons of Spanish mother tongue" was added to Census forms. In 1980, the description was broadened again, to "Spanish/Hispanic" origin.

The term Hispanic, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, refers to Spanish-speaking people in the United States of any race. On the 2000 Census form, people of Spanish/Hispanic/Latino origin could identify themselves as Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, or "other Spanish/Hispanic/Latino." More than 35 million people identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino on the 2000 Census.

No matter how Hispanic-Americans are categorized by the Census Bureaus, it is evident that Hispanic Heritage Month celebrates a growing segment of the American population and culture. Today, there are more Hispanics in the United States than there are in Spain. Mexico and Colombia are the only nations with larger Hispanic populations than the U.S.

In 1970, there were 9.6 million Hispanics in the United States, according to the Census Bureau. By 2000, the number of Hispanics had grown to 35.5 million, or 12 ½ percent of the total U.S. population. In 2006, the Bureau estimated the Hispanic population as 44.3 million, 15 percent of the total.

During a single year, from July 1, 2005 to July 1, 2006, the Hispanic population added 1.4 million people, accounting for half of the total increase in population during that period. By the years 2050, the Census Bureau predicts, Hispanics will represent one-fourth of the U.S. population.

It is the growing place of Hispanics in American culture and community which Hispanic Heritage Month commemorates.

In 1989, the year the commemoration was expanded from one week to a full month, President George H. W. Bush said "Perhaps no single ethnic group has had as profound an impact upon our Nation as Hispanic American ... Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Puerto Rican Americans and other men and women of Hispanic descent have not only demonstrated the power of individual enterprise but also added to the cultural diversity that so enriches American life.'