Ignacio Delgado

I perfectly remember that day in May 2007. It was early in the morning, and a friend from the Faculty approached me with a face full of hope and said, “Look at this website! It's called Twitter, it's a page where you can write notes of 140 characters maximum, you have to register, it's great!

It wasn't the first time I heard that "Tui..." I don't know what. A few months ago, another friend had been teaching it to me, but honestly, he didn't find it funny to have only 140 characters. Not to mention that the web was all text, without any images (except those of the avatars). In that first "attempt", I flatly refused. «They will never see me in there, what nonsense», he told me to myself.

However, in those months of denial, I did not stop hearing things from the Faculty. That grew at breakneck speed: «What is your Twitter account?», «I already have 112 followers!». Like everything in the Faculties, either you're inside, or you're not, and if that was related to the Internet, I had to be there. So that day in May, I made up my mind and opened my personal Twitter account.

Twitter, and in general all the Social Networks (RRSS) that we know and use today, has suffered an exponential explosion since 2005. From my point of view, it has produced a very curious situation. Before they existed, the child who did not have a bicycle in the village was excluded from the group; Today something similar happens with the RRSS. There are people who have an account, just to say the typical: “yes, of course, I have an account”.

The phenomenon of the RRSS fascinates me. It is a way of telling the world about your concerns, expressing opinions immediately and, above all and very importantly, freely. It is precisely this freedom that leads many of us to overturn sensations and emotions that define us as people; an open book of ourselves.

For any company, this becomes very attractive. We are increasingly aware of more analytical solutions that help us filter the content of these networks and give us answers to business questions such as: Do customers like the latest collection/product/service that my company has just launched? What aspects do you not like? What factors make my customers stand out from my competition? Are there any misunderstandings that our Marketing team needs to clear up to protect our brand image? Solutions such as IBM Social Media Analytics allow us to have a vision of the "sentiment" of the comments, being able to launch analyzes of the different campaigns and obtain insightsocial through the evaluation, segmentation, relationship and discovery of conversation topics.

However, we must bear in mind that we have gone from a customer relationship model that began as general (reaching everyone equally), went through the segmentation of populations and that right now is totally individualistic (and where the idea of to generate 360º models of each person, with their personal tastes and concerns). And with the same speed that Social Networks and the Internet in general move, solutions move. An example of this is "System-U", an IBM developmentled by Michelle Zhou, which is capable of analyzing the latest tweets of a client and creating a profile of it, to adapt the promotions and services offered individually and with an accuracy of 80%, according to Zhou. This software is capable of drawing conclusions about our personality, behaviors, needs and values, specific to each person.

As it happened to me, at first you can refuse, but there comes a time when you have to accept it and live with it. Social Networks are here to stay. Whether it's called Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook. Whether they last forever or new Network names arise. So both people and companies can be in them, both listening and taking action , developing what is known as "Social Observatories", or not being. Knowing that if they are not alert, the other children may not want to play with them in the town square.