Guest Speaker

This past week we had a guest speaker in class. Marta Alonso came to speak to us about her job and some of the things she works with dealing with social media and marketing. She currently works as the founder and director of the digital marketing agency called Circle Line. The intent of this company is to build great and long lasting relationships between people (or consumers) and brands. They are based in Barcelona. Her job is to come up with campaigns for these brands that will appeal to people in some way. It is all about communication and how one can communicate a message or an image best to the audience viewing it.

Her previous work experience were similar to what she does now but obviously not exactly the same. She worked for Edelman as the head of their digital department. She also worked as a business director at a company called Muuby, before Edelman. In all of her work experience she has been working with similar concepts of communicating through media. She has accomplished a lot in her career so far and is continuing to create new ideas and campaigns through social media.

In 2011, she created Instagramers Barcelona, which is an online community for people around the world to connect with. She has a lot of experience using Instagram to communicate with a large audience. Instagramers Barcelona is the first local group of Instagramers. This account has over 14,000 followers now and consists of different pictures from around the city of Barcelona. Marta has acquired a great amount of work experience to be where she is now. She is skilled in many areas such as digital marketing and strategies, online marketing, social media. and blogs.

One of her campaigns that she launched was called Vueling air gallery and was to promote the airline Vueling. This was an Instagram contest/campaign in which made citizens contribute to the campaign through Instagram and this brought awareness to the airline which was the original goal. She talked to us about some strategies she uses in order to be successful with her campaigns. One thing she pointed out was to use hashtags in order to make the brand stand out and become more searchable.

Marta has taken a great amount of the information she has learned throughout the years with her work experience and her experience with Instagram specifically, and put that into a book. The book is titled “WeInstagram”. She wrote this book to talk about the revolution that Instagram has created just in the past 5 years. This application has been used by millions of people in so many different ways. Whether its for photography, creativity, inspiration, or just for fun people are using Instagram every day. The book discusses the different trends of Instagram and also how it has become a major social network in such a short time period. This book is a good representation of her input on the topic of Instagram and marketing through social media.

Marta’s job is solely based on communication through social media campaigns. This can consist of many different typed of campaigns or topics but they are all communicating a message or image to the public. For example, her Vueling air gallery campaign brought attention to the airline Vueling from people all over Europe. With Instagramers Barcelona she also brought attention to the city. This account showcases numerous pictures of the beautiful things about Barcelona and it is contributed to by the public.

In our society today with social media being so prominent it has become a major source of communication. Not only on a small and personal scale but on a large scale as we have seen from Marta’s work experience. Messages that are portrayed through Instagram campaigns or images can reach a huge audience of millions of people worldwide. With social media we can communicate a variety of things to our friends as well as to strangers. So many things are possible to come from someone posting an Instagram or any type of social media post. One can inspire a complete stranger with what they post or encourage someone to do something they may not have thought of before.

Marta proved that one can make a huge impact through using social media. Her campaigns have gained a lot of public attention by her use of Instagram and it has only been a few years since Instagram was created. She has been quite successful in her career which is crazy considering that if it wasn’t for the creation of Instagram her career would be completely different. I hope to work with social media in my future career and Marta has inspired me by showing that it can be a very interesting career. I hope that I can communicate with large groups of people through social media one day and that it can make an influence on someone or something.