 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCube at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor, IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas. This is theCube, our flagship program from SiliconANGLE Media. We go out to the events and extract the signal and noise. And we are here at the VIP Go Social Lounge, InterconnectGo.com is the website. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Brian Kramer, the CEO of Pure Matter, VIP influencer, author, overall great guy, Ted Talker, the Ted at IBM event. And I've been in the business entrepreneur. Great, great person to know and talk with. Thanks for coming to keep Brian Kramer. Welcome to theCube. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it, I'm looking forward to it. So theCube was originally, when we first started talking to theCube, it was like where ideas can grow. So it's not in us so much what's going on with IBM. Because of course IBM, it's the air event, stuff going on here. But people are involved. And IBM is really transforming themselves into social business. And I remember in the 90s, they coined the term e-business, but no one talks about e-business anymore. So IBM really is on the front end of a mega trend. It's called cloud. It's called the internet. It's called now mobile, right? Cloud mobile is social. So again, like e-business, it's all native. E-business is electronic. That's the internet. Social business, they coined that. They're on the front wave of a killer trend. And you are a big part of that. You are part of their new way to work event. You're an author. So you're in the trenches, you're on the front lines. So what is this social business phenomenon out there? And what does it mean to people, businesses, and potentially to the world? Yeah. That's a good question. So one of the interesting things that a lot of people are thinking about right now is what is, you know, they get social media. I mean, you get how to post a status on Facebook or a tweet out to a lot of different people. You write what you think and you tweet it out. The problem with that is you're pushing a message. You're sending something out and you're not actually engaging, which is what you're talking about. It's all about people. So social business takes that to the next level. It connects two people and engages in a conversation. And it puts everything as a touch point throughout the entire business. So it socializes every moment of truth that is possible. So think about like the shopping experience on any kind of online website or the experience of buying something with any product here at IBM. Every single touch point and every experience should be socialized. How do you make that an engaged experience? So that's really what social business is. It's not just pushing a tweet out. It's actually creating a shared experience where you can engage as a community. And this is, sounds really easy to get your arms around. Just like normal social interaction. It should be. It's like walking in a meeting or a cocktail party and networking, right? When you walk in and you share a drink with someone, you are engaging and networking. You might hand your business card over to someone and it becomes a networking event. That's no different than what social media should be. So David and I always talk like we love Twitter. We use Twitter all the time. We have our analytics system. And we look at Twitter as people are talking publicly. So imagine actually recording everything. It's all recorded. So let's talk about the old way and new way, right? In that context, right? The old way was email marketing, website, which is great in gen one. You put a website up there. People can self-serve themselves. Use Google search. Find out what you're looking for. Make a decision. Talk to your friends. Hey, should I buy that car? Should I do this? Should I go on that trip? Offline, right? Now you have click stream information. I came to the store, walked around virtually. They'll add metrics. That's all pretty much good, right? Now with this Twitter and social phenomenon, you have first party data. Whole new concept. It has nothing to do with click streamers. It's out in the open. This teases out your human to human thing. What do you make sense of that concept of the first party data and how that could change reporting, interactions? Because it's now a new metric. It's got my Twitter, I'll walk into a site, I'm in. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's all about what we do with the data. And so if there's a billion and a half tweets happening every two days, then what are we going to do with that? How are we going to listen to the data that's happening? What are we going to parse out that's going to make it easier for us to not automate, but actually, again, engage? So where are those moments where you can create a customer-centric conversation or a potential customer-centric conversation? So people are talking about their experiences all over the place. So if we could take all of that data, that potential data and use things like IBM Analytics and IBM's partnership with Twitter and Watson to be able to combine those efforts and figure out where those moments are and then go have a human-to-human experience, that's what we're trying to do. So you said earlier, every touch point should be socialized. Can I poke at that a little bit and just understand better what you mean by that? Yeah. So right now, we're creating a co-created experience. I mean, this is broadcast, it's also being broadcast on speakers. We're creating this experience and then hopefully this then also becomes a shareable moment, a shareable experience that people want to learn from, that they wanna share out, that they maybe even wanna tweet out. And so that becomes one touch point in the total IBM experience. You can take that all the way through the buying cycle. You can take that all the way through, think about it in terms of an online shopping experience where somebody goes online and they purchase something, but they don't end up, or sorry, they shop for it, but they don't end up purchasing it yet. And so now all of a sudden they go and they have a different experience at another store and then maybe they have another experience with a friend of theirs who actually says, hey, I've had a good experience with that product, you should go back and buy it. I think it's a really good product, whether it's a bike or something that you're really wanting to buy. And then eventually you go back and you actually buy that product. Now first of all, there's nothing linear about that buying process like there used to be. It used to be you start in one place and you end in another. We only had advertising radio and TV according to the Mad Men days. Those were the only two ways that you could advertise. Now you hear all these bits and pieces of information all over the place. So nothing about it is linear. And yet through the buying cycle, we're creating these little moments, these little moments of truth, these little shareable moments that are eventually leading us back to buying that same product because we trust the people that are talking to us. And the moment is huge right now. But so I want to just understand the sort of control points to that socialization. So if the premise is that every touch point should be socialized, as a consumer I say, well, wait a minute, I don't maybe not want every touch point. So you're talking about the data being socialized of that experience? Or what's the control point there? I mean, it's the obvious privacy, anonymity, like last night we're at the Z-Party. A lot of debauchery going on. I did not want to be in the video. For example, a lot of social business going on. No, it wasn't, it was good. It was all good. You can't, you're out in the open. Good clean mainframe, fun. But so, so I was, but I was sort of behind you when you were filming, but I chose not to be in that video. But so how do I choose as a consumer not to share that? Sometimes I don't want to share my purchase on Facebook. I mean, so talk about the flip side of that coin. So a shared experiences does not have to be a digital experience. It can be a shared experience between two people. That's not being filmed. That's not being released on the internet. It's a shared experience that we're having that makes me want to go then buy that product. So that's why it's not linear. Now, what are we doing as brands to make that experience happen? How are we helping to create those shared experiences? That's what I'm talking about. Okay, and so this human to human piece, it's like Abby Metta says, the persona of one. He kind of comes out of the banking world, right? You can't be more impersonal than the banks, but. But personas change in real time based on what you're doing. So my reality when I'm on the go, in the moment, I'm rushing to the bank, for instance, I got a banking transaction. I'm on the corner of the, in that moment, I have context. So, okay, so. But now we have the data. So one of the things Abby said is that sampling's dead. All right, it's completely transforming the way in which we should be thinking about it. I'm trying to tie it into this socialization of every touch point, because we have the data now. But the hard part, like you said, it sounds easy, but the hard part is, okay, how do I package that and get it to assume these pieces of confetti that are all over the place? Who's doing that well? Is Abby, I'm doing that well? What other brands are doing it well? You know, that's interesting because we're sitting in the land of Vegas right now in one of the greatest places to actually be having this conversation. Casinos are doing that really well. Yeah, okay. You know, they invented it. They're buying in rewards cards that we use in the casino to go actually gamble. They're tracking every single movement across our casino experience. You wanna talk about shared experiences. They know when we come out of a concert what time that's gonna be so that they can open up the bar across the way and have three bartenders ready for the amount of people that are coming out and create a shared experience exactly for those people because they know who went in based upon their cards that they're using, their VIP cards got them in. They know who's coming out. They know based upon the past, now this gets into a creepy versus cool conversation, but they know what kind of drinks we like. They could have those drinks ready for us and probably come close to nailing it. So we're actually sitting in the land of answering that exactly. It's all about the data though, really. It really is. And then you see the new badges for this event. Yeah, it's all RFID. There's a lot of data on there. I'm not sure what it means, but. Just watch where you go. I'd like to see what they know about me. It's like that movie, Enemy in the State. You just gotta show you. Should I be able to? Should you be able to what? To see what they know about me. You, well, yes. You should be able to see what they know about you. They should be transparent about everything. Obviously. Yeah, the problem is, and the good thing is that they don't probably have an interest in specifically just you. Otherwise, they would have a much bigger army, a much bigger team of people that would have to focus in on every single person. So they're looking at trends. They're not looking at individuals experience. Oh, okay, but the age to age. That's where I think they need to go. It's going deeper. That persona of one, that concept. Well, think about it. I mean, the old days of the casino, you used to have a person you could go to. Like, you had a personal, like pit boss, or a personal. Yeah, the white glove service. Yeah, that would come out and they'd say, what can I get you next? And how can I help you with your next drink? Or do you want to go on a ride down the street? I'll get you a limo, and we'll take care of everything for you. So we've kind of gotten away from that. We've kind of gotten into the point now where we're trying to automate so much. We're trying to use the data to create less than personalization. That's a great point. White glove service in the old day was physical, face-to-face interaction, engagement at the highest form. Okay, we have too much noise right now. Automating is a good challenge. Personalization is collective intelligence, all that great stuff, great computer science stuff, but are we over notified? And is that a work area? Do you believe that? And you've been in design. You've been in this business for years. You've seen the cycles. Are we over notified right now? Is there too much notification going on? Is there too much personalization? Absolutely, there's too much content. There's so much content right now that where do we turn for our answers? And who's putting out content for actual, for a real reason, like to really educate the consumer, to really put their efforts into something that's going to really continue a buying purchase. It's going to help somebody. As Dave Bair always talks about, if you help the customer, they're going to want to come back and help you. And so, instead of writing and creating all this content, for content's sake, that's the problem. I mean, there's too much content out there and we need to actually focus it on value. It's not valuable. Marketing is a source of value is what you're talking about. And mother, the rules are changing too. Transparency is, we talked about this about the open source game, right? Transparency now, which has always been an ethos of open source, doing it in the open, is now completely open because it's 100% measurable so you can't hide anywhere. You can't. They know what you had for breakfast before you had. Let me put it this way. I'll tell you like really quick short, I'll try to keep a short story. You guys had high school jobs and college jobs. Stock and shoe shelf. How much fun were those? Yeah, horrible. Yeah. Right. I'm a lifeguard most. That was pretty good. I worked at the Country Club. I had a great job. So I had all kinds of jobs. I had like unfortunately in the last very long because I thought maybe, they weren't being entrepreneurial. They just wanted me to make a sandwich in the sandwich shop for 30 seconds. 30 second sandwich. You don't want one of those sandwiches. So I eventually like made my way through to becoming a pizza driver. I won't say the brand, but I was a pizza driver in college and I was constantly trying to figure out how to make more money, right? And because I'm like a poor college student. So how do I make more money? Well, delivering pizza in college only gets you a dollar or two. If that, sometimes no tips at all. So how do I up the game? How do I deliver more value with this commodity? I mean pizza is a commodity. It's you have one pizza. I mean we can argue this to death for an hour but pizza's pizza, right? So I'm delivering these pizzas. I'm not making very much money. One day I'm shopping in a grocery store and I see this pallet of two liters and I bought the pallet. I bought the whole pallet because it was 50 cents for two. So a quarter per two liter. Put it in the back of my 1954 Chevy Blazer. Blue Chevy Blazer, I've missed that truck. So I put it in the back of that truck, drove it around and with every medium or larger I would deliver a two liter. And I'd hand it to them and they would go, I didn't order that. They'd say, yeah, I know that's from me. I'm just gonna give you this two liter. I swear to God. They would go, that's exactly what I needed right now. And they'd reach into their pocket and they'd come out with $5 or $10. And at the end of the night, I started making between two and $300 or before I'm making like 20 to 30 bucks. And the reason that happened is because I was providing unexpected value in a moment when they actually needed something like two liter. You just proved, you just proved what I've been saying along. Entrepreneurs are born. Not, you can't learn it. You can go to school for entrepreneurship but you are born. Did you have a paper or did you have pirate software? Did you arbitrage your piece of the liter? You are an entrepreneur. You are, that is entrepreneurial. But isn't that what we're all looking for? We're looking for, we're looking for pleasant surprises. We're looking for value in a moment when you didn't even know you needed it as a customer. And that's what you can do on social media. That's what social business is about. It's providing that unexpected value. Well, let's get back to the content thing because this is a really great point. Value is in the eye of the beholder. It's one of my phrases. It's contextual but if it's noisy or over notified, people are meeting each other online. There's new value in this engagement. I just tweeted to someone who's loved your point and your point about socialized every touch point. There's new currency out there. Engagement is also currency with people, right? I mean, I love the story with I, social funds, Brian and you guys are on Twitter. I love that connection. People meet each other. They build relationships online that never would have been there, right? So like what's happening is that like you did with the soda and on this but it's a surprise. People can get content and develop content, play in the open. Talk about that new dynamic. Because this plays in this whole earned media thing that we've been riffing on is you don't have to buy content. You don't have to buy audience anymore. The audience is already out there. So to your point about the soda is a really good point. Yes and no. So social networks are making it now. It is a pay to play. It's starting to get to the point. Nothing lasts for free. Yes. I mean, nothing's for free in this world. So eventually you pay for something. Whether it's the time to create that content, which is, that's resources and time. So how much, and a lot of times we say it's free but how much are we hiring people to write the content, to build the content? I mean, this is not free. But at the end of the day, we're putting it out there and we're offering it up for free. We're giving it to other people at the risk of them not returning, you know, something in return to give us their purchase, to give us their sale. So we're running that risk. But I also, I talk about this in my book about the give, give, give, give, give, give, give. And then you maybe get. And if you don't, keep giving. And that's really what this is all about. That's what content is about. I mean, it really is. I mean, through the centuries, you can talk about, you know, examples of people giving with no expectation of something in return but somehow it gets returned. Right. Yeah, it really is. If it's valuable. Yes, the golden rule, right? Yeah, that's right. But let's take this to one step forward because transparency and time is money, right? So your attention, all that stuff we've talked about. Open source, we always talk about developer, right? The ethos of open sources stand on the shoulders of giants before you. And that ethos is give and take and the quid pro quo is you put the source code in. Social media in my mind is taking that same kind of trajectory. We're offering stuff for free but there's still a quid pro quo going on, exchanges of information, IBM's extracting value out of the freeness through the community. So do you see the community of an open source framework applying to social business on the human to human level? Is there some similarities there in terms of the protocol? Respect, code. I think, I understand your question. I think what's going to end up happening is we're going to end up developing micro niche communities. And I think where we're at right now is trying to figure out this global community. Like how do I get in touch with all of these people? But eventually it becomes like your neighborhood. We're going to need, we want to get to know our neighbors. We want to get to, our neighbors aren't in a proximity. They're around the world but our neighbors become a proximity of keywords, a proximity of interests. So you've noticed that Facebook has started to buy individual networks, they've started to buy companies like Instagram and what they're buying is they're buying niche communities, they're buying micro communities. Now these are large communities, they're paying billions of dollars for them. But they have affinities within them. But they have communities within them and maybe one day Facebook won't be as relevant as those communities are. And that's where I think it's heading. I think we all need to actually invest in the micro communities. And as IBM and I think back to your question where I think you're heading with that is yes, there is a community and it needs to be developed and that's where the future of community is at. I just get worried. I mean, I love the community model. I think it works. I've seen it work personally and I think it does work for social. But people use it as a punch. No, community is a bumper sticker. It just puts community on it and everything's great. Yeah, we're going to go out and build an ecosystem with communities. Yeah. Where do I start? Green piece, man. We're going to question from the crowd here. So for you, how much personalization is too much? Benefit or limit the user? Question mark. It's certainly frustrating that hella to me as a customer, sort of creepy from Corrine Torres. Thanks to the question. How much personalization is too much? Benefit or limit the user? It's frustrating. Personalization is one of those things where when you sign up for something and you give over your information and you spell out exactly the things that you like, you basically you opted in and you have given over your information. If I told you I like the color green, I've opted in to you sending me green things and you should personalize me on that and I actually have opted in to that. Now if I didn't provide you information and you're giving me personalization on certain things that you shouldn't be because I have never given that to you, you took it from my credit card company or you bought it through something else and now all of a sudden you're personalizing to me, I've not given you that information. Now that's crossing a line that becomes personalized. That becomes creepy. At a context though, right? Because that's the whole point, it's at a context completely. You said I like green over here, now you're using green, it's retargeting you on some data from another context and you're getting green, shoving your face all day long on some banner ads. But it comes back to your perception of value too because if I'm lost and I need help and Google helps me, I'm really thankful for that level of personalization but if I'm getting spammed for some product that I bought three weeks ago, I'm done, you know what I mean? Well, Jeff Jonas we've interviewed on theCUBE before. We've talked about it mostly in the security context. It's all about puzzle, puzzle pieces. That's his riff. I love his talks dude, he's a great one to talk. Jeff Jonas is a great interview to look at but he's like all about the puzzle pieces. He goes, John, Dave, terrorists don't write bomb on manifests, right? They don't say I'm shipping a bomb. That's a metadata model so like that's a keyword, right? You know, looking for bomb is the wrong approach for looking for bombs. Don't look for the keyword bomb. Look for other things. You know, it's interesting. So this is personalization. Green is wrong, it's a great wrong keyword so now you have to really do the big data thing to get real personalization. You know, and it can also be wrong. Like for instance, years ago when this was new, when email marketing was a new thing, I was running a campaign for a really high end resort spa place and I shipped the email out or our team shipped the email out. I was tracking all the responses and what people were doing and my dad was on that list which was ironic or I think I put him on that list just to see if I could like figure it out, right? I'm just testing. I want to see it. I want to see it. Yeah, I want to see like somebody I know whether they could do it. Guarantee at least one response rate from your dad. Guarantee, like right? And he did, he clicked on it and he clicked over and then he stopped, he clicked into one page then he stopped, went off and then an hour later he went back on again and then he clicked all the way through and it was a Mother's Day campaign but he ended up buying a day spa package, right? So I just emailed him on the side and I'm like, hey dad, I noticed it took you an hour to go back and actually purchase that and you bought it for her package for Valentine's Day. It is for mom, right? And he replied back and said, what the heck is going on here? How do you know that? Like this is revolutionary stuff, right? Yeah, for him it's amazing. Like for him it's like and it's creepy. Yeah, it is creepy. But that's what I'm talking about. Like that's creepy stuff. So we have access to that kind of stuff. What we do with that information is up to us as marketers to really make sure that it's benefiting the customer, not benefiting us. Well the laws are really fuzzy right now. Is there like going to be, remember pre-email marketing and there was no law against it. The guys who did the land grab succeeded in the end. Are we going to see a similar thing here with privacy? Absolutely. Well there was no hand span laws back in the day. Remember there was land grab and then that had been enacted. Yes, and so many people built enormous databases and they're. So most people love email marketing. Even today you still see webinars out there. It's a tried and true method but again if you want to put the line in the sand saying old way, new way. If we are in the new way of doing stuff as IBM's theme is you got to put email marketing in the old way. And webinars and other forms of walled gardens and or web-based old techniques. Not everyone can be as aggressive being a forward thinker. So what is the transition? What is the new way to do email marketing? What is the new way to do webinars? We have an opinion on that. But like these are the things that people are looking for. If it's human to human, if there's peer-to-peer, if there's some big data mojo that can be tapped into for the benefit of the user there are got to be new ways. Yeah, so I think email marketing is still very relevant and it's not going to go away. I think the way that we use email as we move forward in a corporate setting will change. So there's two different things. One is how do we reach out and touch someone based upon their preferences, likes and what do we say. So if I'm going to send something out to a mass audience and I'm going to think that I'm going to personalize it that's never going to happen. Because I haven't taken the time to actually customize a message based upon their preferences and groups without being creepy. But internally in the company we've got millennials growing up that don't really like email. They like Snapchat. They like Instagram. They will private message you on Facebook. They will not use email. Not until they go to college. My son, my son, my son. Yeah, maybe even then. My son doesn't set up voice mail or do email. Like that, it's a pain in the ass to use email. There you go. They'll force them to do it to get their grades, but that's it. Yeah, I have to Snapchat my daughter to get her to come down for dinner. I actually like, we'll take a picture of dinner and say this is what we're having. If I yell at her, she ignores me, but if I Snapchat her she'll come back there. So we have to change our thinking in a corporate setting, moving forward that's going to happen in the next five to 10 years. And that's why IBM versus SoSmart. Because it's changed the conversation from being an email marketing system to a community driven conversation. It's socialized email. Which is great. That's going to be a great game changer. Brian, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great to have you on. You're awesome. Entrepreneur, been in business for a while. VIP influencers, understatement. Congratulations for all your success and social, you're doing great. And the book's hard to write a book. I don't know how you do it, but how many books have you written? I drink a lot of wine. While you're writing, how do you create your ideas? Yeah, in the brainstorming mode, for sure. I have one book, Human and Human, that came out a year ago. And then I've got another book coming out in the spring called Shareology. All right. Brian Cramer inside theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back.