SocialFlow CEO, Frank Speiser, was pleased to join a panel of experts at the Digital Hollywood Spring Conference to discuss how social media is transforming marketing, the entertainment industry and the world.

Here are four key points that Frank made on last week’s panel

1. It’s all about timing. Timing is critically important in social. The key challenge becomes understanding timing and knowing how to break through all the noise.

2. Attention is a scarce resource. The flood of conversations on the social graph presents a huge challenge when you are struggling for attention. It’s difficult to predict what your audience will be interested in at any given time, and since there are so many conversations, you need to use technology to improve your chances of success.

3. Let people do what they’re best at. There is no question that humans are better at creating content and strategy than a computer. However, when it comes to analyzing large sets of data and identifying attention opportunities, algorithms can do a lot of heavy lifting -  giving people more time to do the things they do best.

4. Social media managers are underpaid.  Tasked with selecting content and publishing across multiple channels, social media managers have the same responsibilities as media planning professionals and executives in traditional advertising. However, while the challenges are the same, the salaries are not.

Further information on the panel:
Twitter, Facebook & Social Media – Transforming Marketing, Transforming the World
Moderator:
Dr. Natalie Petouhoff
Speakers:
Frank Speiser, CEO, SocialFlow
Matt Corey, CMO, Mass Relevance
Richard Maraschi, Global Lead Business Analytics, IBM Media & Entertainment Industry
Brian Dear, CEO & Co-founder, Nettle, Inc.
Holly Brown, Publisher and Video Blogger, TheBrownLounge.com
Lane Soelberg, CEO, Weplay
Ron Close, CMO, Nuage
Johnny Miller, Founder of Bamboo

We’ve teamed up with our friends at Engage 121 to bring you a series of blog posts, listing and explaining best practices for optimizing your social media publishing. Here’s the basic rundown…

1. Start with great content: Align an ideal mix with your goals that may incorporate evergreen content, external resources, personality, questions, tips/how-tos, video, images and audio.
2. Don’t over-publish: Find the sweet spot of enough messaging to satisfy your audience but not so much that they get tired of hearing from you.
3. Master a content cycle: Keep a constant flow between listening, planning, creating, publishing and evaluating. All are important in social, and all will enhance your results. 
4. Think outside your time zone: Publish in off hours and recycle occasionally to hit night owls and those on a different schedule. Remember, not all your fans and followers are online at the same time. It’s okay to recycle your message.
5. Engage & reward your audience: Interactions, contests quizzes and conversation are all great ways to do this. Use a content management and publishing applications like Engage121 to help you effectively and efficiently reach your community and prospects.
6. Make sure your website encourages social sharing: Do you have easy social tools on site? Are you using Open Graph tags correctly?
7. Meet your audience halfway: Listen to them, and use the keywords and hashtags your audience is already using.
8. Save time through science and technology: Use the SocialFlow Optimized Publisher™  to streamline your publishing to Facebook and Twitter. Optimizing means you don’t have to guess when the best time to deliver your message is or how often.

Tune in next Tuesday as we go in depth to cover how to approach and execute these best practices one-by-one.

“Brands and publishers face quite a challenge in capturing the attention of distracted consumers because it’s hard to pinpoint where to target a marketing message when people are constantly moving across different forms of media. But for New York-based SocialFlow, there’s opportunity in the chaos.”

-Ryan Kim, GigaOm

Recently SocialFlow has received a great deal of outstanding press coverage that we wanted to share with you. From our take on how Twitter is now evolving into a real-time engagement tool for political campaigns, to some exciting customer news with Pepsi and their #LiveForNow campaign, to a new SocialFlow platform for buying attention on the social graph.

For more buzz on SocialFlow, check out our recent press mentions:

The Guardian: The Science of Social Attention

NPR: Twitter: From Infancy to Political Powerhouse 

The Washington Post: Twitter Becomes a Real-Time Tool for Campaigns 

GigaOm: SocialFlow Builds an Attention Buying Platform

Pepsi Pulse Campaign:

USA Today: Social Media is Latest Front of Cola Wars

TechCrunch: Pepsi Puts a Pop Culture Cheat Sheet at the Heart of it’s New Campaign 

Mashable: Pepsi Unwraps ‘Pulse’ Digital Dashboard for Pop Culture

-Mike Snider, USA Today

Pepsi, a SocialFlow Optimized Publisher customer, today announced a new global campaign that integrates social media with pop culture, called Pepsi Pulse. Pepsi has enlisted our help to visualize real-time interest in topics and content on the Pepsi Pulse #NOW board. Using SocialFlow’s technology and data, Pepsi Pulse surfaces pop culture content that is currently trending among Facebook and Twitter’s trending terms and audience.

Additions to the campaign include celebrity challenges which urges celebrity’s fans to participate and respond, as a means to, “inspiring and getting consumers to live in the now,” say Shiv Singh, Global Head of Digital for PepsiCo Beverages.

Scoring Content for Attention and Engagement:

The Pepsi Pulse campaign features a fresh set of pop culture based articles that are scored by SocialFlow’s AttentionScore™ technology to rank interest and resonance of the articles against an audience on Twitter. This technology enables Pepsi to display articles, images, and videos on the board based on what the chosen audience has indicated as the hottest at that moment.

Check out USA Today’s article for more information about our part in the Pepsi Pulse campaign.

Use Twitter hashtags #LiveForNow and #Now to participate in Pepsi’s ‘Live for Now” campaign, now!

This year event goers can expect all the best, from new categories, such as ‘People’s Choice’ to the host Stephanie Stricklen from Portland’s local news station KGW, to industry leading judges, including Amber Naslund, Cindy King and Liz Strauss.

Recently we have been notified that SocialFlow has been chosen as a finalist for the 2012 SoMe Awards for our Social Weapon campaign.  We are honored for such a great opportunity and cannot wait until May 3, 2012 to hear the winners announced.

Previous Winners included: Bonfire Social Media, Dachis Group, {B}ecause Media, Karmic Marketing, Mambo Media, and Pop Art and Maxwell PR.

Our fingers are crossed. Wish us luck, you can follow the SoMe Awards on Twitter @SoMeAwards

We had a great turn out and received a ton of insight on case studies of brands who have been successful and in some cases unsuccessful at using real-time marketing tactics. In case you were unable to make it to the webinar, here are some key takeaways and insights…

1.Real-time marketing is an immediate reaction.
It’s the marketing of relevancy, achieved by listening and anticipating consumer needs.

2. Real-time marketing delivers what marketers want most and turbo charges other efforts.
Real-time marketing can be made apart of many communications programs that are intended to capture user attention, drive word of mouth, increase buying preference or boaster the likelihood of people buying or considering purchasing a product. Real-time is affective and when done correctly, makes consumers more receptive of brands messages.

3. There are two types of  always on marketing:

a.) Event Driven

• Public Events
• Brand Events
• Breaking News

b.) Customer Driven

Here are some case studies to further explain these two types of always on marketing.

Pepsi: Event Driven

The Event Driven approach focuses on real-time events such as public and brand events, as well as breaking news that requires real-time participation.

Shiv Singh, the head of Digital Marketing at Pepsi, says that what Pepsi is really competing against is not the competitive brands in the space but instead the 70, 000 status updates per a minute.

Pepsi has inserted their brands in relevant real time events. An example of this is when Diet Pepsi integrated their new “skinny can” into Fashion Week. Pepsi hired a journalist as their core press source during the event. When the journalist posted something about the event it was then amplified via social media. This lead to the the promotion of the theme “getting the skinny” during Fashion Week. This in turn called attention to the brand as well an an element to the brand, the skinny can, which was relevant to the event itself.

Walgreens: Customer Driven

The Customer Driven approach focuses on how real time marketing can help you to service your customers better and help you to manage customer service complaints.

Walgreens has become somewhat of an innovator by combining social, local, and mobile with real-time Foursquare check in coupons. Offers that they provide are always relevant to the time of year and seasonality.

Walgreens is looking at the ways people are shopping, where they are shopping, and how they function socially, to better understand their customers and funnel them into logical sales channels that they might not have been considered in before. Walgreens in turn delivers these instant coupons in the form of barcodes to make for a seamless form of interaction for consumers during the checkout process.

A big thanks again goes out to Rebecca Lieb for being an outstanding host and to those who attended.

Stay tuned for future SocialFlow events!

How does the music industry face the obstacle of connecting with fans? What works and what doesn’t? What is the next level for music and bands and how can social media help them get there?

The music industry is constantly looking for new ways to engage their fan base. Industry leaders are now showing more interest in social media metrics, insights, as well as upcoming platforms and thus resolving how music throughout social media is residing with their audience.

Many of these topics will be discussed with industry leaders, during Leadership Music Digital Summit in Nashville, TN, April 25, 2012. One of the many speakers will include SocialFlow’s COO and Co-founder Mike Perrone. Mike will be speaking during the 2:45pm panel on “Analytic Tools for Social Media”.

The panel is comprised of executives in social media analytic fields who will examine the importance of social media information, how to get it, and how to implement it into your marketing program in order to gain a new level of success. Speakers for the panel will also include:

• Moderator: Jeremy Holley – Warner Music Nashville
• Alex White – Next Big Sound
• Marcus Whitney – Moontoast
• Wayne St. Amand – Crimson Hexagon
• Mike Perrone – SocialFlow

Nashville 

You can also follow the conference on Twitter @lmdigitalsummit and use #lmds2012.

See you in!

In her recent report, Content: The New Marketing Equation, Altimeter Group’s Rebecca Lieb identifies the five stages organizations must progress through in order to fully take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the real-time social media landscape.

Identify where your organization sits with this self-assessment worksheet, and be sure to join us on Thursday, April 19 at 1PM Eastern for a FREE webinar by Rebecca on real-time marketing strategies. Here’s a preview:

Register for the webinar here.

That’s why we’re especially proud of our work with WordPress, including being a one of the first partners included in the WordPress VIP Featured Partner Program and our relatively recent WordPress plugin, a great tool for making sure your content is optimized for maximum impact the second you publish it.

Tomorrow night (Tues), we’ll be giving a demo of the plugin at the WordPress NYC Meetup during an evening on Responsive Design. Though the program is currently sold out, it’s definitely worth joining the waitlist, because things do open up last minute. It’s a great community, and we’re thrilled to be sponsors this year.

Read more about our plugin here.

Check out some tips on getting specific feeds from your WordPress blog into SocialFlow below:

How do you get people to pay attention to what you say in social?

You’ve got to post great content, content that your audience is interested in, and not just once in a while.

Matching the right piece of content to the right opportunity to connect with an audience is central to what we do here at SocialFlow. Using language analysis to understand audiences, topics, attention and engagement on the real-time social graph, the SocialFlow Optimized Publisher™ is able to pinpoint the precise moment any given piece of content is to yield clicks, likes, shares, Retweets and conversions.

Having a well-stocked queue of content can only enhance your chances of getting great results day in and day out. And so that’s why we’ve created a special “Get Content” resource which is filled with great ideas for excellent content to populate your Twitter and Facebook feeds with.

Check it out to find ideas on adding a Pinterest feeds, Youtube feeds and much more. We’ll be adding to a library of how-to videos, as well as providing some of our favorite content feeds in subjects like news, culture and sports.

Take a look at our new “Get Content” section>>

Don’t forget! Sign up for our FREE webinar on top real-time marketing strategies with the Altimeter Group’s Rebecca Lieb on Thursday 1 Eastern. Register now!