 Hi, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, host of theCUBE, and we're here at 18th Factor, Brian Shrabian, who runs the social media for the Giants, and if you know theCUBE, you know me, you know we love social, we love social business, we love social interactions, and best of all, mobile, cloud, and social, and big data all come together. So tell us, what a challenge it is, you have a huge fan base, they love the Wi-Fi here, they're used to all the amenities on the digital side, now you've got to come out with the social. How do you do that? What's going on? Give us the lay of the land here. You know, it is a challenge, but it's a fun challenge, and I think we're in a very unique and great opportunity here in San Francisco. Like you mentioned, the Wi-Fi gives us this huge advantage. Our fans are very social savvy. Many of them have iPhones or Android phones, they're taking a lot of pictures, they're posting on Instagram, they're posting on Twitter, and we try to foster and encourage that engagement with our fans day in and day out. The challenge is 162 games season, it's a long season, and there's a lot of content, but you're telling a, you know, as we like to say, we're telling a season long story, so all of it kind of blends together. So it's a really unique job, but you know, look at this place, this is our office, so it's an awesome job to have. It's a very social environment, of course, a lot of activities to talk about. So talk about the challenge of social in general, right, because obviously fans all use social. You guys have what we call the fat pipes here to upload, your upload speeds are really fantastic. We did a test before the stadium, 30 meg up on LTE, 40 on Wi-Fi, certainly that changes, but good uploading for the fan population that are here. Is there a software approach? Where's the innovation comes from? Is there best practices? It's an iterative, it's evolving process, it's fairly new, I mean, it's only, you know, less than 10 years since the iPhone really hit the scene, so what have you learned and shared with the folks out there for best practice? You know, I mean, I think again, you take something that is, it's been lasting for a while, I mean, baseball and coming to the ballpark is, you know, is an American pastime. It's a social experience, though. We come with our family and our friends, we take pictures, we share that experience. So now that we have social media, we're going to have a little bit of a real time update. We do whatever it takes to get the interviews here. This is what it is. This is what it is. This is the challenge at 18. We've got a lot of tough life we have here. We've got to let the field crew. Sorry, you can't do your job. The game's got to be delayed. We're talking social media, more important stuff. But seriously, so what are you guys doing in terms of apps? What are you guys, what's the philosophy of social media? What's the DNA of your group? It really is engagement. I mean, we want to, you know, it's interesting that our motto is giant together, stronger together. We bring this community of our fans together, that it's all inclusive. And I think that's what we try to do in social media. We want our fans to be a part of that story. We want to share in that experience. It's a 162 game season. Some years you win the World Series and some years you don't. You don't know that until the very end and you kind of come along. And one thing we found is that fans love to be a part of that. They love to see themselves on the scoreboard. They love to see their tweets favorited. They love to see behind-the-scenes photos. They love to feel like they are an insider with our organization. And that's, I think, where we bring social media to bring our fans closer. One of the great things about social is that crowd can talk back and you have to listen. So what are you guys doing on the listening side to foster better engagement, to give really good actionable insights and pleasures to your audience. And the fan experience certainly now takes on a whole other dimension in the game, in the stadium. You have to listen. You have to respond. What do you guys do? How do you guys handle that? You know, I think we've done a fairly good job of responding in real time on Twitter using it as a customer service channel. But I think going deeper than that, this is a focus group for us. We're learning in real time what our fans think about the team. What do they think about the experience? You know, on the micro level, what do they think about their particular seats? You know, their experience at the ballpark. How can we learn from that? More so than responding to everyone. I mean, we try to respond and engage with many fans. But even more importantly, we're listening to our fans. We're taking a lot of the data that we see. We're talking about it. You know, everything from how we display replays off of challenges and are we doing that the right way? Is that, you know, giving our fans the utmost experience? So essentially, you know, our fans here give us feedback 365 days a year and we're able to take that and elevate our business. And certainly San Francisco, some of the most socially advanced fans technically. I mean, you got Twitter here. You got Facebook. You got Google, all in Silicon Valley. And the population of tech savvy. So the standards are pretty high. You feel a lot of pressure on that? Yeah, you know, I don't know if I feel pressure per se, but I think we definitely feel the bar is raised. And yeah, there is an experience, but it is baseball as well. I remember when we first built the ballpark in 2000, the overwhelming response of fans wanted to get away from the technology at the time, you know, 2000 was a different time. That's changed now that the iPhone really just changed people's, how they look at technology. So I think with all that being said, you know, technology adds to the experience. So, you know, we have at the ballpark app, which we're able to customize and make the ability for fans to customize for their experience at the park. So we're trying to use the technology out there to help our fans, everything from the minute they leave their house to the minute they're here. How can that help them experience this ballpark? So tell me two things. The most coolest thing you've ever seen come out of the whole social initiative from a fan base and two, the crowdsourcing dynamics. Yeah. What is the coolest thing you've seen come out of the crowdsourcing concept? But the fans are there. Probably some weird stuff. Probably some great stuff. What is the coolest thing you've seen? Well, I mean, I think that goes hand in hand. I think in 2012, when we were in the postseason and the whole rally Zito movement and it started, we were down three games to one in St. Louis and Barry Zito was pitching the next day and a fan started a hashtag, a meme rally Zito and it just kind of spread overnight to the point where it just kind of took over. And the Giants, you know, came back and won that game, launched them into the World Series and won the World Series, but it was really this engaged fan base that started that. It was almost, you know, as if one fan was clapping in the stands and the rest, it took fire. Same thing happened on Twitter and it was a really cool thing to see and that was crowdsourced and I think that's, you know, kind of the philosophy we have is that, you know, by no means are we controlling that conversation. We're part of that conversation and we want to foster that conversation. So you're saying that the fan experience in the crowdsourcing virtual space affected the team's performance. Almost as if they were in the stands themselves. Yeah, I didn't say that. I wish I could say that. But that's what happened. The fans' rally in a virtual stand in this world of saying that the baseball god shined down on us and that had a small part. Absolutely. Why not? The fans helped us win the World Series. Fans, if you're on social, you better get going because we need some offense. Let's see some offense on the Giants in some stretch. We need five runs today. That would be helpful. What was the coolest thing you've seen on a tweet? What's the most epic tweet you've seen on the scoreboard? Boy, you know, we see a lot of tweets on the scoreboard. I think the best tweet we ever saw going back to that and it was our tweet but it wasn't our photo. It was, here's how it worked, the team was on a plane and they weren't sure if they were going to St. Louis or if they were going to Washington D.C. or home and they were watching the St. Louis Washington Nationals game and our traveling secretary sent me the picture and I tweeted it out and it just captured kind of this emotion of the team watching the game and it just brought a lot of attention to the fact that social media takes you to places you've never been before on a charter plane watching a team that look like a bunch of little leakers. So from the team side I think we're able to get behind the scenes, we're able to get our players to kind of share a little bit about what they are privately as much as they're willing to give and our fans love that. So we're always looking to kind of bring our fans into the front row as they say. That you capture those moments that are behind the scenes. Yeah. Now accessible. Very nice. Brian, thanks for joining us. I really appreciate you coming on the field and talking to us at Silicon Angle on the Cube. Thanks for all your support and also congratulations on a really badass social program you guys out here. Really well done. Thank you. I appreciate that. I think we can say badass but it's not really... Sure show. You can do whatever you want. Social TV, social media, social interactions, this is the future and now the fans are involved, the teams are listening and certainly it's great for everyone. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. This is John Furrier live on the ground here at AT&T Park. We'll be right back. Thanks for watching.