 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube at IBM Interconnect 2015 brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Hey, Ariana Grado here and I'm at IBM Interconnect in Las Vegas, Nevada and you're watching Cube on the ground. I'm here with Warren Whitlock, social media expert. Can you tell me a little bit about how you became a VIP influencer and your experience with social media? Well, I did it the right way for social. I waited until somebody asked me and I think that's the key to what social media has changed the way that we do business. It's not about blasting out a message, it's about being available when somebody wants to say something. My friend Chris Brogan says, you always want to be ready to sell something but you never want anybody to think you're selling something and so that's what I did and in case of being an expert or an influencer, I like that better than expert. Expert sounds like I'm bragging but part of the influencer team was they reached out to me because they knew not only did I have an audience but I communicate with them and they asked me and I said, sure, I'd like to help. Awesome. How did you become an influencer? What's your background and experience with social media? I've loved people most of my life. There have been some times when I didn't love especially certain people but my life philosophy is that if you get somebody what they want, you'll get everything that you need which is basically the golden rule and it's in every sort of religion and philosophy that helping others is better than helping yourself. Awesome. What are some ways that you're interacting with the audience here in the crowd and engaging with this community online? This community is pretty much using a hashtag, lots of hashtags and IBMers love hashtags and so talking about that, answering people, I have listening on social media when I find out where the people are talking about it and I interact with them. Of course, my job here is not to talk to them so much as to spread it out to my audience and some of my people care about what's going on here and I talk to them and I answer their questions and what I've found is any topic that I get passionate about, I care about or that I'm working with, what I told the IBMers this week was my new line is you can buy my time, you can't buy my opinion and that's how an influencer works. I feel should work is to go out and be passionate about something and if somebody wants to influence you by treating you well and paying you money and everything that's nice but you can't let that change what you're going to say so I'm still me, I'm still doing what I would be doing if IBM wasn't here. The difference is that IBM has the access where they can talk to me and tell me what's going on with them. There's no way I'd know about IBMverse if I hadn't come to this show and when I found out about it, well that's pretty cool stuff, I don't mind sharing that with people and they're smart, they're not saying you need to send these, we've scripted these tweets, please send them, that just doesn't work, it's not media, it's social. So you're a big Twitter user, what do you think the benefit of Twitter is versus some other platforms and how do you use Twitter to reach a different audience? Nothing beats Twitter for real time, you can actually see what's going on in the world if a major news event happens or anything, especially the celebrities and TV and who won the football game and those kind of things and that other little thing they have every four years in Washington, something to do with leadership or something that I try not to pay attention to but I do find my election results from looking at Twitter. Everything is in there, it's real time, it's news, it's unfiltered. So that's good and bad, it's good in that it's unfiltered, you don't have anybody putting a spin on it or they're putting a micro spin because it's only 140 characters and so if they say a curse word Obama then you know what side they're on, if they say yay for Obama then you know they're on the other side and you can read that according but it's real, it's authentic, it's what's happening, whereas you can never confine that out if you watch TV news and by the time it gets in the newspaper it's something to wrap fish in. Awesome. Well Twitter and IBM use hashtags a lot as you mentioned and what do you think the benefits of hashtags are online? A good question, I've been using Twitter since before, there were much in hashtags and people started using them for shows so everybody that was at South by Southwest would put SXSW and the way I found out even South by Southwest existed where Twitter users talking about it and then I started searching for that, the hashtag, the pound sign that goes before them helps some software sort things better but a hashtag is like a program and kind of thing, it was a comment, it's like a meta tag, it's describing what the rest of the thing is about and today people use it for all sorts of different things and actually if you're doing any kind of a listening campaign you can trigger on any word, you could just have tweets that have the word house in them and you don't need hashtag house so and fortunately the software is developed around looking at the hashtag and people like that but it's not needed, it's really a good way to tell a large group of people like 21,000 people what the official hashtag is but otherwise I'd have to be listening for interconnect, IBM space interconnect, you know, enter space connect, enter with an E connect and you'd be looking for all those phrases and searching for them by people standardizing and hashtag it help so it's really good for events, the rest of everything, Twitter themselves in trending topics usually over half of them aren't hashtags, they're just phrases that people are using. Awesome, so what are some trends you're seeing in 2015 on social media? I think we're getting away from worrying about what medium we're on, what platform, is Google Plus going to beat Facebook which is silly from the beginning, they're two different things, Google Plus has a lot of great technology in it but it wasn't, you know, I don't think they ever really intended it for it to be a Facebook replacement, not that they'd mind that it, that happened and there's no, this is the best thing to do or every business must be on YouTube or anything like that, what we're really trying to do is connect with people and so if I want to connect with you, I find out what, where you are and I, you know, talk to you, I'm not, I'm not going to refuse to talk to you because you're not on Twitter and you're on Facebook and so now it's human to human, H2H as the best-selling author, Brian Cramer says, H2H, good book, I recommend it. Yeah, so last question, what do you recommend for enterprise techs and other large companies to do in their business teams to engage with their community through social media? Listen, listen is most important, I'd like to say if I had a two-word marketing strategy it would be listen and love and by love I don't mean romance, I mean love like you love your dog and your kids and your relatives, you know, and just your friends. If somebody is asking for something you answer them and so often in the past the customer service department seems to have been invented to be a way to get the customers away from the people that want to do their job. Well your job is to take care of the customer, right? And you find it, it's happening, it's a trend in customer service that people are now engaging in the different social media, it's not a question of the channel, to me it's the attitude. So if you ask me for something, we're friends, I'm going to do the best I can for you. It may not be my department, I may not know how to fix it but I'm going to care enough about you to see that you get an answer and when we start treating everybody like that the world's a better place. Yeah, so that's actually an interesting topic this whole listening to your audience because I find that Twitter, it's a lot of, you know, some people say noise on Twitter and a lot, it's hard to really interact with your followers and your community through Twitter. Do you have any tips or how that you can do, you know, it makes it easier to engage with your followers and your community? Yeah, first of all you're not doing anything wrong if you think Twitter's a lot of noise. It is. It's the same thing as like right now there's conversations, we're in a big room, there's a lot of conversations going on. Most people don't care about what we're talking about or at least at the moment they may like this subject and just not know what we're talking about. We don't care. There's another interview behind us, what they're doing. We, you know, we're not listening to that and it's just noise and when we tune in and talk to somebody then that's what's important. So I found that there were three stages of Twitter acceptance. We all go through it. Number one is I don't care what other people had for breakfast. Number two is how do I monetize this? And number three is oh, how did I live without this? I need to actually start talking to people. And if you're not talking to people, if you're not having a conversation, you might as well not bother. If you want to put ads out, you can buy ads. Twitter sells ads. Facebook sells ads. You know, go ahead and advertise. We're not beyond using mass media to advertise. But in mass media and even what we're doing here, it's all push. We create something hoping that those people out there all listen to it. And more and more the what social media does and what everything in the future is going to do is be able to have a two-way conversation. So when you start listening as much as you broadcast or more, what would mom say? Two ears and one mouth. Use them in that ratio. And that's it. Just listen and love. Simple as that. Well, great tips. Thank you, Warren, for being here. I'm Ariana Gratto and you're watching The Cube.