GigaOM » SocialFlow

SocialFlow debuts Crescendo, an attention buying platform

Ryan Kim — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:00:45 +0000

SocialFlow, which got on the radar of marketers by helping them time their social messages, is now rolling out the second of its 1-2 punch, a paid media tool called Crescendo that is launching Thursday for Facebook. The tool is designed to help brands buy ads at the cheapest price by monitoring the changing conversations and actions of fans.

Crescendo works alongside SocialFlow’s existing optimized publisher tool now called Cadence, which helps marketers send out tweets and updates at the time that their fans are most receptive to them. With Crescendo, marketers have a cost-effective way to target consumers who are not following the brand.

The secret sauce behind Crescendo and Cadence is the way New York City-based SocialFlow understands what people are talking about and where their attention is likely to turn to over time. That allows the company to stay ahead of followers and keep sending messages that are likely to be complementary to their discussion. Now, with Crescendo, SocialFlow can use its knowledge to buy up the right keywords for Facebook ads that reflect what their most engaged fans are talking about and sharing at the moment. So instead of buying against larger buckets of expensive keywords, SocialFlow can pick off terms that are being discussed in real time and then buy them for less money.

Using SocialFlow’s dashboard, customers can target customers by geography and demographics and set how much they want to spend. And then they let Crescendo buy the right keywords automatically. This is important because as some popular conversation topics emerge, which can drive up the cost of certain words, Crescendo can move on to the next set of keywords as it anticipates the flow of attention. The dashboard shows users how much their spending is worth in terms of cost per clicks, cost per likes and other metrics.

Frank Speiser, SocialFlow’s co-founder and CEO, told me marketers can’t be expected to track every conversation and respond in real time. But with Crescendo, SocialFlow helps companies insert themselves into conversations in a helpful way by being timely and listening to what people are saying.

“If you want to be relevant and not intrusive, you have to listen to where the conversation is and you have to fit in with the conversation and where it’s flowing,” Speiser said. “It has to be adding to the experience. No one likes a commercial, but if it’s contextually relevant, it feels like I’m helping at the right time and place.”

Crescendo is designed to work with Cadence and highlights how paid and earned media can work together. By building up a large following of fans, a brand can tap into the conversations of active users to learn how to target similar consumers on the open market. And ultimately, if a paid ad works, it can turn a consumer into a fan, allowing a marketer to get more out of their earned media.

LIPMAN advertising, which has been testing Crescendo with one of its brand customers, said it was able to double conversion rates and produce more qualified “likes” using Crescendo.

“Partnering with SocialFlow has enabled us to significantly amplify brand messages dynamically to the right audiences, at the right time in their journey,” says Jennifer Pasiakos, VP of digital at LIPMAN. ”Together we are inspiring more users to join the conversation, share their own experiences and ultimately create a more engaged, deeply loyal community.”

SocialFlow’s approach to social media advertising makes a lot of sense especially in today’s attention economy. These days, everything is competition for a user’s attention, whether it’s media, advertising, games or just life. More and more, it comes down to listening to what a user is talking about and reacting quickly.

Image courtesy of Flickr user xthylacine

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SocialFlow builds an attention buying platform

Ryan Kim — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:00:27 +0000

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.

The company is helping marketers time their messages for the fullest effect, in hopes of attracting attention at just the right moment. In February, it launched its optimized publisher platform, giving companies a way to time their social messages — tweets and Facebook updates — to ensure they are there when their followers are most receptive to a particular message. And now, SocialFlow is poised to release a paid media platform that will allow clients to push out timed ads that will address consumers who are not already followers, the company told GigaOM.

SocialFlow has been testing the product with a client and expects to launch it by July. The paid media service will allow advertisers to target certain interests using Facebook ads, which will be timed and optimized to hit select groups when their attention is ripe for a message.

“With optimized publisher, you get the attention you’ve established through your connections with your customers and then with the paid media platform, you can then find people like your customers and buy that attention when you want to yield results,” Frank Speiser, CEO and founder of SocialFlow told me in an interview.

Both products build on SocialFlow’s core work in understanding attention and how it shifts over time. SocialFlow gets access to the Twitter firehose, allowing it to see the contextual habits of millions of users every day. It combines its historical database and a complex algorithm to understand how an online conversation can morph over time and where people will likely move to after starting on one topic. It also scores a company’s content based on their expected resonance with a target audience. By anticipating shifts in a person’s attention, SocialFlow can insert Tweets and updates that are relevant to their evolving attention. And with paid ads, they can also buy against interests that are relatively cheap because they’re not in high demand.

The optimized publisher service now has 2,700 paying accounts on the platform after launching in February, including companies like the Economist and National Geographic. Customers who pay $99 a month also get back valuable data on the conversion rate of each message and how users engage with it.

SocialFlow’s approach contrasts with many existing social media and advertising efforts, where companies schedule tweets to go out at fixed times or push out manual updates to try to engage users. Traditional advertisers also similarly try to target people with ads but don’t take into account when they’re most likely in the mood to hear a message. In this social media saturated world, attention has become an even more valuable commodity, Speiser said.

It’s not about how much you spend but being smart about keeping people engaged, he said. “Nothing succeeds without attention. That’s the new battleground,” Speiser said.

Even for popular media properties like American Idol, advertising on the show becomes even more difficult because consumers often turn to their smartphones and tablets when commercials appear, he said. That’s the challenge for advertisers now. As a Pepsi client recently told him: “My competition isn’t Coke, it’s 30 million status updates.”

SocialFlow is seeing real results from its work. During the beta of its optimized publisher platform, SocialFlow was able to increase clicks per tweet between 40 percent and 60 percent. And with the paid media service, SocialFlow claims it outperforms traditional ads on Facebook. Speiser said the ultimate goal of the paid media product is to help convert consumers into followers, who will eventually do something on behalf of that brand.

“The paid media platform will grow pretty fast. It’s really a strategic investment in the lifetime value of a brand to convert those people to followers so they’re paying attention when you reach out to them with earned media,” Speiser said.

I think SocialFlow has got the right idea. The way the world works now, everything is competition in the attention economy and it’s all about getting people to interact and engage. Brands and publishers need ways to stay in front of consumers and social media, while it’s one channel that can siphon away attention, it can also be a place to re-engage with people and hold on to that precious attention.

Image courtesy of Flickr user miranda.granche

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Twitter Goes Mobile on the Weekend

Om Malik — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 23:49:43 +0000

SocialFlow, a New York-based social media marketing startup backed by Betaworks recently studied one of its clients with more than 500,000 Twitter followers and came up with some unique lessons. The company looked at clicks on the client account’s Bit.ly links for two months to see trends in the way people use Twitter and the content they find on it.

One of the biggest lessons: Twitter usage jumps pretty sharply on mobile devices versus desktops on the weekend.

According to SocialFlow’s analysis, on Saturdays nearly 41 percent of all clicks came from mobile devices. In addition, folks who were checking tweets from mobiles are also “also reading long-form content that appears (in link form) in their Twitter timelines,” SocialFlow notes on Betaworks’ blog.

* Mobile usage is really important – at the peak (at 8 p.m. on Saturdays), an average of 41% of all clicks came from mobile devices.
* Weekends generally have a higher percentage than weekdays. (It’s good to know you’re not just shifting from following Twitter on your office PC to following Twitter on your home PC. You’re using Twitter on your phone!)
* Friday night looks more like a weekend, and Sunday night looks more like a weeknight. (Your mother will be happy to know you’re staying home on Sunday nights.)
* People are less likely to click from their mobile devices in the middle of the day and wee hours of the morning than during morning rush hour or at night

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SocialFlow Wants to Make Sense of the Real-time Web

Om Malik — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 07:00:45 +0000

What makes Twitter so special is also what makes it so infuriating. The tweets (or conversations) move so fast that you miss them more often than not. What’s maddening is that there isn’t enough context to the information that’s flowing through the service, or at least not enough to engage with the right content at the right time. These are some of the challenges I have written about in the past.

They’re also precisely the problems that Frank Speiser, co-founder of New York-based startup SocialFlow, is targeting (his co-founder, Michael Perrone has moved on to a new gig, but remains active with SocialFlow). The five-month-old, two-person company, which is backed by New York investment group Betaworks, has developed an analysis tool that is essentially targeted at publishers (or creators) of content and large brands.

The tool looks at your Twitter stream, determines what (or how many) of your followers are online, what they’re talking about and what keywords they’re using during their conversations. Once the system determines that you (the publisher) has something interesting to offer, it tweets out a link that’s contextual to the conversation. The right link at the right time, theoretically speaking, translates to more effective responses and higher clickthroughs. SocialFlow in many ways is a startup built for the new, data-rich, real-time web with the concept of serendipity as its driving principle.

Speiser and Perrone came up with the idea when they failed to find listeners for their podcast on economics and philosophy. This gave them an idea: What if people knew of their podcast just when they were talking about some of the topics their podcast touched upon? That would give them an incentive to download the podcast. Well, that idea didn’t quite pan out. But the problem on Twitter is essentially the same: publishers and big brands need to find ways to embed themselves in relevant conversations, much like relevant ads showing up next to search results.

Speiser argued that so far most of the focus has been on one-to-one matching — finely tuned emails and banner ads, for example. That model doesn’t work on the social web, because the social web is more similar to broadcast media. Instead of flooding the proverbial airwaves with ads, SocialFlow simply matches conversations with brands. For instance, @DimensionFilms has been using the tool to encourage discussion about movies by contributing movie release dates and casting calls.

Like SocialFlow, several other start-ups such as Klout, Tweetup and Twitter itself are trying to figure out ways to mine the real-time web feeds and develop advertising and marketing methodologies that go beyond the concept of contextual advertising. So far, I am impressed with SocialFlow’s approach and have even started beta-testing the product. I will share the results with you in a few weeks.

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