 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor, IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live. This is theCUBE in Las Vegas with IBM Interconnect, a special presentation of theCUBE where we go out and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. Joe McCose, Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org. Our next guest I'm super excited for because we talk all the time online. We don't see each other in person except that these events is good to have intimate conversation. Our next guest, Amber Armstrong, Program Director, IBM Social Business. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much. theCUBE is one big crowd chat, but three of us and hopefully we really can't chat with anyone else. But there is a crowd chat online right now. So if you're watching, go to crowdchat.net slash IBM Interconnect, we'll be watching. Bring the questions in. Amber is probably the best power user we've seen on the crowd chat. Mainly because you guys have such a great community but you guys are really doing well. And people who know me and Dave know that we love social business because it's not about the PR and the buzz and just talking to yourself. It's actually connecting with relationships and using that interaction engagement to create more attraction, more people interacting, to create data, to create engagement. And that's the holy grail right now. So tell us, how's it going? How did you get here? And can you be prolific at the same time at creating value? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don't know, try. No, when we do the crowd chats, one of the big pieces that works for us most is we bring in our influencers. And you bring them in based on the topics. You try to figure out what's going to be the most valuable to the audience around this particular topic. And then you bring in the right influencers and you run through the questions. We try to make our crowd chats really visual. So we put the questions up with the tiles and we also try to get things so that they're also kind of pushing out to Twitter overall and trying to bring as many people as we can into the conversation. What I really also love about it is it's activating. And I think the term I like to use is crowd activated innovation because what you're doing is you're not selling anything. You're providing a virtual venue around a constructed theme. So it kind of looks top down, structured. But the soil of organic growth is all going to be based upon the interaction of the topic. So it's truly the winning form in my opinion of what we call earned media. So I want to get your take on this. Visa V the old way, webinar, we have a webinar. Give me your email address, give me your firstborn. We're going to sell you something. Watch this video, there's no interaction. And maybe you can ask a question at the end. So that's webinars, the old way. How would you compare and contrast this new way of social? Well it's really about starting the conversations early, often, really engaging with people so that when they think of social business they think of how are they going to reach their customers? They're thinking about commerce. They automatically think of IBM and then they drive into our own channels to get additional information and really start engaging with us. But we spend our full time just providing value out to them. Even when they're unsolicited, we're not trying to push them towards anything. But if we just push out value, then we believe that they will come back to us. And we're seeing a great increase on our website visits. We've done a lot of work with Ted at IBM. We just did the IBM verse launch. And all these things, because the value we're providing to customers, we're seeing that land back on our own properties. So talk about the experience you've had with Ted at IBM and other chats you've done, because that's the crowd chat thing we've been interacting on. But I bring it up to crowd chat because we've built it to be easy to stand up. What you're doing is you're standing up social programs almost ad hoc but get structured themes. This is the new way, this is the cloud way. Standing something up is a cloud geek term. Stand up for some new servers. So with the hashtags, they provide a great direct response opportunity vehicle. So hey, advertise the hashtag. Direct response, I'm noticing you're doing that. And users are using hashtags to navigate. So this trend of the hashtags being a direct response vehicle for advertising an event, if you will, or chat. And then users navigate is the perfect storm for this innovation. Talk about how you guys did that. Because at Ted at IBM, you guys executed with non-disruptive operations in your group. You just plugged in the social programs and things just kind of smooth. It's about building series of content. And so what we did is we started out with, you know, we would have influencers come in, we would bring in our speakers that were going to be at Ted and we started months and months before Ted where we would put together what we called smart packs. And it would be, we would do a tweet chat, we would have infographics blogs and you put that content out there so that you're already building awareness for that speaker and people are interested. They're like, oh, we want to come and talk to this person. And so it just kind of, you do it in a series so people get used to it. And now we switched it and we're doing the, because Ted at IBM happened last year. Now we're on a new way to work and so we do our new way to work tweet chats. Same kind of thing. We put it out there. We did a great influencer event with Pure Matter and we filmed the influencers and we now put out blogs, tweet chats, you know, the same kind of process just in a series that people learn to kind of constantly come back for it. So a couple other things. Your Twitter stream is very visual, I noticed. Like 99% of what you tweet has a visual in there. Is that just based on you know that it plays better? Is it based on research that you guys did? Can you talk about that? Yeah, yeah, it's a rule. So we always use the visual. We actually use dynamic signal to a lot of our employee advocacy and you have to have a visual in there so that's one of the reasons you see when IBM employees are sharing then it's because they're pulling it out of dynamic signal getting it out to all their channels. But we also, we have rules about, you know, if we're going to put an image on there we'd use it to the exact Twitter dimensions because that can still play in Facebook and LinkedIn but you got to make it so that when someone's looking in that preview screen that they see the core message or sometimes a couple of things I posted last night a picture of, you know, it's a really silly example but a cupcake that had a new way to work on it. And it was kind of this interesting image and I looked at the tweet stats on it today and 190 people looked at that image and it was just a cupcake. Images are fantastic. So you'll, so the dynamic signal is part of your workflow. It's a, I know a little bit about it. It's like an employee advocacy tool. Yeah, it's an employee advocacy tool and what it does is it allows our, we have about 500 employees that share very actively for a social business. IBM on whole has about 6,500 that are sharing our content all through dynamic signal. My team puts the content in there and then you go in and, you know, 10, 15 minutes a day you can share out that content and you can automate it to go out. The way I tend to do it if you watch my stream is I tend to post things four times because it hits the different time zones. And then I've tried it out. I don't lose engagement by doing that. I get the same, sometimes the third time I post something is when it gets the most engagement. So it's really fun to kind of watch and just kind of see. That's interesting. So you're not worried about the repetition. Repetition is actually a good thing because you're going to hit different parts of your social graph. Yeah. What about email marketing? Does that still fit into this whole social play? Yeah, it does. It does. So one of the things that we just launched was IBM Verse and hopefully you guys are hearing a lot about IBM Verse here at the conference. And with Verse, you know, we wanted to drive registrations. We wanted people to sign up for Verse. It's a premium. It's, you know, it's a great product but we need names, email addresses, titles all that kind of great stuff. So Verse is now being launched. We're starting to ramp people into it but there's this whole timeframe from when we did the launch in November until now. And so we're just now starting to bring people in. We've been continuing that conversation via email. We've been giving people access to private content so it's unique, only registered people get to see it. And then we're pulling people into Verse based on some priority things. For example, people that attended ConnectEd, people that are registering here from InterConnect are also going to get prioritized. If I asked companies, let's say a year and a half ago, do you put Twitter handles in your CRM? I would say close to 100% would have said no. Right. And that's starting to change. If I ask you that, what's your answer? How are you using things like Twitter handles? Yeah, I think we're still learning on it, but we are. We definitely do it. We also use a lot of tools. So an interesting kind of thing, a stat that I just looked at this morning is we use a tool called Mutual Mind. I think you guys just talk to Mutual Mind, right? Yeah, so we use Mutual Mind. So we have all of our influencer handles, all of our employee advocacy handles, and I can tell you what percentage of the Twitter impressions were driven by those groups. So we've got 20 social influencers here, and yesterday they drove 35% of the impressions for the overall conference. And so being able to track those handles helps you understand ConnectEd. Where are you getting the biggest impact? They're a small percentage of the overall population. Yeah, they're 20 people. Maybe what? Okay, so I got to ask you the question, because I love this, this is my favorite. You know I love social. What does join the conversation? If you advertise join the conversation, where do I go? Is there like a website? Is there a join the conversation website? Do I go to Twitter? Or do I go to Tumblr? Do I go to Instagram? Is there a hashtag? You guys are figuring this out. I mean, obviously it's a little bias with crowd chat, but if this audience is generating 35% of the activity, they're essentially ginning up the conversations. How does someone join? The hashtag, the hashtag we're using is new way to work. So what you'll see, you're seeing us do now, we've been having the first conversations on that hashtag. We've been talking about the future of work. We just launched a new website a couple days ago, IBM.com slash futurists. And all of our influencer content is there. You'll see all the videos, all of that stuff. So if someone can go there, within the actual conversations are happening on Twitter. Go in and we're now joining that new way to work conversation with the IBM Interconnect conversation by kind of merging those handles and helping those communities get to know each other. Yeah, I got to say that is such a great strategy because with the crowd chat, it's not a full in the wild. People love to go walk around the park, if you will, of the social web, which is Twitter, but in the moment, that's how you meet people. Then you can have structured conversations and record them. So what's the next thing that you're seeing is the next innovation beyond that? So I'm a user, I want to join the conversation. I dial up Twitter, that's the channel, new way to work, hashtag. I come in, there's a lot of noise in there. What are you guys doing? You can drive the websites, you've got crowd chat, you've got your ambassadors. And it's the biggest thing that I'm focused on is getting other people to tell our story. And they don't do it on brand. They do it, you know, hopefully not terribly off brand, right, but- And their channel that they would like to choose, right? Letting people tell that story is really important because you want your employees to tell it. You want your customers to tell it. You want your external influencers to tell it. You want industry experts to tell it. And so we're building relationships with all of these people and letting them tell their story that is really closely aligned to ours. And when you want to engage in that conversation, well, you go to the hashtag, of course. But you also go to the person that you know that you trust, right? So you go to Brian Kramer, Brian Fanzo, or Jeff Tieng. And there's no one answer. People have their little, come to my little house and we'll sit here, or let's go in the park or let's go here. So it's about horizontally scaling this conversation. Do you see it? Yeah, absolutely. And you go to your employees, right? Or our employees, but you go to your friend who works at IBM and you say, hey, I heard about this thing, you know? So it's all about finding what's the most trusted route and let those people tell the story. And then we are there to kind of catch and receive. Awesome. Well, I would like to just end the segment by saying thanks, great to work with you guys. Share with the folks out there, just best practice, philosophy. What's the new way to think around social? What's the new way to execute and bring some of these best practices into their company? So they can move social from a PR activity that no one really sees value other than creating a short-term buzz, splash on the pool, if you will, or to take it to the next level. What's your advice mindset-wise? How they should think, how they should work it, how they should build it, how they should execute it? I think everybody should have an employee advocacy program. It's astounding the amount of impact you can drive by doing that. And, you know, for companies that don't, I mean, it's so easy to start and it makes such a huge impact. We started with 60 people and one week we drove 35,000 clicks. Right now our advocates are driving 55,000 clicks. Like that's, it's really impactful and it's working. And so to start with employee advocacy, as you start to ramp up, then you can build in more of this influencer piece and working with these external influencers. And then what I think the real magic is taking the external influencers and powering their content with your employee advocates and really merging those, you've got this kind of shared value overall and it's, it's been great. That's the owned, paid and earned media coming together in a very clean, authentic, fully transparent way. And it's, it's sharing the value. You know, there's a lot of different ways to share value across influencer channels, all the different channels. And so finding ways to really do that in meaningful ways that's, you know, you can do a sponsorship, that sort of thing. There's a lot of different ways. It's data driven too, so it's all data driven. Absolutely. Amber, you guys have lightning in a bottle. Congratulations, it's just the beginning. So I know it's going to morph and take a hold on the direction. I've always been a big fan of social business and I would just be in a long time IBM observer, you know, back in the 90s, IBM pioneered e-business, which no one uses anymore. It's just called the web, it's called the internet, right? Now, social business is the same thing. So I really think you guys are honest on this company and what you're doing, congratulations. This is theCUBE out sharing our social media view with Amber here, talking about the best practices, new way to work, new way to build, new way to collaborate, new way to engage, new way to measure it, new way to connect with customers through all this new great social media, social business. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back after this short break.