 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015 brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Hi, I'm Ariana Grado here in Las Vegas, Nevada from IBM Interconnect doing CUBE on the ground and we're here with Marcia Collier, a VIP influencer. So Marcia, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're working on? Well, yeah, just go the Wikipedia, I mean that just makes it easier. I've been in the online space since the late 90s. I wrote eBay for Dummies, you ever read that book? I have, I have heard of that book. See, it's in 8th edition, I think the whole, we've sold about a million copies by 2007. I've written other books about e-commerce, social media, customer service, and I even have a series for seniors on how to do social media. Awesome. So how did you get into this? What's your background and what brought you into the social media realm? Well, technology is my main love and I did a radio show which turned into a podcast, been going on computer and technology radio and that's on iTunes, been doing that for six, seven years. So you know that helps me get the technology because I love data. I mean I just love doing something and then digging apart the data, seeing what words resonated with people. What was the important pull when you tweet something or share something online or social media? What is it that causes people to react? You can make people react in a negative way really easily, but when you're talking about positive sentiment, which I think is really important, especially if you're a brand, you want people to think positive of you, you don't want to trigger any negative thoughts when someone's talking to you. So working on all those things and reading the data just gives me so much pleasure because I can learn the secrets. And what do you find the importance of social media for our brands? Well the important, several things. First off, customer service. I mean if you want to help your customers, so much of the world is online now and they want immediate answers, a lot of people do not like picking up the phone. Hopefully you can have them tweet, if they tweet to you and they have a problem, you can catch it right away before it mushrooms into something really horrible. Also, beyond social media for a brand, talk about your products, how they can benefit the customer, and then also get involved with the customer in a discussion that is not related to your brand. Reach out to people on a human basis because we're all just people and big business can go a lot farther if they have that human touch online. Great, great advice. And what does the phrase join the conversation mean to you? Social media is totally all about a conversation. It's not, see that's one of the problems. Brands will often tweet out, tweet out, tweet out. And they'll never answer, they won't follow back. And the whole point of social media is to build a community. You build a community of supporters and once you have enough supporters, you don't really have to promote yourself at all. I mean, sometimes articles come out about me that I've never seen because somebody's tweeted it to me. And I kind of feel that's the organic way for it to happen. Is you build a community, you follow people, you talk to people. If somebody wants to talk to you, answer them back even if it's just to say thank you. But you're building a human bond, whether you're a brand or just an individual building a brand. And you can build a community that when you have something to sell, they're gonna be more likely to sell because they know you and they're emotionally invested in you. Awesome. Are there any trends in 2015 that you've been watching, social media trends? Well, there's a whole bunch of things going on in social media. But I think what we need to do is start thinking back to the best practices. And so many people, like I said, of engagement. Best practices, sentiment, and how we present ourselves online. No matter what your age, those tweets are on there forever. Employers check Twitter, employers check Facebook. Think about what you're posting. And I think that's the most important takeaway. That's good advice for me. Well, thank you so much. It was great to have you on here and tuning in from IBM Interconnect, we have Marcia Collar. Check out her over 48 books, is that correct? That's at Marcia Collar on Twitter. Thank you so much. Thank you.