Traditional media give ground to new media, and people prefer to choose and express themselves individually, prioritizing their emotions, something they had not had before.
An urban myth in the United States says that in 1899, the United States Patent Office head would have said that this dependency should close because everything was invented. Commissioner Charles H Duell has been held responsible for such a statement because there was little left to patent after the typewriter, photography, film, and the car.
A century later, at totally different times, the business world was surprised by a statement in the best style of Commissioner Duell: “Well, much has been written about how the home TV is going to become something like a computer (and vice versa). People will sit in front of this electronic wonder and enjoy shows, read the news, play, interact, compute, and everything you say and send. I doubt that all this will happen, but what if it happened? Will all those wonderful machines make people smarter? (Trout and Rivkin, 1997)”.
By the time these words were published, the world had begun to marvel at two things that had already changed everyone’s life. The first was the cell phone, whose arrival came in 1983 when Motorola launched its Dynatac 8000x model, which weighed almost a kilogram and had an autonomy of one hour in conversation and eight in standby. The company had invested 100 million dollars in its development (Ranchal, 2014). Three generations of phones would succeed in reaching today’s advances. The second was the internet with its nascent tools, among which the email stood out. The limited use of the network to exchanging emails and having a global library with the most up-to-date information on the planet was a difficult task (Delgado, 2018).
Far would be anyone to predict a fusion of these advances and much more to imagine a technological development that would bring them together in a single device and make it indispensable for humanity two decades later. Humanity’s imagination seemed to have no limits beginning the 21st century. The internet boom showed that humanity’s creativity seemed to have no limits. Quickly the internet and cell phone came together to never separate. They begin to give society offspring of even more fantastic products. With the advance of the internet and its surroundings and the aesthetic and technological refinement, it was possible towards the end of the new century’s first decade to begin to carry in them a new product known as social networks.
When it seemed that substantially different advances would continue, the world dedicated itself to enjoy social networks. They are the most inclusive, independent, spontaneous new media. Their significant advantages gradually began to be popular with each day of technological advancement. One by one, each social network was appearing and gaining adherents: LinkedIn in 2003, Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010, or Pinterest in 2011, to mention the most popular and used in our environment.
This interaction with intelligent cell phones developed as a machine that brought together at least 20 devices in disuse allowed people to perform several communication actions at the same time, such as: listening to music, answering an email, taking a picture, publishing content on the social networks, record audio, chat, read digital versions of the media and all that while making a call.
This cataract of actions created a new communication field that I describe as the individual, which joined the general and the collective marked since the invention of each traditional medium, their interaction with the audience. By the end of the second decade of the new century, a person no longer has to watch television, news, listen to the radio and its information, wait for the newspaper in the morning to read it, or even go to the movies. All this began to be part of the individual sphere. Each person with a “smartphone” is empowering by technology.
The empowerment makes it a new and unknown world to conquer for communication and marketing. We were faced with technologies initially developed to solve the basic needs of communication between the military and scientists, which gave rise to create a scenario that would become the largest and most important means of communication, cooperation, and commerce in the world that is the Internet (Slim, 2018).
In marketing, they establish two-way, interactive, direct, and real-time communication with each person through portable devices and wireless internet connections. An investigation into the influence of “smartphones” shows that the use is extending during daylight hours. Technology has improved life as it allows communication with others; these types of phones have gained more ground because they are the only ones to allow the use of social networks (Flores, Alvarado, and Ramos, 2015).
Every day it is discovered that the options and possibilities are more significant, and communication and marketing are trying to take advantage of them. A study about fan engagement with football clubs on Facebook showed that the need for information, empowerment, and love for the brand are the main drivers of consumption, contribution, and creation. The three levels of involvement or commitment of fans with their teams revealed that social networks’ interactive and collaborative nature could reinforce new, specific, and more social motivations. Finally, the study shows that the main driver of the highest level of participation, creation, was the brand’s love, which shows that fans develop unique reactions to their favorite teams. The study mentioned above, one of the few in investigating fan relations and football through social networks, lays the foundations of how clubs and fans should interact online to obtain the most significant mutual benefit from a one-to-one relationship (Vale and Fernandes, 2018).
So when we talk about targeting, micro-targeting, or algorithms, to reach that relationship one by one, it seems that we are entering a science fiction language and not marketing, and there is the key. Social networks are a reality that offers us many opportunities with only two actions: the first, with the technology and the ability to use it, and the second, showing the leadership to open up to a digital mindset.
Companies and organizations must create marketing or communication channels through new media to show that the digital world applied to these processes offers as many possibilities as the mind and passion for a discipline or practice permit. “There is no doubt that social networks have become one of the most used media by millions of people across the globe, which converge in a specific place, that is to say, a website, to share with their contacts a diversity of information. The objective of these interactive networks, which allow maintaining contact between users from all over the world beyond the geographical distances that separate them, and precisely these communities feed on the content that people who consume service (Technology & computing”, 2019).
It is good to affirm the evolution of public opinion’s conformation during the last decade, which is more determined by direct digital marketing techniques, which are displacing traditional media as the primary agents of the creation of public opinion (Lesaca, 2017).” Another author said, “Browsing the Internet is no longer as seductive as the fact of participating in a social network” (De Salas, 2009). With which, “it is clear that the trend is to strengthen the personalization. It is the era of marketing ONE to ONE, where the relevance of information is more important than ever to be able to choose the user the advertising it receives” (De Salas, 2009).
In the Colombian environment, all this seems to have positioned itself in large volume: 97% use the internet to communicate and 78% to entertain themselves; in the last month in Colombia, 79% entered the internet to consult social networks, 80% accessed daily and Facebook is the most used by 88%, Colombians between 16 and 54 years define the internet as the most crucial thing in their life, and finally in 92% of homes some member has a smartphone (Government of Colombia, 2017).
Finally, remember a study that lets us see the specificity of the topic in terms of habits and times, which states that the most effective time to publish on Facebook is from 1 pm to 4 pm, emphasizing 3 pm. He also points out that it coincides with the moment when people usually have lunch and leave their jobs, going to their cell phones, noting that users check that social network at least 4 or 5 times. As for Twitter, the analysis carried out states that the moment of most incredible traffic on this network is from Monday to Thursday from 1 pm to 3 pm and very little at night. Today, we conclude much willing technology and its obligation to use it (Santos, 2017).
Having said all the above about one-to-one communication with equal segmentation, we can say that practical, economically reasonable, direct, and inclusive solutions arrive if we know how to use the new media and their full potential. If the person who hires is not sensitive to these changes in a company or government office, he must understand that he must reinvent himself because the new times have completely surpassed him. To learn more about marketing or one-to-one communication, write to me at ottogutierrez@ymail.com and tell me about your project or need and I can surely help.
Otto Gutierrez 
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it
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