Photo by Leslie Berestein Rojas/KPCC
Schmooze-fest: A "speed dating" session between Latino bloggers and corporate sponsors, April 7, 2011
I wasn’t sure what to expect this afternoon when I stopped by a conference in Hollywood dubbed Hispanicize 2011, a three-day affair billed as a “public relations and social media conference.”
The combination sounded intriguing, if the kind of mix that could go, well, any number of ways. And while it leaned heavily toward marketing, in the end, it was rather fascinating.
This dawned on me as I witnessed a “speed dating” session between bloggers and corporate marketing types, standing in a hotel ballroom surrounded people rapidly exchanging business cards and giving one another three-minute pitches before the moderator called time-out.
“Are you a sponsor?” asked an eager-looking young woman, seeing me unattached. I said no, but she explained anyway that she had a parenting blog – a “mami blog,” in Latino blogger parlance – dedicated to organic child-rearing, and she was hoping to find the right kind of corporate sponsor.
Welcome to the business-minded world of Latino bloggers 2.0, or as one social media guru there called it, “the second wave.”
