In this interview, Enrique Dans, a Professor in Information Systems at IE Business School, looks into the main changes ICT is bringing to people, organisations, and the society. This renowned expert argues that, with the breakthrough of social media, organisations need above all to think about how to develop processes to absorb information. This will allow them to identify conversations of their customers, prescribers and competitors. Prof. Dans explains that the development of personal protocols in accepting technological change always lags behind technology. In his opinion, regulations need to adapt to change by setting the new situation as a standard; moreover, help should be provided to those suffering under disruption.

Nowadays, social media have become a major marketing tool for businesses. But, in addition to being an excellent tool for managing the relationship with customers, social media are also used by companies for many other purposes. This article analyses these other uses.

The emergence of social media has led many companies to adopt them as marketing channels. Yet these media are novel enough to still leave many marketers unsure as to how to plan an effective social media marketing strategy, actually oriented towards engaging prospects. In this article, we discuss how to shape a social media strategy. To do so, we show the key concepts and steps involved in the planning process of this type of digital marketing strategy, and how to measure their impact immediately.

The globalisation of financial markets has been based on several factors that have enabled their integration. Two of them are financial deregulation and free movement of capital. Especially relevant to this change has been technological progress regarding the connection between markets. This has encouraged and standardised systems for settling and compensating transactions, speeded up trading with integrated services from different markets, and improved the risk-benefit ratio for investors.

As a result of such big change in the economic environment as well as the financial system and its communication patterns, new innovative financial products have been developed. Their aim is to provide protection from growing volatility and increased risk in all financial transactions.

The negative side of globalisation and the high interconnection between markets is the contagion effect of financial crises. The most recent example is the sub-prime crisis that sparked off in the United States in 2007. This caused a drop in liquidity on the global credit market, which in turn affected the economy of several countries, and showed the weakness of the global financial system and its regulatory framework.

Social media play a relevant role as the basis to most processes related to information transfer as well as knowledge creation and transfer. In order to optimise those processes in organisations, knowledge management needs to take into account essential functions of social media. In this article, we describe some of the specific mechanisms by which a social media structure influences the effectiveness of information transfer and knowledge creation and transfer. Based on this, we put forward some considerations on the most suitable features of social media to meet organisational objectives. Knowledge management must be able to use existing social media and, if possible, to have those media adopt the most adequate structure.