EthnicMajority

(USAToday) Barack Obama is again an Internet sensation.

A 29-year-old Barack Obama.

Internet users are enjoying a 1991 television spot in which Obama — then a student at Harvard Law School — talks about pioneering African-American lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston.

Obama — longer hair, no gray — taped the spot as part of the "Black History Minute" series run by the TBS cable station in 1991.

Who could have guessed the heights that young man would have reached in less than two decades?

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(Home Media) Kmart has created the first brand-produced U.S. Latino video series distributed through YouTube.

“Madres y Comadres” is an eight-part original Spanish-language miniseries about two Latina moms and the challenges they face raising a family in America while maintaining their cultural identity. The series is written and directed by Alberto Ferreras, best known for his long-running “Habla” documentary series on HBO Latino. The lighthearted webisodes are styled like a telenovela and are accompanied by 12 video interviews with real moms from Mexico, Peru, Guatemala and Colombia managing the nuances of raising American children in a traditional Latino household.

Kmart launched a customized host channel at YouTube for the series at YouTube.com/MadresyComadres. The channel includes data capture, Facebook and Twitter social plug-ins and sharing features, and shopable video. The show also will have its own Twitter account @MadresyComadres and Facebook media, consistent with the multiple platforms where Latino usage is outpacing other audience segments.

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(Ogilvy PR) We are not all the same!

As the Hispanic market continues to expand in the U.S., more and more companies are targeting this ever- growing segment of the population through social media initiatives. A 2011 TeleNoticias-LatinoWire Hispanic Social Media Survey found that when marketers employ social media to engage with Hispanic consumers they turn to Facebook (84%), Twitter (62%), YouTube (42%) and Blogs (40%)

As a Hispanic who spends a rather large amount of time in the online space, I find it interesting that often we are still lumped together as one big group of people, as if we all behaved the same. It might come as a surprise to some but some of us like to get our messaging in English. Don’t get me wrong, I am fully bilingual, 100% proud of my Mexican background and I communicate with some friends and family in Spanish in person and online, but I like my promotions in English. Some friends of mine, on the other hand, are much more interested in Spanish promotions.

So why does this matter?

More often than not Hispanics are targeted on the basis of language and/or culture, and as Jose Villa from MediaPost.com points out, “most online Hispanics are comfortable reading and writing in English.”Moreover, the growth of the Hispanic market is happening thanks to the American-born children of immigrants, who are “bilingual, bicultural and increasingly influential within their multi-generational households.” so it is important that you know who in the Hispanic market you are targeting.

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(Washington Post) Antoine Dodson’s angry, head-shaking TV interview about an attempted rape against his younger sister in her bed has turned into a chart-topping iTunes song and YouTube hit and made the 24-year-old Alabama college student an Internet sensation.

“So y’all need to hide your kids, hide your wife and hide your husband, ’cause they raping everybody out here,” the song’s catchy refrain goes.

Dodson plans to use the money from the “Bed Intruder Song” selling for $1.29 a download and T-shirt sales to move his family out of the Lincoln Park housing project where they say the attack happened. But in an era when a viral video clip can rocket anyone to stardom, some suggest that Dodson and his family are being used and that his online rant plays to racial stereotypes.

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