okay welcome back we're live here in Las Vegas this is the cube silicon angles exclusive coverage of IBM's information on demand I'm John Farid founder silicon I am John mecos day volante and we're talking social business and our next guest is Renee ducrai decree from IBM welcome welcome to the q thank you you know I was having trouble those names but social business yesterday we were teasing it up and you know we were riffing on that because the date topic was big data analytics which shows the value sign up at the insights all the all that greatness and that's going to have the impact on business of the conversation today is social business so I want you to just take the folks through what's the new orientation towards social business it's not like it hasn't been around awhile collaboration connecting with phones and an email has been kind of the old way what's the new direction of social business why is it important now all right thank you John so I'm great question so once again my name is Renee decree and the director of marketing for IBM social business unit and you know as we're looking at social business and we think about you know the unprecedented growth and innovation that it's really been driving over the last you know really five plus years right and some of the trends that we've been seeing with a lot of the smarter planet implementations that we've done there's really some key trends that have been emerging around you know how people inform the decisions that they're making as well as you know how they're delivering value to clients and really leveraging you know one of the big payoffs of social business is really social data right and now they're leveraging the social data much better in you know really to make product and service innovation you know much more robust and what are they able to deliver to clients good so even a couple short years ago business let's say what's the point of twitter why do you even bother can you get any value out of it and what's changed you talk about that change and what's change in your customer base yeah and really you know as we look at social business it's it's so much more than you know the typical when you think of social the typical tools like Twitter and Facebook and it's really about applying social networking tools to really you know improve your business drive better you know more productivity across your your workforce just as an example you know one of the implementations that we've done working with Boston Children's Hospital classic example of how you know you take social technologies and really apply it to business right so working with Boston's Children's Hospital we've created a social networking hub that allows them to share all kinds of you know surgical procedures you think of how you know physicians were trained there's such an explosion of data right there's medical journals that are creating you know all kinds of learnings that these exploding rates doctors having a hard time keeping up with all the information as well as all the new procedures out there so now we've helped them create the social networking hub that houses all that information so now physicians all over the world are able to share that information with each other and what we're hearing are you know very good when you talk about you know return on investment right we're hearing very good anecdotal stories around you know doctors and remote locations being able to you know through a mobile device plug into that social networking hub now and actually you know see procedures being done real time instead of you know in in the world of old you had to do all of that training person-to-person very expensive not scalable now they're able to share that through this networking hub at unprecedented rates which is really helping physicians you know save lives right so we're hearing anecdotal stories about how they're able to save lives by leveraging this networking hub Renee how would you characterize this in the strategy is it really to take the best of social networking concepts maybe improve upon them you know replicate them in certain ways and as I say prove upon certainly from a maybe a security standpoint and collaboration maybe integration with other technology products and do that in sort of a walled garden type of safe approach or is it more of a hybrid between sort of what I just described and sort of the public social networks in here again I think it's um so you know a great question i think it's you know based on the needs of the client really as well you know one of the things that we're seeing is definitely a need to have a secure social infrastructure right so working with clients to deliver that based on their needs whether it needs to be you know highly secure we're not the other thing that's interesting in your question is you know leveraging all the social data providing you know social analytics around that data to really help you know here again people make better decisions as well as you know to really inform the you know the value that they're delivering so you think about crowdsourcing for example right and a lot of the examples that we see out there with various vendors crowdsourcing product development so you know being able to improve upon upon their products by being able to look to leverage these social communities if you will okay so it's really sort of both and I guess it probably depends on the industry some highly regulated industry exactly one of the little bit more private yet others like consumer packaged goods maybe they're trying to do some some testing and that's that's an industry that you came out of exactly you cut your teeth the exact dr. gamble so so I I would imagine that there's a lot of momentum in that industry what if we could talk about that a little bit how that's changed since I mean when you know the 90s it really wasn't any kind of public social networks yes I talk about that industry specifically and they would get into some other one so consumers always very you know very interesting right there's so much on that you can do especially around social right if you look at you know procter gamble has always been you know a leader in using social networks and you know social communities to you know really tap into what people like about their products what makes a product good why people you know what performance people are getting out of the products and making sure that they also improve upon that every you know kind of turn of the crank you'll see a new release around tide or you know some new innovation so they're very good at you know leveraging kind of social networks and I think as social technologies have improved and advanced they've been able to leverage that the other thing that's interesting is just when I look at you know other consumers right other consumer products companies you know one that we we point to all the time has really haven't done something spectacular was oreo at the super bowl right and we look at their real time marketing that they did with Twitter and even now they're doing some very innovative things to drive engagement with clients and really kind of improve their you know kind of relationships with clients online a lot of things on Twitter that I think are very clever and really getting people almost to to innovate and come up with you know different desserts and that kind of thing and then take pictures of them actually leveraging Twitter and vine that are you know some very clever implementations that are seeing as well so we had a comment i just posted on Twitter what is the value of Twitter I asked on the queue and some comments from the crowd captain traditional media is about building brands if I'm selling you know I see nachos you name it you see the ad on TV you sure to buy it later you kind of offline and mobile and Twitter you can not do that online so the dynamics there how does use how do you see Twitter for instance changing the game for consumers and in the in this in the spirit of brand advertising or brand marketing yeah so one thing that you know I've raised you with Twitter and for business it's I think it's really a very net way of getting information right so in our you know attention sand deficit you know environment that we live in where you know attention is definitely a commodity right that everyone's trying to win I think Twitter is a way you know in a very number of characters and people tend to like it for you know those aspects because you can really hone in on the news channels that you're interested in the topics that you're interested in and get feedback real-time very succinctly you know with a very short blurb and a point to you know an article so I see it as like four companies a way to you know very quickly send out information so now keep messages links to demos I also think it's a great way like Oreo has done with the Super Bowl you know to really get things to go viral very quickly and so you know being able to leverage now you know actually I was just on a panel at it was a real time marketing event in New York and one of the things that is always a challenge with organizations though in using Twitter is the real time aspect of it right and so I think for Oreo I actually read an article for what they did the super bowl and for those that are not familiar with it you know they did a tweet when the lights went out at the Super Bowl this year or they actually said you know you can still dunk an Oreo in the dark right there was a perfectly time and but the thing that went into that like I read this article about and you know how did they pull it off and they actually had like all of their senior executives sitting around a table that you know made the decision that you know go we're going to you know post this tweet and so you think about large organizations like IBM and you know other you know vendors would I be able to get all of our senior leaders around a table to you know approve a tweet for the you know in the evening of the Super Bowl that would probably like a very career limiting think if that was to happen right so the flash mob essentially an exact negative trend and it was amazing but you know you think about that in large organizations would be pretty hard to pull off so there's always that real-time nature of Twitter that's a challenge for large organization we have big data Alex on Twitter Alex Phillips so so it was a great great friend of the cube and he says the new commodity is attention and one wants to win it my comment was to that which I agree with the new currency is I'm a scarce resource yeah cuz there's so much information we heard from dr. Tim Buchanan yes they talk about all the alarms going off in the hospital there's so many notifications going on you could be bombarded with no noise out there so that's the new week scarce resources time do you agree with that and do you agree the attention game is what people are trying to fight for how do businesses you know extract that state from the noise of you body how people break through that yeah i think you know social technologies are a key way to do that because there's so many new sources right there's so many things that you know you really are trying to achieve that cut through right to it to an audience so definitely towards a way to do that you know in the instance that i gave you with Boston's Children's Hospital for example so taking those social technologies and applying it to a business you know from a business standpoint I think one of the things that's great is your able to you know allow people to collaborate across the world you know by doing a social technology home like we did for Boston Children's Hospital where now people in very remote locations can upload information you know download information to share so I think you know when you think about that attention deficit and attention is a key commodity one thing that I think social kind of levels the playing field with on that is being able to allow people to cut through to the things that they really care about and want to hear about so like on Twitter you know another example you know people are always wondering how do I get more followers how to get more followers if you are tweeting things that are authentic that people are that are that's relevant it's amazing the followers will come the brings up that brings up a good point i want to chill down we also have brainy on twitter who was making crowd chatter making a comment about twitter is also a huge listening funnel Jake poor way shared that Twitter data is used to identify flu breakouts we saw that yesterday here in the keynote so I asked you two questions on that and that come up you mentioned people want to try to get more followers so there's really two concepts one is the tooling available right now still early I want you to talk about kind of a vision and how you guys see that evolving on the tooling and the platforms for customers what's going to be automated what in the future will and make you know social media monitoring obsolete is it's going to be plug and play and to the gamification aspect of it people are gaming Twitter and social networks to get more followers or click on a heads okay so you can use big data solved society problems or get more followers so but gamification sees it so there the tooling kind of where we're at in your mind and also the concept of gamification and user experience okay so all very good questions so you know from a platform perspective we have a social business platform there are solutions around smarter workforce which here is you know a lot of round talent management we have an acquisition that we deal with kenexa around talent management workforce management a lot of robust solutions there there's also a lot of social analytics solutions that we offer on a platform as well as you know we're trying to expand that so you'll see you know announcements coming from us in the future really around including smarter workforce or smarter commerce solutions as well as the overall umbrella underneath the umbrella of social business now from a gaming gamification standpoint yeah I think gay like engagement is key and really trying to figure out ways to increase you know engage meeting with employees or you know with with our customers and gamification I think is a key way to do that right so I was actually out meeting with a client on maybe a week and a half ago superior group and you're actually going to interview tomm their CEO later on today and one of the things that they talked about was using a gamification element and kind of like the training of their workforce and you know kind of making it fun you know to learn aspects of the company when people first come in which I thought was a very clever use of gamification right and then there's always the you know all the contests that you see you know across all the different vendors out there we've been looking at doing you know some gamification elements at some of the conference's going forward like anyone that's going to connect you so you know some gamification there's gamification over here in the corner as well so we have voting on crowd chats a little gamification tweaking people I mean it's so this is the gesture economy right i mean where people are clicking on things and and and making their sentiment known we there with hashtags or votes so i got to ask you about the real time aspect of it you mentioned crowdsourcing earlier this is a new phenomenon the notion of actually measuring crowds i mean marketing is kind of tried to do sampling and you know most of the research analyst we talked to have old-school meant that we sampled 250 people well now you can sable turn 50,000 people so you now have instrumentation which creates interesting crowd sourcing opportunities yeah definitely in real time so you gotta do both you can't talk about those two concepts yeah so the thing that's interesting with crowdsourcing there's a miles reading an article and and uh mmm there was a statement in the article that said you know nowadays you know who's the smartest person in the room you know yesterday it used to be you know they used to point to a person right now it's the wisdom of the crowd or fifth grader exactly so you know I think I just thought that was kind of an interesting way as they opened up the article but it was speaking to crowd sourcing and how really you know we look at like product development and you know a lot of the crowdsourcing models that are out there right now you know my boss part Scott Hebner has small you know children that are like in their teens and he talks about a crowdsourcing model where his son has already bought like an airplane you know that's going to be part of like a game and you know the game's not coming for like another year and a half but they've already crowd sourced millions of dollars by getting people to buy a component that'll be used as a part of the game so you know I think there's a lot of very interesting crowd sourcing models out there and I think we're just going to see more and more of it as well well the crowd has always been a very you know efficient I'm wearing Las Vegas handicapper right i mean young people always say Oh either the football game wow that Las Vegas really got it right you know what's the crowd who actually got it right because they bet you know they make a market and the crowds determining what that line should be essentially right and so you know they really make the market and so I have to ask you a question about the philosophy of IBM regarding social is it is it my understanding that essentially you want to make social every part of an application experience is that ultimately where you're headed exactly so you know you and you'll start seeing more of that as different offerings come forward you'll see more social technologies that are being brought forward so and a lot of our solutions were you know baking in same time for example where there's the real-time collaboration piece so we're baking into a lot of the solutions so definitely as you think of being a smarter Enterprise being a social enterprise leveraging all of the social collaboration tools is a must yeah so that talks to a complete change in the user experience ok do you think you think ultimately that the the social user experience is going to dominate application design I mean you know five ten years down the road yeah you know what I think there's no going back like you know we're at a point where and actually our latest c-suite study that was just released maybe two weeks ago it's called the customer activated enterprise and it really talks about how you know you have to listen to the wisdom of the crowd and your clients in order to you know make sure their clients are always delighted right with with the products that you're delivering to market and just really the importance of listening to you know to clients going forward and I think it's um you know we're seeing that in the marketplace we're seeing that and you know solutions that people are bringing forward that different vendors are bringing forward so I think you know all boats arise we're at a point where we're never going to go back I believe and you know client you know feedback and insights into your products it's here to stay well we got we got a smart crowd smarter crowd on crouch at night and one of the questions I'll ask before we end the segment is all comment Isabel says crowdsourcing scales where the like-minded people saying with you connecting with that that came up yesterday as well as in communities you want to put you know smart people with the audience within its customers or or the chem so great comment there but the question I want to ask you and the segment is does IBM plan on crowd sourcing solutions in the smarter cloud and is the social business portfolio going to be kind of part of that smarter cloud initiative well that's a great question crowdsourcing I think we'll always crowdsource innovation piece of it so making sure that we listen to clients and factor you know all of those key learnings into the next river of our products I'm assuming that you're not saying from a funding standpoint from browser using technology like what kind what we're doing here and with the cube is some people are engaged they want to engage and you're seeing people do tweet chats and as we mentioned earlier there is an active crowd out there yeah that is activated by other people yeah and i think you know now i think crowdsourcing is like the buzz word for it but we've been doing that for a long time you know listen to clients making sure you know that we factor that into the next row of offerings that are coming out and I think you know social technologies are enabling us to you know just further evolve you know how we've listened to customers over time I remember to reiterate we said yes there's a folks you know Jonah white I was running comms back in two thousand five times room when I first started I did the first podcast with a team over there yeah back in the day and I remember they were doing crowdsourcing internally IBM had huge blogging great internal collaboration going back with it seems like a decade ago it's almost a decade ago I mean so you're not you that's not new to you yeah so final comment i want to ask you but boy rap before we wrap here is what is the new resurgence within IBM around social business okay you've been doing it internally even doing with customers that's a long time ago was you know really before Facebook and Twitter even came about what's the new tweak on the model for you guys and how do you guys look at going forward to build on your expertise ok so I think it's you know it's a couple things one it's you know really kind of harnessing here again kind of the wisdom of the crowd here and as we you know go forward with our social business platform baking in a lot of the social collaboration tools that we have into you know other solutions across the corporation it's you know leveraging one of the big payoffs is around social data so making sure that we you know provide our clients with all the social analytics you know to leverage all the data that they've been collecting over years that they may have been sitting on and not using to better engage with clients to you know deliver exceptional client experience be able to you know innovate around the product so that they're delivering you know and then finally the other piece that you know no one ever thinks about is kind of the elephant in the room but you know based on you know we talked about you know regulatory requirements or what are their needs are but just making sure that you know it's in a secure kind of social infrastructure and being able to you know help our clients with that you know I think those are some of the key things that were focused on and you know making sure that as clients you know deliver value that they're able to you know really you know here again leverage the social data and they do create here live on the cube director of marketing for social business here at IBM great conversation great engagement online there on the on the Twitter comment and how you talked about these new channels these new opportunities it's exciting times and certainly this interest and for businesses out there it's fun to watch and then opportunities so this the cube right back with our next guest after this short break the queue