 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCube at IBM Interconnect 2015, brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Hi, this is Ariana Grado here with Cube on the ground and we're here tuning in from IBM Interconnect in Las Vegas, Nevada and I'm really excited, Stu Miniman is here, he's a senior analyst at Wikibon and we're going to be talking about social media. Excellent. So, Stu, can you tell us a little bit about the importance of social media for business? Wow, so Ariana, I dove into the social space quite a few years back. I was pretty early on Twitter, my Twitter handle Stu and everybody kind of is like, oh my gosh, you must have been really early but kind of a loophole I got it in after back in 2008. But from a business standpoint, you know, there's a few things. First of all, social is about turning it from really broadcasting to really having a conversation. I've always looked at, you know, the social media tools is helping you to build those conversations. Sometimes, in the past, really, before the social piece, it was really at shows where you got to get together with people in your industry, maybe you emailed with them and now social media really extends those conversations out there into the public. It's a good, you know, space to really dialogue and have chat rooms and do lots of different ways to engage and, you know, find people with common interests and you can even make new friends too, which is kind of an added bonus. Yeah, definitely. So, you mentioned the phrase, join the conversation and engage the crowd. Can you talk a little bit about either one of those, what those mean to you and maybe the importance of that? Yeah, so, you know, it's interesting. If you look at any kind of, you know, dynamics you can talk about communities, the old pyramid used to be that, you know, 90% of the people just lurked, 9% of the people maybe did a little bit and 1% were the real contributors out there. When Dave Vellante, one of our co-founders, Wikibon, a founder of the company, he says, you know, I'm a 1%er and 1%er back there meant that, you know, maybe you're the troublemaker, you're the ones that created a lot of content and help engage people. And social is really about trying to turn that pyramid upside down. Let's let 90% of the people engage in that conversation and be part of it. You know, here at the show Interconnect, we're talking a lot about open source and open source is really about everybody being involved in it. The latest survey I saw on open source said that over half of all enterprises, you know, are not only using open source but are contributing to open source. So it's a real change in the IT industry. It's a real change in our dynamics as workers and there's a lot of opportunity there. Awesome. So you talk about open source. How can crowd engagement and open source go together? How can they be involved? Well, in many ways they can go together. So just as anybody can contribute to the conversation, anybody can contribute to open source. So you could start out by just, you know, reviewing things or adding code, you know, going to meetups, going to hackathons and, you know, getting involved deeper. You know, IBM and, you know, a broad part of their ecosystem are heavily involved in talking at this show. Things like, you know, open stack and Docker. And really these are driven a lot by the community. So, you know, really amazing to see like open stack and Docker. Just huge participation from, you know, not just one or two big companies, but lots of startups, lots of individuals getting involved, putting their passion into their work. And the whole industry as a whole gets to take advantage of that. Awesome. So last question, as an analyst, what do you think the importance of big data with social media? How do they go hand in hand and how can they come together? All right, so, you know, I focus more on the infrastructure piece, but I do keep a little bit of an eye on big data. And, you know, social media is one of those sources of data. You and I have been involved with the crowd chats that we've been doing. You know, we're creating a lot of that social signal out there. So looking at the analytics, looking at, you know, what's trending, what's getting involved, and taking that piece forward. It's really being able to take action from that information which social media and big data are a big part of. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Stu. You can find Stu at AtStu on Twitter. And I'm Ariana Grato with theCUBE here in Las Vegas, Nevada at IBM Interconnect. Thanks for tuning in.