This week, I join hundreds of bloggers, marketing agency executives and brand managers in Miami at the third annual Hispnicize social media conference.

Did you hear about Nestle's recent launch of Construye el Mejor Nido ("Create the Best Nest"), a new communications platform to reach the U.S. Hispanic market? Maybe you've seen or visited Unilever's Vive Mejor (Live Better) program, a similar cross-platform effort to engage Hispanics around various Unilever brands. If you haven't noticed, there has been a growing trend over the last five years among consumer goods companies to launch Hispanic multi-brand programs.

David Chitel is a pioneer in the bilingual/bicultural Hispanic media and entertainment space. Preferring the term "New Generation Latino," or NGL, Chitel has launched several companies targeting this demographic over the last 12 years, including the first Latino social network, the first Latino animated TV series, and an agency dedicated to helping Fortune 500 companies reach young Latinos through live events, magazines, the Internet, and college campus marketing.

If we are to be effective in reaching a demographic for its potentially great resource as consumers, it is important to focus on other strategies besides just the tactics of how to be efficient. I believe that a deep understanding of not just the group trends as consumers, but also of the realities of its members as human beings, is the key to becoming an agent of change. Not that I want to predicate my political or sociological views here, but I think that by doing so, marketers could have the added benefit of tapping into the economic potential of …

My digital existence will have to undergo a serious change. Last Sunday, my Abuela casually commented on pictures she saw of my nephews on "El Facebook." I was barely able to contain my surprise. Many of my non-Hispanic friends had told me about this very thing and how it affected their social media experience. Strange as it may sound, I thought I was off the hook, thanks to the proverbial Hispanic "digital divide."

Now that we are well into the New Year, I thought it would be worthwhile to provide an update on the state of the Hispanic online market. Overall, the market continues to be rich and vibrant and the data points to a clear opportunity for online marketers in 2012.

We hear the term "multicultural" a lot. Marketers, academics, and industry leaders love to talk about multicultural groups and the growth of America's multicultural population - the various minority groups, including Hispanic, African-American, Asian, and "other" (Middle Eastern, European, South Asian, etc.) that are rapidly expanding in size and influence. As a marketer, I've always grappled with the question of whether this is an actual segment or just convenient nomenclature, created by corporate America to neatly package what would otherwise be very distinct groups of individuals.

A consistent message has been widely expressed throughout forums like this one, books and traditional and new media. Phrases like "the Hispanic market represents a critical opportunity for your business today" or "there is potentially a huge opportunity for marketers" make reference to what some studies and statistics seem to indicate: Hispanic consumers as a group represent a market potentially worth a trillion dollars.

This country's big media content producers, whether they produce in Spanish or in English, are in danger. The danger they face is two pronged. On the one hand, the film and television industries seem satisfied to keep producing content that appears to ignore or somehow overlook the real face of America today. Of course, they cannot really be blamed because they have been getting away with it for so long. The studios or networks might point to a current sitcom or two and say: we are multicultural, we are diverse. Why would people object? It's just entertainment, what should we …

Last week, Hispanic marketing pioneer M. Isabel Valds published her fifth book, "WIN! The Hispanic Market; Strategies for Business Growth." Isabel Valds took a unique approach by aggregating the voices of 19 Hispanic marketing industry experts to illuminate the importance of the Hispanic market and to provide actionable insights and strategies for driving real and sustainable business growth. I am proud to be one of those volunteer voices and will herein summarize my contribution to the book, "The Hispanic Digital Marketing Opportunity."