LAN's Carlos Roman

LAN's Roman leads discussion of 'brave new world' of social media

You might have never heard of Dave Caroll or Deltalina, and you might not recall that the first photograph of the U.S. Airways jet that went down in the Hudson River after taking off from New York’s LaGuardia appeared on Twitter.

All three are examples that LAN’s Carlos Roman detailed during WorldCity’s Marketing Connections event today to show how social media is disrupting the traditional channels of communication. It’s Twitter, it’s FaceBook, it’s LinkedIn, it’s YouTube, it’s Wikipedia.

While Roman, the Marketing Director for the successful Chilean company, used other airlines as examples, the impact of social media is running rapidly through all companies, in all industries, the participants agreed.

Marketing Connections is an every-other-month event series sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, one of six event series hosted by WorldCity.

“Advertising used to be about what you said to other people,” said Maxim Weitzman, the marketing director for Telefonica USA, which is headquartered in Miami. “Social media is about what other people are saying about you.”

That can be bad, if you are United Airlines, as a country singer’s goal of 1 million hits on Youtube by year’s end is reached within a matter of days and you are forced into an awkward apology for breaking his guitar after traditional media picks up the story.

And it can be good if you are Delta, and a red-headed, blue-eyed 33-year-old flight attendant with a Southern accent, a slightly naughty finger wag and a fleeting resemblance to Angelina Jolie, or at least her lips, delivering the in-flight safety via video can find her way to youtube and then all over traditional media as well, including BusinessWeek and the Ellen DeGeneres show.

In both cases, however, the airlines ceded control to the masses.

“It has a life of its own,” said Nokia’s Matt Rothchild, referrring to social media. “So when the vice president comes in and says, ‘What the hell is this?’… That’s not what (it’s) about. It’s about raw truth.”

“Consumers are taking over your brand. You can sit and wait or you can be a part of it,” said Roman’s LAN, before adding: “You can’t wait.”

Social media, then, poses risks and rewards. That can certainly be said of traditional media as well.

A few key differences are the speed of the internet — Nortel’s Roberto Ricossa recalled receiving a ‘tweet’ within minutes of a Nortel event starting in Chile, before he knew it had even begun — its new-ness and the collaborative power to put you on a pedestal or destroy you.

Miami law firm and trade consultancy Sandler Travis & Rosenberg is on LinkedIn and Facebook, three attorneys have blogs, the firm is on Twitter — and Twitter, Facebok and LinkedIn are all connected.

Said the firm’s marketing coordinator, Grace Montealegre, “You’re going to have to become best friends with the programmers. You’re not only Marketing, you’re Marketing-IT.”

The power, of course, rests with attracting attention, and creating the win-win situation.

“We try to be creative,” said VISA’s Luis Lobo, speaking of the marketing professionals in the room, “but if you can get collaboration, you will probably be (better off) than finding it within your own company.”

He gave the example of Netflix, which is offering a $1 million prize to any programmer who can create a better model to forecast demand for its movies. “If you have something that works better than our system, you get $1 million.”

Creating content, and keeping it lively and changing is also critical. Said Mastercard’s Guillermo Morrone, a senior vice president for marketing, in discussing the company’s efforts in Latin America with soccer, “It depends on how fast you move or people don’t come back.”

Because the internet is so vast, it can also create far too much noise. It presents, said Nokia’s Rothchild, an opportunity for an entirely new line of work — finding the “golden nuggets,” the invaluable threads of informaton amidst all the rancor, garbage and drivel.

It is also creating far less consternation for young people than the baby boomer crowd.

“If we look at the average age of this group, we are definitely on the edge. Younger generation is (fine) with all these communication vehicles. It’s embeddd in their DNA. As marketeers, we all have to embrace that. Get a couple of young people on your team.”

“Probably the best people to hire are your kids,” said VISA’s Lobo with a chuckle.