 Live from the Mandalay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Insight 2014. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas for IBM Insight in the Digital Media Lounge. The Digital Experience, the second screen, the Social Media Lounge. This is theCUBE's special presentation. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media with Dave Vellante. Chief Stretcher at Wikibon.org. Also co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. And this is theCUBE. We go out and extract the signal from the noise. And our next guest is Brian Fonzo. Brian, I'm John Furrier. I'm a Cuba holic. Nice to meet you. So I hear that you're a Twitter holic. So I'm just joking. We've known each other for a while. I'll see friends in person also online. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I think that's the power of social. We've met online. I've been on theCUBE a couple of times now. And we chat online just as much as we chat in person. I get to see all the family stuff. You're very social online, which is great. You're also really doing a great job in this new era of community, community influence. You're as an influencer here at the IBM Digital Experience. And you're really an ambassador, too, of the data. And that's why I was mentioned to the folks earlier. It's like, you know, the influencer program here at IBM is really about data curators, right? You're not working for IBM. We're not working for IBM. But we're out collaborating with IBM independently, curating the data, creating an experience for the people who aren't here. And I think that's the phenomenon. So, you know, you're out there. You're in the sessions. You're getting a tour of everything. You're doing some interviews. What's your take going out there as a beacon, as a probe, as a influencer? You know, you're doing some human filtering. You're a cognitive engine right now in this big data space, observation space, as we say. Internet sensor. You're an internet sensor. Yeah, human thing connected to the network. Tell us, what's going on? That's why I like the idea that, you know, we talk about filtering the noise. And I think we're all creating, like, our own kind of content today. And I think creating that content comes in all different forms, if it's interviews, if it's video. And it's really about filtering the noise and providing good content and value. And here at the event, I'm actually surprised how many people are really passionate about data because it seems to be less philosophy and actually more, actually they're doing something. I'm hearing use cases. I interviewed a couple small businesses that were actually talking about the analytics that they're actually using today, not talking about what they hope they'll be using. So that was a big piece. I think the social element, you know, having events like this. I mean, you guys have been broadcasting live for two days. I think every session as I'm leaving, I have my phone on. I'm watching on my phone as I'm leaving. So I think the digital experience for a conference is the future. I think we're all experiencing that here at IBM. So I got to ask you more on a tactical note. What's backup battery power are you using? Do you have one of those juice? Because you're always on your phone. You're always tweeting your mobile. You got your laptop. But you must run out of battery juice. You got to bring the Jax for juice, don't you? I do. I have three mobile features that I actually have. And I have the iPhone 6 Plus, which I absolutely love. It took a while to get used to it. And I hear all this stuff about good battery life. But my battery life hasn't been that great. And when I took it to the Apple store, the guy was like, well, your usage rate is way higher. That's good if you don't use it. Yes, yes. And that's what I say. I'm like, I bought it for features, right? That's what we're doing. So for me, actually I actually tweeted out. I said, if IBM Watson could really give me universal Wi-Fi signal and unlimited battery life, my life would be happy. Dave, I was joking about the Stanford tailgates because we got season tickets. I brought my little Mophie multi-charger. And I brought the first charging station to the tailgate because everybody runs out of battery at the football game. So again, challenges for us digital natives. But I got to ask you on a more technical note, your thoughts on social. I mean, I'm joking about myself online with my tweet about the Halloween costume calling myself a social media guru. It's really funny, actually. But this is a very early business, the social business aspect. Kind of, you're seeing social media convert from a business standpoint from more PR, you know, in rah-rah to actual concrete conversations, community content. And data is a big part of that. What's your thoughts on that? What's your vision? It is. And I think that's, I mean, you kind of told the story there. It's about community now. So we're talking about community in the sense of we should be listening. We should be talking with, not talking at. You know, the connected consumer, the connect, we're all talking about all these connected devices and connected people. But when you think about it, if they're all connected, they're giving us all the data we always wanted. You hear every brand. I want feedback. I want, well, the key is that they have to be listening. So social listening, social engagement. It takes work. You know, I often joke, it's easiest to write a tweet 140 characters. It's hard to get your tweet in front of the people that need to read that tweet. And so it takes work doing it. If it's a Twitter, if it's a community chat, if it's the crowd chat that we ran yesterday here at IBM Insight, I got a comment today, some guys stopped by and was like, I was able to go back and listen to a follow along in your chat and find out information I didn't get in one of the sessions. On the crowd chat? On the crowd chat. So I thought like, that's the element of, we're creating content in multiple different areas, but it's a community we're talking with. We're having conversations. And I think anytime we're talking about social, you can't talk about how you're using it for communication. It's how you're using it to create conversation. I saw this with the podcast. When I first did the podcast thing in 2004, I was part of that whole crew, Evan Williams, myself. And you saw the labor of love, passion, but the distribution became a big part of it. And then people pocket it into hobbyists. I'm really cool with my small little group of them. Some people grew it significantly. My friend Mike Arrington built TechCrunch. I built PodTech. Evan Williams went and gone Twitter. But what's happening is that you see that with social right now, where it's the content collaboration because the crowd sets a great example and the stuff that you're doing with your communities is the group gets together. It's a production engine. This is the new normal. This is the community holy grail, in my opinion where like-minded individuals can get together, not just rant and talk about stuff and ping-pong back and forth and have some fun bantering. It's the serious interaction relationship that creates content. And so now with this ability to store it, this is to me the real deal because even Twitter's earnings yesterday, if you listen to that, Brian, I don't know if you caught a note of it, but now Dick Costello's explicitly calling out the people who don't log into Twitter. So the people in the core Twitter base are production engine and there's a whole new consumption wave coming behind it. And Dave, we were talking about earlier. Yeah, people who want to go in, search something, looking for a hashtag aren't logged in. So it's sort of the off-platform engagement that's going on. I think they've got metrics on it. I mean Twitter's got metrics. I think they're still, John, trying to figure out, okay, what's the model to attract those people? Do we disrupt that experience anyway? They don't want to do that. But how can they enhance that experience? Maybe off-platform. So it's not a walled garden, like Facebook, you know. And that's kind of the thing about Twitter. I think that's partially why the chats work, that I work hard and all of the Twitter chats because time is valuable, but you want to talk with a community that's engaged and too often everybody's overwhelmed by social or overwhelmed by what's going on. But when you get on for that one hour, it's the event, it's a happy hour that you have where you're on with people that are also on and also engaged. So it's that idea that you're having these conversations with people that want to actively engage. I think that's powerful. I think that's when we're taking social and are actually making meaning with it. The data element is super important. I was going through the stats here yesterday. I think John and I were actually going through different numbers and I thought one of the big ones for me is figuring out if the people here, if we have 3,800 people tweeting, what's their average number of followers? How long have they been on Twitter? Understanding the community of people and how they're using social today. What makes a good chat? For me, I think it's a host that's okay with the idea that if you have a network of people, it's people going there to talk to the people. But if you have people that are coming around a passion topic, then everyone comes there. It doesn't matter who the people are. You're not inviting. You're invited because you care about the topic. So the chats that are actually making a difference that have a great guest is great, but it's the great community of people that we're able to engage with. I have made great friends, a business partner, and some of my clients today all from Twitter chats, which is, for me, that's changing it because it's conversations. And you've made some new relationships. Are you doing any business on there as well? Has it come off? Is it secondary or is that primary? So for now, actually, we're actually having sponsors coming in wanting to sponsor the chats and these hangouts because for them, it's like, hey, how do I get my name to show that I care about my community? But the data is what they want because they now have 200 active people for this hour about a certain topic and they now can target those people with ads or even target with them. Okay, these are the people we need to listen to. Let's filter the noise and only listen to these people's feedback because they're active in our social screen. Awesome. So what's next for you? You've got the new role. You're involved in an agency. Tell the folks a little bit about that and some of the business goals you have with that new opportunity. Sure, so I'm the Chief Digital Strategist at Broad Suite now with Daniel Newman and Broad Suite's been around for about 18 months now. Our focus is, I'm joining the team and Daniel is a noted author and pretty much a content man and really knows big data cloud technology and we connected because we're both kind of tech geeks at heart, we care about social and we like to think of it as, for me, I focus on the community and creating content and it doesn't matter if it's a podcast, it's a video like this, but it's how can we provide value for the community and our customers. So we're working with enterprise technology companies to create content that helps them integrate the cloud or integrate social and so we've created a couple different chats as well as different content vehicles to hopefully educate the community. And real quick, summarize what's going on for IBM here, for the folks out there watching. What's the bottom line? What's the vibe? What's the feeling here? So I think it's passion for Internet of Things, big data, all these things, it's this system of insight. It's big data, cloud and they're calling it engagement which is this mobile social. I think now instead of us fighting change and cloud struggling because we're not using data correctly or data struggling because no one's talking and not communicating via social, if we're using all three of these together to fight change, I think we're going to lead the charge and these people are passionate for data. It's kind of cool to see people passionate about data, it's not normal. Are you excited to run your own gig and be the chief digital strategist of your own company? I love it. I left what I was doing because I really want to focus on my passion and I couldn't be happier right now. Brian Fonzo, here inside theCUBE, good friend, we see him out in the social nets all over the place. He's got a schedule on Twitter. You can find him on Twitter chats basically. It's not too hard to find. So thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insight here at IBM Insight. Of course, this is theCUBE. We extract a single noise and provide that insight to you here in Las Vegas. We'll be right back after this short break.