 Come back, we're live here in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of IBM's information on demand. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm Joe McCose, Dave Vellante, and we're talking social business, and our next guest is Renee Ducre. Ducre from IBM, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Dave, you know, I was having trouble with those names, but social business, yesterday we were teasing it up, and we were riffing on that because the topic was big data analytics, which shows the value side of it, the insights, all that greatness, and that's gonna have the impact on business. So the conversation today is social business, so I want you to just take the folks through what's the new orientation towards social business? It's not like it hasn't been around a while, collaboration, connecting with phones and email has been kind of the old way. What's the new direction of social business? Why is it important now? All right, thank you, John. So, great question. So once again, my name is Renee Ducre, and I'm the director of marketing for IBM's social business unit. And as we're looking at social business, and we think about the unprecedented growth and innovation that it's really been driving over the last, you know, really five plus years, right? And some of the trends that we've been seeing with a lot of the smarter planet implementations that we've done. There's really some key trends that have been emerging around how people inform the decisions that they're making, as well as how they're delivering value to clients and really leveraging, you know, one of the big payoffs of social business is really social data, right? And how they're leveraging the social data much better in really to make product and service innovation much more robust in what they're able to deliver to clients. Go ahead. So, even a couple short years ago, business people would say, what's the point of Twitter? Why do you even bother? Do you get any value out of it? And what's changed? You talk about that change and what's changed in your customer base? Yeah, and really, you know, as we look at social business, it's so much more than the typical when you think of social, the typical tools like Twitter and Facebook, and it's really about applying social networking tools to really improve your business, drive better, more productivity across your workforce. Just as an example, one of the implementations that we've done working with Boston Children's Hospital, classic example of how you take social technologies and really apply it to business, right? So, working with Boston Children's Hospital, we've created a social networking hub that allows them to share all kinds of surgical procedures. You think of how physicians were trained, there's such an explosion of data, right? There's medical journals that are creating all kinds of learnings at these exploding rates, doctors having a hard time keeping up with all the information, as well as all the new procedures out there. So now, we've helped them create the social networking hub that houses all that information. So now physicians all over the world are able to share that information with each other, and what we're hearing are very good, when you talk about return on investment, right? We're hearing very good anecdotal stories around doctors in remote locations being able to, through a mobile device, plug into that social networking hub now, and actually see procedures being done real-time instead of, in the world of old, you had to do all of that training person to person, very expensive, not scalable. Now they're able to share that through this networking hub at unprecedented rates, which is really helping physicians save lives, right? So we're hearing anecdotal stories about how they're able to save lives by leveraging this networking hub. Renee, how would you characterize this strategy? Is it really to take the best of social networking concepts, maybe improve upon them, replicate them in certain ways, and as I say, improve upon them, certainly from a security standpoint and collaboration, maybe integration with other technology products, and do that in sort of a wall-to-garden type of safe approach, or is it more of a hybrid between what I just described and sort of the public social networks? And here again, I think it's, so great question, I think it's based on the needs of the client, and really as well, one of the things that we're seeing is definitely a need to have a secure social infrastructure, so working with clients to deliver that based on their needs, whether it needs to be highly secure or not. The other thing that's interesting in your question is leveraging all the social data, providing social analytics around that data to really help here again, people make better decisions, as well as to really inform the value that they're delivering. So you think about crowdsourcing, for example, right? And a lot of the examples that we see out there with various vendors, crowdsourcing product development, so being able to improve upon their products by being able to leverage these social communities, if you will. Okay, so it's really sort of both, and I guess it probably depends on the industry, some highly regulated industries. Exactly. I mean, one of the little bit more private, others like consumer package goods, maybe they're trying to do some testing, and that's an industry that you came out of, right? Exactly. You cut your teeth at Procter & Gamble. Exactly. So I would imagine that there's a lot of momentum in that industry in particular. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, how that's changed since, I mean, in the 90s there really wasn't any kind of public social network. Yes. Talk about that industry specifically, and maybe we can get into some other ones. So consumers are always very interesting, right? There's so much that you can do, especially around social, right? If you look at Procter & Gamble's always been a leader in using social networks and social communities to really tap into what people like about their products, what makes a product good, why people, what performance people are getting out of the products, and making sure that they also improve upon that. Every kind of turn of the crank, you'll see a new release around Tide or some new innovation. So they're very good at leveraging social networks, and I think as social technologies have improved and advanced, they've been able to leverage that. The other thing that's interesting is just when I look at other consumers, right? Other consumer products companies. One that we point to all the time is really haven't done something spectacular was Oreo at the Super Bowl, right? And when you look at their real-time marketing that they did with Twitter, and even now, they're doing some very innovative things to drive engagement with clients and really kind of improve their relationships with clients online. A lot of things on Twitter that I think are very clever and really getting people almost to innovate and come up with different desserts and that kind of thing, and then take pictures of them, actually leverage in Twitter and Vine that are some very clever implementations that I'm seeing as well. So we had a comment, I just posted on Twitter. What is the value of Twitter, I asked on theCUBE, and just some comments from the crowd cap, and traditional media is about building brands from selling spicy nachos, you name it. You see the ad on TV, you're sure to buy it later, you kind of offline. With mobile and Twitter, you can now do that online. So the dynamic's there. How do you see Twitter, for instance, changing the game for consumers in the spirit of brand advertising or brand marketing? Yeah, so one thing that I've always seen with Twitter and for business, I think it's really a very net way of getting information, right? So in our, you know, attention to deficit, you know, environment that we live in where, you know, attention is definitely a commodity, right, that everyone's trying to win. I think Twitter is a way, you know, in a very succinct number of characters and people tend to like it for, you know, those aspects, because you can really hone in on the news channels that you're interested in, the topics that you're interested in, and get feedback real time, very succinctly, you know, with a very short blurb and a point to, you know, an article. So I see it as like, for companies, a way to, you know, very quickly send out information, send out key messages, links to demos. I also think it's a great way, like Oreo has done with the Super Bowl, you know, to really get things to go viral very quickly. And so, you know, being able to leverage, now, you know, actually I was just on a panel at, it was a real time marketing event in New York. And one of the things that is always a challenge with organizations though, and using Twitter is the real time aspect of it, right? And so, I think for Oreo, I actually read an article for what they did at the Super Bowl, and for those that are not familiar with it, you know, they did a tweet when the lights went out at the Super Bowl this year, where they actually said, you know, you can still dunk an Oreo in the dark, right? So it was perfectly timed. And, but the thing that went into that, like I read this article about, and you know, how did they pull it off? And they actually had like all of their senior executives sitting around a table that, you know, made the decision that, you know, go, we're gonna, you know, post this tweet. And so you think about large organizations like IBM, and you know, other, you know, vendors, would I be able to get all of our senior leaders around a table to, you know, approve a tweet for the, you know, on the evening of the Super Bowl? That would probably be like a very career limiting thing if that was to happen, right? So. It was a flash mob, essentially. They took advantage of a trend. Exactly. A negative trend. And it was amazing, but you know, if you think about that in large organizations, it'd be pretty hard to pull off. So there's always that real time nature of Twitter that's a challenge for large organizations. So we have big data Alex on Twitter, Alex Phillips. So who's a great, great friend of the cube. And he says, the new commodity is a tension. Everyone wants to win it. My comment was to that, which I agree with. The new currency is time. It's the new scarce resource. Because there's so much information we heard from Dr. Tim Buchanan earlier yesterday, talking about all the alarms going off in the hospital. There's so many notifications going on. You could be bombarded with noise out there. So that's the new scarce resource is time. Do you agree with that? And do you agree the attention game is what people are trying to fight for? Definitely. And how do businesses, you know, extract that, say that from the noise, how do people break through that? Yeah, I think, you know, social technologies are a key way to do that because there's so many new sources, right? There's so many things that, you know, you really are trying to achieve that cut through, right? To an audience. So definitely, there's a way to do that. You know, in the instance that I gave you with Boston Children's Hospital, for example, so taking those social technologies and applying it to a business, you know, from a business standpoint, I think one of the things that's great is you're able to, you know, allow people to collaborate across the world, you know, by doing a social technology hub like we did for Boston Children's Hospital, where now people in very remote locations can upload information, you know, download information to share. So I think, you know, when you think about that, attention deficit and attention is a key commodity. One thing that I think social kind of levels the playing field with on that is being able to allow people to cut through to the things that they really care about and want to hear about. So like on Twitter, you know, another example, you know, people are always wondering, how do I get more followers? How do I get more followers? If you are tweeting things that are authentic, that are people that are, that's relevant, it's amazing, the followers will come. That brings up a good point I want to drill down. We also have Brenny on Twitter who was making, on CrowdChat, making a comment about, Twitter is also a huge listening funnel. Jake Pourway shared that Twitter data is used to identify flu breakouts. We saw that yesterday here in the keynote. So I asked you two questions on that and that come up. You mentioned people want to try to get more followers. So there's really two concepts. One is the tooling available right now, still early. I want you to talk about kind of the vision and how you guys see that evolving on the tooling and the platforms for customers. What's going to be automated? What in the future will Watson make, you know, social media monitoring obsolete? Is this going to be plug and play? And two, the gamification aspect of it. People are gaming Twitter and social networks to get more followers or click on ads. So you can use big data to solve society problems or get more followers. But gamification sees it. So what are the tooling, kind of where we're at in your mind and also the concept of gamification and user experience? Okay, so all very good questions. So, you know, from a platform perspective, we have a social business platform. There are solutions around smarter workforce, which here is, you know, a lot around talent management. We have an acquisition that we did with Konexa around talent management, workforce management, a lot of robust solutions there. There's also a lot of social analytics solutions that we offer on the platform, as well as, you know, we're trying to expand that. So you'll see, you know, announcements coming from us in the future, really around including smarter workforce or smarter commerce solutions, as well as the overall umbrella underneath the umbrella of social business. Now, from a gamification standpoint, you know, I think like engagement is key and really trying to figure out ways to increase, you know, engagement either with employees or, you know, with our customers. And gamification, I think, is a key way to do that, right? So I was actually out meeting with a client, maybe a week and a half ago, a superior group, and you're actually gonna interview Tom, their CEO, later on today. And one of the things that they talked about was using a gamification element in kind of like the training of their workforce and, you know, kind of making it fun, you know, to learn aspects of the company when people first come in, which I thought was a very clever use of gamification, right? And then there's always the, you know, all the contests that you see, you know, across all the different vendors out there. We were even looking at doing, you know, some gamification elements at some of the conferences going forward. Like anyone that's going to connect, you'll see, you know, some gamification, there's gamification over here in the corner as well. We have voting on crowd chats, there's a little gamification tweak. I mean, people, I mean, this is the gesture economy, right? I mean, where people are clicking on things and making their sentiment known, whether with hashtags or votes. So I gotta ask you about the real-time aspect that you mentioned crowdsourcing earlier. This is a new phenomenon, the notion of actually measuring crowds. I mean, marketing has kind of tried to do sampling and, you know, most of the research analysts we talked to have old-school mental, we sampled 250 people. Well, now you can sample 250,000 people. So you now have instrumentation which creates interesting crowdsourcing opportunities. Yeah, definitely. And real-time. So you gotta do both. You can't talk about those two concepts. Yeah, so the thing that's interesting with crowdsourcing, I was reading an article and there was a statement in the article that said, you know, nowadays, you know, who's the smartest person in the room? You know, yesterday it used to be, you know, they used to point to a person, right? Now it's the wisdom of the crowd. Or a fifth grader. Exactly. So, you know, I just thought that was kind of an interesting way as they opened up the article, but it was speaking to crowdsourcing and how really, you know, when you look at like product development and, you know, a lot of the crowdsourcing models that are out there right now, you know, my boss Scott Hebner has small, you know, children that are like in their teens and he talks about a crowdsourcing model where his son has already bought like an airplane, you know, that's gonna be part of like a game. And, you know, the game's not coming for like another year and a half, but they've already crowdsourced millions of dollars by getting people to buy a component that'll be used as a part of the game. So, you know, I think there's a lot of very interesting crowdsourcing models out there and I think we're just gonna see more and more of it as well. Well, the crowd has always been a very, you know, efficient, and we're in Las Vegas, handicapper, right? I mean, you know, people always say, oh, the football game, wow, the Las Vegas really got it right, you know. What's the crowd who actually got it right? Because they bet, you know, they make a market and the crowd's determining what that line should be essentially, right? And so, you know, they really make the market. And so, I have to ask you a question about the philosophy of IBM regarding social. Is it, is it my understanding that essentially you wanna make social every part of an application experience? Is that ultimately where your head is? Exactly, so, you know, and you'll start seeing more of that as different offerings come forward. You'll see more social technologies that are being brought forward. So, in a lot of our solutions we're, you know, baking in, same time, for example, where there's the real-time collaboration piece that we're baking into a lot of the solutions. So, definitely, as you think of being a smarter enterprise, being a social enterprise, leveraging all of the social collaboration tools is a must. Yeah, so, that talks to a complete change in the user experience. Yeah, yep. Do you think, ultimately, that the social user experience is gonna dominate application design, I mean, you know, five, 10 years down the road? Yeah, you know what, I think there's no going back. Like, you know, we're at a point where, and actually our latest C-suite study that was just released maybe two weeks ago, it's called the Customer Activated Enterprise. And it really talks about how, you know, you have to listen to the wisdom of the crowd and your clients in order to, you know, make sure that clients are always delighted, right, with the products that you're delivering to market, and just really the importance of listening to, you know, to clients going forward. And I think it's, you know, we're seeing that in the marketplace. We're seeing that in, you know, solutions that people are bringing forward, that different vendors are bringing forward. So, I think, you know, all boats arise. We're at a point where we're never gonna go back, I believe, and, you know, client feedback and insights into your products is here to stay. Well, we got a smart crowd, smarter crowd on crowdchat.net. And one of the questions I'll ask before we end the segment is, and I'll comment, Isabel says crowd sourcing scales. Where are the like-minded people saying with you, connecting with that? And that came up yesterday as well as in communities you want to put, you know, smart people with the audience, whether that's customers or the community. So great comment there. But the question I want to ask you to end the segment is, does IBM plan on crowd sourcing solutions in the smarter cloud? And is the social business portfolio gonna be kind of part of that smarter cloud initiative? Ooh, that's a great question. Crowd sourcing, I think we'll always crowdsource innovation piece of it. So making sure that we listen to clients and factor, you know, all of those key learnings into the next rev of our products. I'm assuming that you're not saying from a funding standpoint. No, no, just from like crowd sourcing technology, like what we're doing here and with theCUBE is that people are engaged, they want to engage. And we're seeing people do tweet chats and as we mentioned earlier, there is an active crowd out there that is activated by other people. Yeah, and I think, you know, now I think crowd sourcing is like the buzzword for it, but we've been doing that for a long time. You know, listening to clients, making sure that we factor that into the next row of offerings that are coming out. And I think, you know, social technologies are enabling us to, you know, just further evolve, you know, how we've listened to customers over time. I remember just to reiterate, we said yes to the folks, you know, John Awaita was running comms back in the 2005 timeframe when I first started. I mean, I did the first podcast with the team over there back in the day. And I remember they were doing crowd sourcing internally, IBM had huge blogging, great internal collaboration going back, seems like a decade ago. It's almost a decade ago. I mean, so you're not, that's not new to you. So final comment I want to ask you for the, before we wrap your ears. What is the new resurgence within IBM around social business? Okay, you've been doing it internally, you've been doing it with customers. That's a long time ago. That was, you know, really before Facebook and Twitter even came about it. What's the new tweak on the model for you guys and how do you guys look at it going forward to build on your expertise? Okay, so I think it's, you know, it's a couple of things. One, it's, you know, really kind of harnessing here again, you know, kind of the wisdom of the crowd here. And as we, you know, go forward with our social business platform, baking in a lot of the social collaboration tools that we have into, you know, other solutions across the corporation, it's, you know, leveraging one of the big payoffs is around social data. So making sure that we, you know, provide our clients with all the social analytics, you know, to leverage all the data that they've been collecting over years that they may have been sitting on and not using to better engage with clients to, you know, deliver exceptional client experience, be able to, you know, innovate around the products that they're delivering, you know, and then finally, the other piece that, you know, no one ever thinks about is kind of the elephant in the room. But, you know, based on, you know, we talked about, you know, regulatory requirements or what are their needs are, but just making sure that, you know, it's in a secure kind of social infrastructure and being able to, you know, help our clients with that. You know, I think those are some of the, you know, key things that we're focused on. And, you know, making sure that as clients, you know, deliver value that they're able to, you know, really, you know, here again, leverage the social data. And then- Bernadio Cree here live on theCUBE, Director of Marketing for Social Business here at IBM, great conversation, great engagement online there on the Twitter comment and how you talked about these new channels, these new opportunities. It's exciting times and certainly there's interest and for businesses out there, it's fun to watch and new opportunities. So this is theCUBE, right back with our next guest after this short break.