 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Open World 2015, brought to you by Oracle. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone. You are watching Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm John, my co-host Jeff Frick, the general manager of theCUBE. And we are live in San Francisco for exclusive coverage for Oracle Open World. Our next guest is Whitney Drake, manager of social strategy and care at General Motors. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, happy to be here. We are super excited about this segment because we love social data. We love where our media is all based on social distribution, engagement, interaction. But for Oracle Open World, it really represents the new way of how things are getting done. And the database, structured databases, columns and fields, now can handle unstructured data, which is all social. The user experience and user expectations now are social. Yeah, absolutely. Tell us about what you guys are doing because you can really do a lot of good things with social. So I want to hear the care and what you guys are doing. Obviously customer support, identifying potentially things happening in your customer base, persona base, 360 degree view. Share your social strategy. I would love to. You're on theCUBE. So we have several different parts and pieces of our social strategy at GM. One element is social care where we're monitoring, we have 24 agents in the U.S. that monitor all of what's happening within social care. So mainly forums, Facebook and Twitter right now, and then obviously Instagram is up and coming. So we help customers set their clock if they're having a question about OnStar. We also provide marketing support on Twitter. So if someone's looking for a car, we'll help facilitate a test drive at a dealer, get them any information they might need, and then hopefully sell a car or truck. And we do that seven days a week, 16 hours a day. And in 2015, we rolled global care out to 25 markets. So we have about 145 agents globally working on social care. And so it's awesome. It's a huge task because we have over 145 social pages globally and every different level of engagement on those pages. So that's one part of the puzzle. The other part of the puzzle is how we go to market from a community management marketing perspective. So not just pushing messages, but engaging with customers. So we have a story about Little Red that we like to talk about. So Little Red's owner was Richie. And every Friday he would post Little Red and I are off on adventure. And one Friday, the Chevy team didn't hear from him and they were like, hey, Richie, are you and Little Red okay? And he replied, oh yeah, we're just on vacation. Everything's great. And so just more than just pushing your message out but trying to find those points of engagement. It's hard to be with your customer base. You're connecting with people on a personal level. Yeah, exactly. And that's what social allows customers and companies to do. Can you share their view? Because customers want to contact just instantly. I mean, you got Snapchat, you got Instagram, and I have four kids, two in college and I'm trying to get on my daughter's story line on Snapchat, she still hasn't let me on that. You'll never be on my Snapchat story. But this is the new channel that they're not going to pick up the phone. This doesn't have voicemail. That's when we won't set it up. So the touch points are really the key for the care piece. How, share some anecdotal color around how that's been with the customer base. And then they tweet you direct messages. Is that how you're connecting? Can you share some use cases and just day in the life? Yeah, they, obviously they use Twitter and they use Facebook. And like I mentioned, we're starting to see a lot more engagement on Instagram, especially with the paid part of Instagram. So we'll have customers who might be having an issue with vehicle. Just last week, we had a customer on a forum that posted he wasn't having an issue with his infotainment system going on and off. And so customer care jumped in, worked with our infotainment team to figure out what was going on, talked to the dealer, dealer had the fix, got it all resolved. Well, in the meantime, a Canadian customer saw it. And the Canadian customer's dealer didn't know anything about it. So we ended up working with our Canadian team and our technical assistance team to get the help in Canada. And that's what using a global tool allows us to do because we're able to see the conversations happening all over the world. It's real time. They're on the go. There's data in motion. People are in motion. Cars are in motion. Jeff, we talk about this all the time. I'm curious, Wendy, because cars are such an emotional thing. I mean, you look at the advertising around cars and it's really about the emotion of the car experience, whether it's a truck or a Corvette or going out on the town and being all dressed up. And how does that really kind of map back to the social piece of really having more of an engaged conversation and connection with people? Yeah, we like to say we have really passionate owners. So we hear them loud and clear on a regular basis. And I think it's really awesome because I've also overseen social for life insurance. You're never gonna be as passionate about life insurance, you know, you need it, but you're never gonna be as passionate about it as you are about your car and how much you're spending. I think the other challenge for us is you were talking earlier about the response time because a lot of what's happening with auto is not as quick as turning around a reservation at an airline. It does take us a little bit longer to get a customer the service that they need and close out a case. But customers expect it. And in the future, we believe as millennials are now buying more cars and they are still passionate. There's just an article this week that says that they do care about driving or transportation, maybe not the way that a generation ago did, but it's still important that we're gonna see even more social engagement, you know, and we love it. I mean, Corvette owners are some of our most passionate. I was born in Bowling Green so I've been to the factory. I was born there. I still don't have a Corvette. I'm waiting for my Corvette, John. But the other interesting thing is- I'm making a note of myself. Yeah, I made a note of myself. Color what you like. GM was so ahead of the curve with OnStar and really having a connection directly to the vehicle. How has that, you know, I think before it was like, if you got in a crash or you needed kind of concierge services, how has that adapted over time and how did that kind of give you guys an early footprint into connecting directly inside of the vehicle? Yeah, so OnStar data is something that we try to look at and now actually social care was in one area and OnStar social care was in a separate and earlier this year we brought them together so that we're able to give holistically look at a customer like if you've had an OnStar issue, you know, or you've had a vehicle issue, could we provide you OnStar extension? Do we wanna bring you back? How can we leverage that data? And as infotainment increases over time, we'll be able to leverage more data from the head unit in what we're doing from a social perspective. So it's all, you know, the internet of things and the future of how we look at a customer and how a customer engages with us will definitely be something that we're taking into consideration. OnStar DNA obviously helps the mindset in the company, but talk about the culture. Obviously to have the success you've had, what's the mindset internally from management? They're obviously must say, hey, we got the market research that shows this is how the millennials and the new, the natives, if you will, native internet generates like my youngest daughter. Yeah, I mean, leadership is really supportive. Mary Baraj just got recognized for her presence on Facebook, which was awesome. Our CEO is out there. You know, she's tweeting, she's talking, she wants to be a part of it. She understands the importance of both social and social care and customer care. And at GM, one of the mantras in our mission is that the customer is at the center of everything we do. So every journey starts and ends with the customer. So we have to keep that in mind as we're trying to do what's best for them. You know, it's really great. We always say here at Oracle, all the executives have come through all the Oracle top guys, except for Mark Hurd and Safra Katz. We'll get them on sometime. But if they can, and Larry, we can. I tried to taunt Larry on earlier during the keynote. But now you have the access. You have the touch points. You have the customer cares. You got your channel set up. You got the engagement going on. You have the open line of communication. You're listening. That's going to throw up a lot of data. This is a data center value proposition for all of Oracle now. How are you guys operationalized that internally? Okay, so the front end social teams doing their thing. You're trying this, trying that. But then the day you lock in, what's working? How do you bring it in to the company to hit that customer-centric mission? How's the data being ingested? How are they using it for ROI? Can you share some internal? Yeah, so I think in the beginning we were really concerned about what is or isn't working in the social space. What time of day? What day of week? How many characters is it? What is the sweet spot? And now I think our focus has shifted is how can this data help us sell more cars, improve quality and vehicle productivity, and leverage this live focus group that we have. So for example, when we launched the Silverado and the Sierra, K2XX is their code name. Not so secret. But anyways, we had a special team that was looking at quality ground up in the social space and we noticed in the forums that the steering wheel was getting too hot to the touch and customers were complaining and the cooled seats were venting hot air into the rear passenger. And we picked this up in the forum when we quickly got with the technical assistance team and was, how did we not see this? Well, we had run our test fleet in a cold climate. I mean, we're in Michigan, it was winter and these were early vehicles available down south. And so the team was able to take the steering wheel out of production immediately and within 30 days they were able to reroute the ventilation for the cooled seat. So that's real world data that probably would have taken us 30 or 60 or 90 days previously. So I think that's a huge opportunity for us. So one of the things that we're trying to look at as we move into 16 is what was ROI of warranty cost if you intercept that early? And then I think another thing we're trying to look at from an ROI is call center versus social and how we can help. And then looking at the average ownership of a vehicle so it's 11 years in the U.S. How do we get ahead of that? Because as millennials start to buy we want to be there to help provide social care. Yeah, that's real ROI right there. Yeah, I want to dig in a little bit. So what was the forum that data came across? It was a truck forum. Yep. So you're... We monitor about 120 forums in the U.S. and we're rolling that out globally to do it as well. So we have agents on there every day monitoring the conversations and engaging where appropriate. And how do you see the traffic flow or the kind of intensity of the information shifting from people calling 1-800, my steering wheel's too hot versus just a public outcry of I'm frying my kid in the backseat, we need a justice thing. I think that we haven't seen the shift yet but I think that goes back to the average age of our owner and how long keep people keep vehicles. But we do expect that well, another thing that we were talking about is awareness that automotive companies are in the social space helping with social care. I think everyone knows that the airlines are there but I'm not sure that they fully know that auto companies are there because GM was actually leading in this space and now we're seeing the competition come online. So we've talked about how do we raise awareness for what we're doing in this space and help more people. And with that 11 years in between purchases, I mean, I would imagine the socials are pretty important tool to keep those people engaged because they're not gonna buy a car for a while, right? In theory, they just bought one, they're locked in for a little while but you wanna keep them really engaged, part of the family, part of the conversation. One of the things that we're trying to look at is the correlation between an engaged community from a marketing perspective and then when you have an issue, how we help you and then what does that mean when you go to buy a new vehicle, right? Because we wanna be able to correlate the fact that we helped you in this space and the fact that you came back. One of the things we also wanna look at is if the average life cycle's 11 years, hopefully it comes down because that's actually a long time, is if we help you now and we come back to you in three years and say, are you ready to buy a vehicle, can we do it? In some of our other markets, they actually are using serum related to social. It's just not been totally embraced in the US because we consider it spam here. If you talk to us on social, you don't wanna get an email from us saying come buy a vehicle. But in other markets like Brazil, it's totally acceptable. So we're trying to look at that data. The localization. Right. How can we leverage that data? And other markets like our GM international operations, India, it's acceptable as well. Europe, not so much. Privacy laws in Europe are crazy in Canada as well. So just trying to look at those different ways for us to work better in the future. Wendy, I wanna get your take on it on social because it's a big part of our business. We are big into social business. We think social is the next generation. Social business was like e-business. I wanna get your take on it because social's evolved from, hey PR, buzz, hey buy some stuff, having a promotion and trying to sell stuff on social versus looking at it as an environment. So I want you to compare and contrast the web. Because in the early days, I worked with Procter and GM and there are interactive days, they called it interactive back then. That was the web. I spent some time at P&G. Yeah, so you know, I noticed that's why I brought up. So I did my homework, did a little bit of homework. You know, but P&G and GM and the car companies, they were very big early adopters on the web. When people were saying, oh, that's just a kid's thing. The interactive was what was called. But that obviously became, people were buying and getting information with buying cars online. Well, getting information then going to dealer and you're doing e-commerce. And then the rest is history and now we have end of that at web error to social. How is social evolving as fast to being a viable platform like the web was? I mean, the web was laughed at early on. Oh yeah, absolutely. People thought we were crazy. Social was laughed at, but now the president's on, everyone's on, but people are interacting. So it's a new channel. How is that evolving in your mind? And compare and contrast if you can to the other trend of the web and where are we, what's your take on status of the industry? I think though, social's moving even faster than the web did. And if you aren't thinking about it or haven't thought about it, you're going to get left behind. I mean, one of the examples that I've been using in the last few weeks is I color my hair like a lot of women do, right? And I tweeted a hair coloring company. I won't name names and said, hey, I'm this color right now. It's summer, I need to go lighter. Can you help me? And the response was call us on the 800 number. And I'm like, really, you can't help me on Twitter. And they're like, no, it'll be better if you call us. So I called and then the first question they asked me is, well, what does your hair look like? What color is it? And so I Googled myself and of the first six images that appear, I'm the top three. Like just based on my Twitter handle and you could have seen my picture. So what if in the future, and I'm not talking like a year, I'm talking like six months, that haircare company had responded to my tweet and said, I see these couple of pictures. Are you thinking this color or this color? Is there any other picture? Engage you. Right, tell me, is your hair thicker thin? And then said this and then gave me a link. I would have bought it right then. But instead I called, I was annoyed. I thought about changing brands. Yeah, yeah. So I really do think it's a viable option in the future and the future is now. Yeah. And it is an accelerator. People are browsing and learning from their peers. It's an omnichannel environment. All that stuff is cool. So I agree with you. What data practice are you using? Because now obviously if you're at P&G then you're probably very data driven. I'm sure GM is data driven. Data driven is everything. How do you share with folks watching who are going into social and expanding social how to be data driven and share some experiences that you guys do best practices? Yeah, I think a lot of people really get caught up in trying to have a really expensive tool or pouring over data. And sometimes it's just as simple as exporting the data that exists in the channel you're in and then looking at it. And one of the things that we learned really early on is that when we posted more than three to five times a week we actually saw a drop in engagement. Now that's changed over time. But right after we figured that out, probably a year, a company came out and said, oh, auto needs to post on this day and they need to post six times a week and da, da, da. Well, our data didn't say that. And so you can't take a what people say you have to kind of look at it and be don't overcomplicate it, just start simple. Like, is it what time of day I'm posting? Is it the channel? One of the things we've been looking at a lot is when we engage with customers from a marketing support standpoint we look at their profile and we pick one thing. Like they go went to the school or they live in this town and it's personal. So just don't overcomplicate it to the point. Yeah, to scare people. Right, because it can be scary. I love it, but it can be overwhelming. When done right, it's amazing. Right, it is. When done wrong, it's scary. And I think the future of big data and for us it's called enterprise data warehouse. I mean, the possibilities are fascinating and fun and the sooner we get there, the happier I'll be. But when you're at the beginning of the journey, don't get so caught up at the end of the journey. Just take it one step at a time. You're pioneering right now. And again, for the practitioners out there, what are some of the measures you talked about kind of measuring engagement and trying to correlate that with future success and what are the things that you measured that define engagement in your world? Yeah, so for us, it depends on the channel, obviously, but we try to look at the size of our community, engagement of our community, because if we're just posting and no one's actually replying or liking it, then we don't have an engaged community and that for us is health, is our community healthy. I see a lot of pages out there, not just even our own, where they've been up for several years and they have no engagement. So at that point, it's like, do you really need to be there? We had a conversation, I'm in grad school, we had a conversation the other day about B2C versus B2B and we were talking about the mining crisis in Virginia a few years back and someone was saying, oh, they should have leveraged social and I'm like, but they're a B2B company. So if they had had a Twitter handle, who would they have been talking to? So you have to kind of, right, you had to have this, be realistic. This was good on paper, great engagement. We're talking to ourselves. But be realistic about what your company's trying to achieve and look, engagement might be a great score for you, but driving sales, like GM doesn't sell vehicles online, we sell them through a dealer. I think your point about not listening to consultants and people telling you, this is the playbook. I mean, it's reference architectures and best practices, but you got to take it with a grain of salt because your audience is your audience and beauty's in the eye of your own beholder, right? So you can't take a boilerplate. Right, and every community is different. Like we, the Corvette Facebook page is very different than the Silverado Facebook page or a Cadillac page. It's called demographics, it's like a graphic. Yeah, I mean, and it's amazing to watch. Like one of the things we found with our Chevrolet Facebook page, which was fascinating was more than half of our fans are outside of the US. Who would have thought, you know, on the first blush that that would be the case and then adding geo-targeting, you're able to talk in their native language and work with them, so. That's super insightful. I think, you know, I showed you our listening engine. We build our own custom listening because why, I don't want this, we want our own stuff, we know what we want. We kind of know what we're looking for. So that's the advice that you're giving other people as well. Yeah, I mean, I used to work in an agency for several years and GM was my client, I had other clients as well. But you need to know your client, you need to understand what's best practices, but you also need to know your community because you can't take, I call it the peanut butter approach, you can't just peanut butter everything, it won't work. Whitney Drake, thanks for shaking the time to share with us the data and socials. Great information, like Jeff always says, the answer to all future problems will be on theCUBE by our super smart guests and you are awesome. Thanks for sharing. Thank you very much. I'll give you the final word, quickly share with us what products you're using for Oracle, what are you doing with those guys, what are you guys using for them? We use Engage and publish from Oracle and then we also use for CRM Siebel at GM on the customer care side. So right now we're in integration between customer care and Siebel to make sure that we know a customer's history, how we can help them and what the future holds. In the distant future we'll be able to say, oh, thank you for your loyalty, we want you to buy this vehicle, so yeah, it's awesome. Persona-based, intelligent, machine learning is great stuff out there. Full 360 engagement and intelligence systems are key. I wish I had more time to talk about some of the funnel infrastructure products that you guys were looking at. We got to get you back on the field. Thank you for sharing. Thank you very much. We are live here on Howard Street with our closing things down, this is theCUBE, it's our flagship program powered by SiliconANGLE Media, SiliconANGLE.com, Wikibon.com research team, and of course, SiliconANGLE.tv, CUBE page there. You want to get all the information for all the content, the trending stories, the crowd conversations that we've aggregated, the organic conversations, and all of our videos all out there on crowdpages.co slash oow15, that's for Oracle Open World, that's crowdpages.co slash oow15. We'll be right back for more after this short break here at Oracle Open World, this is theCUBE.