 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube at IBM Interconnect 2015 brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Ariana Grato here in Las Vegas, Nevada at IBM Interconnect and you're watching the Cube on the ground. I'm here with Ted Conroy, a digital strategist for IBM and he's spearheading the charge for InterconnectGo.com which is the social site for Interconnect. You can stream videos, get content. Can you tell us a little bit more about the site and what you're doing? Yeah, absolutely. It's what we're calling it as a virtual digital experience. So the idea is that if you weren't physically at the conference, it would be something that you could put in a box and take with you. But what we've used it primarily for on site is for people who, if they're coming from the MGM to the Mandalay Bay or going from one place to another and they can't make the keynote they really want to go to or if they're bouncing from general session to keynote and they missed a stream and there was something that they weren't able to get to, they can find that all in a nice little packed up box at InterconnectGo.com. And then when they go there, they can also find a ton of great content relating to it. So this is really helpful when it comes to lead generation for IBM. We can put next to a streaming on-demand video, relevant content such as, you know, if we're talking, you know, a cloud keynote, we're going to put a couple of white papers that IBM's CAI team has done and IBV teams have done, which have basically come in and, you know, showed the benefits of cloud and so somebody who might be interested can come in and download that information and learn more about those services. So the idea is almost conference in a box, if you will. And it's been very, very well received since we've been here at Interconnect, just because everybody can just take it with them and it's very responsive. You can play it on your iPhone, your iPad, and or on your laptop. So that's kind of what InterconnectGo is. Awesome. Yeah, well, it's a great site. And are you creating a community around this site and around InterconnectGo or around IBM? Well, I think the idea when it comes to digital and content and community engagement is that you're never going to have a community that goes to one place. I think one big pitfall that a lot of marketers fall into is that they try to create hubs for people to really get around and create these own bespoke experiences where, you know, they create something custom for their own company, but they don't think about their consumers. So I think what we've really been able to do and where we've been able to capture a lot of market is that we're everywhere people want to be. So you know, if you're on Twitter and you want to follow us on Twitter, we have a great, you know, Twitter account that will post relevant stuff and connect with these content repositories and these hubs like InterconnectGo.com. I think too many people, too many times people will focus so much on creating an experience that people will go to and that's the only place they can be. And I think we, for this conference, have done a great job at being where people are and then giving them easy access to what they want. Great. So we really see IBM spearheading Twitter and using Twitter really for its benefit. I mean, you guys are all over the trending hashtags going on and you've really created a lot of engagement. Do you have any advice for other tech enterprises for using social media for their benefit? Well, I think social in general is very much misconstrued a lot and a lot of people think about, you know, they don't think we need to be on social. Why? Because we need to be on social. It's become this default term. I'm not a marketer. I'm not somebody who came from the traditional background of I went to school and how to market to people. I joined Twitter in 2009 because I was interested in it and I wanted to use it and I became somebody who really, really likes to do it. I've got almost 10,000 in the five years I've been on it. And so I think when marketers think about what they put out on social, when they come up with social strategies, don't think about what's going to make us look good. Think about what does a consumer want? You may have a great banner that explains exactly what your product does, but just explaining doesn't do it on social. It needs to engage. It needs to captivate them. And I think the biggest thing you need to think of is really take your marketer brain off and you need to really focus on what would I like to see? If I was being served this content, what is it that I want? And I think that's when you see the best results and I think interconnect is a great situation where we've had a great team of people, you know, Ryan, who's kind of a I work hand in hand with him. We've really gotten to the bare bones of what I want this and there have been situations where we've come up with something and we've looked at it and we've said we don't want this and we throw it out or we hold on to it for another day or we improve it. So I think that's a huge thing, especially in the enterprise world is that every enterprise wants to show how great it is. There are a lot of great enterprises out there, but you need to really connect with that consumer and I think that's where the gap is a lot. And I think it's a gap where we've been able to fill. Yeah. Yeah, I definitely think you guys have done a great job engaging your crowd, engaging your community and finding lead generation through that, through social media means. So in your perspective, what does join the conversation mean to you? Join the conversation can mean so many things, but what I think of to me is that normally in the world, a lot of people have opinions about a lot of things and some people, you know, sometimes it's a hot topic and you can't touch it with a 10 foot pole. Other times it's something a little bit more benign and sometimes there's something right in the middle where it's something you work on and are very passionate about. So I think what's great about, you know, both social media and some of the products that IBM offers is that we're in an unprecedented age where there are very, very few barriers to entry when it comes to, you know, if you're a developer and you want to build something, there are great products open source wise, which you can just go on and you can do it. If you're on social, your voice can be just as strong as somebody else who 20 years ago, if they were on TV, would have been so much more, you know, coveted and their voice would have been heard so much more just because they had those distribution means. These barriers have been knocked down. So when I say join the conversation, if you believe you have something to contribute to what you're interested in, go contribute to it because if you do and you work at it and what you're saying makes sense, you're going to find that audience and you're going to be able to contribute to what you love. So that's what join the conversation means to me. Awesome. All right, last question, a little tricky, but something a lot of us wonder is how do you monitor how your company is doing and engaging with the grad socially, like lead generation, what kind of metrics can you actually see from your social campaigns? Well that's been one of the big transitions in the last couple of years is moving from okay, we're on social, we're doing this to does it work and do people like it? We've had a lot of great tools, business partners and also IBM in-house analysis tools and what's great about this company is that we do data analysis. That's what we do. In social is just another opportunity to glean bits of data and to learn things. So in this situation, we have social data in which especially on Twitter, there is just so much coming in and so much that can be analyzed and we work with a lot of great partners that can analyze our data. We have a great team that works on social insights and has some great tools. So we're really on the edge or really kind of right there in the middle of a point where we can read what works and what doesn't. We can see it in real time. You can throw things at the wall and sometimes you think, even a couple of years ago you think something was good but it just wasn't. So I think working for IBM is really helpful when it comes to gathering social insights for IBM because we're a data company and we're now and we're a cloud company and we're a company that wants to, we want to take all this data and we want to make something out of it. So that is just a hand-in-hand kind of thing that we have. That's easy. That's the easy part. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Ted. Great insights and thanks for being here on the cube on the ground.