 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome back to the program Michelle Paluso. She is the senior vice president of digital sales as well as the chief marketing officer for IBM. Michelle, thanks so much for joining us. Hey Stu, great to see you again. Boy, we had fun at things. Thank you so much for your help. Yeah, well, Michelle, I'm really excited to get a little bit of the inside what happened from your end. Got to talk to you at the show instead of 20,000 people dealing with San Francisco and Moscone and everything there. You had, if I read right, 100,000 people at least registered for the digital event. Bring us inside a little bit, the control center. What was it like being part of that event? Your team of course being all distributed and anything surprised you during that event. What was nerve-wracking? But look, it went an exciting thing and CUBE is the team for so much innovation. I mean, we had in 60 days to build a platform, of course, using IBM technology, lots of media, the IBM cloud, integrate some third part of these, build a reporting suite. We make all the content because in this world, of course, there are different things front and center in our clients' minds and not only that, but we had to film it all in remote locations in people's homes and make it all work. And so the team did an extraordinary job. And on a really positive side, you mentioned we had over 100,000 clients and business partners register, but it was still even more than three times any audience we've ever had comes to our physical event at things. So it was really extraordinary. And now, of course, we're following up. We have a treasure trove of information about what clients are interested in and what our business partners are interested in. And we have a great opportunity to leverage the on-demand content to continue the conversation. It's great. It's really interesting to timeshift things instead of, okay, I'm gonna dedicate however many days to do the event. Now, I love that mix of you can watch it live, you can watch it on demand, you can follow up. How are you, any trends that you're seeing as to where people are going or how you're making sure that there are people to support and engage, not just say, hey, here's a lot of content, go watch our breakouts, go watch theCUBE stuff. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is a huge thing, right? So both in terms of what we actually had to say, we really took our time to say, we interview clients, we look at search, what's happening, what are our clients searching for and PS data. So our big seven conversations, things like supply chain resiliency, things like engaging the customers virtually, things like virtual work and return to work. We knew that those were really pertinent conversations. And now we have a couple of things happening. One, all of our sellers are reaching out to people, their clients, their business partners to talk about what they liked, what they didn't like, what they had to go deep in that conversation to progress that conversation. For those that may be registered and didn't attend, we're sending them on demand sessions based on what they said they were interested in so they can consume with their own pace. And for many, we know that there are real opportunities that have emerged. So real business opportunities they want ideas to help with and there, of course, we're accelerating the conversations with those clients. Yeah, Michelle, your team actually sent over a few questions that some of the audience gave and one of them talked about that there is, no shortage of data out there, but what they put in the question is often there's not enough people that can curate or help you sort through. So, I think with the digital experience, how are you helping people curate the information? How are you making sure that people get from the data down that path towards knowledge and turn data into results eventually? Sure, well, you have to ask good questions. There's gotta be great data standards and governance and you have to ask good questions. I mean, that's really the simple thing. And for us, we can ask some very simple questions. What are the signals we have from some clients that attend to think that they're interested in going deeper? Are there clients where we had maybe 20, 30, 40 attendees? We had some clients attend over a thousand sessions and really maybe they're majoring on AI or maybe they majored on cloud. And so, how do we pair up our sellers or client execs with those clients to talk about taking that conversation to the next phase, right? It's the next opportunity, maybe doing demos, maybe doing a virtual garage, et cetera. Secondly, we had a lot of clients actually sign up for things like virtual garages. Throughout, I think there were these costs to action. And so we had many clients say, hey, I wanna start a virtual garage. I'll take advantage of that to our free consulting. So for them, we know that we've gotta go down a very specific path very quickly. But then there were other clients where the data said, you know, there's a late maybe a little bit of interest, but we have to nurture that. And they're not ready for the next step. So I think it always starts with just asking great questions. We're a very data driven organization in IBM marketing. We're really passionate about what we can learn and beyond, of course, the data and things like think we're passionate about things like net promoter score. We get a million data points every year from our clients about how they're feeling about IBM. So all of this enriches our ability to make sense of this world for our clients. Yeah, so Michelle, one of the things I found really interesting is we've had online events for quite a long time now. We've worked with IBM on that hybrid model of physical and online events before, but there's a real thirst for what our best practice is now. What can you learn? So when your peers are reaching out for you and saying, hey, Michelle, you did this, other than not trying to do it all in from start to finish in six weeks, what other tips would you give or lessons learned that you have from the event? Well, I think first of all, the platform makes a huge decision, right? You really have to have a flawless technical experience. And so we were very lucky to have lots of media and hosting on the IBM Cloud, but we integrated some really good third-party tooling for analytics, real-time analytics, and things like chat, et cetera. Secondly, I think you really have to think about how to make this engaging for the audience. It can't feel like a streaming event. And so for us, that meant things like chat, of course, and then things like moderated live expert sessions. I mean, things like going off platforms for Reddit and hosting sessions in Reddit, things like one-on-one client executive briefing rooms. So the second part is really about engaging the audience and making sure it doesn't just feel like streaming. Third, shorter is better. People's attention spans are small and no one can sit for five or six hours in front of a computer and consume. So we really cut down and tightened up our key messages. That, I think, was critical. I think the mix of live and on-demand was really powerful and something to think about. But the last thing I would say is that how do you progress and follow up on that interest? We all know how to do it in an event. You sit down with your client and you've just watched a day of sessions, you have a beer, you're probably watching some 80s band play, and you're talking about what you like, what you think, what's exciting to you, what are your challenges? In the digital world, that's harder for our client reps and our sellers. And so really thinking of the onset of how do we make sure we create the space for those conversations after the event is critical. Great, well, Michelle, so where do you and the IBM team take all those learnings? Engagement absolutely critical as you talked. What should we expect to be seeing from IBM through the rest of 2020 when it comes to digital? I think we'll do things really differently from here on out. I mean, I think that we'll have, of course we'll go back to live physical experiences at some point when it's safe for all of us, and it is, in certain parts, the world's ready. But we have a series of things, summits coming up all around the world, that idea that you can really engage bigger audiences. We can give them time to make the most of this. They don't have to spend money flying somewhere to really go deep. That's exciting to me, I think we've learned so much. So stay tuned for the think regional summits happening all around the world. And I hope we continue to innovate and bring the best of physical and digital into a new brand of experiences and events. Yeah, it's really fascinating stuff, Michelle, right. Not only do you get to reach a global audience, but you have the opportunity to personalize things a little bit more. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for joining us. Definitely, I'm looking forward to seeing more on the summits going forward. Terrific, always great to see you and always thank you for your partnership. All right, thank you for watching. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.