Our next speaker interview is with the genius behind the “Sheenius”, the CEO of the company Ad.ly, Arnie Gullov Singh. In addition to the infamous Charlie Sheen tweets, Ad.ly has ties with all three Kardashians, Paris Hilton, Pau Gasol, and more than a thousand high profile celebrities. Their platform connects the biggest brands (Sony, NBC, Toyota) with the most followed celebrities. In an age of the influencer Arnie Gullov-Singh offers the insight and innovation that can teach you tons about social media magic.

Be sure to follow the #pivotchat conversation, and tweet your questions. And stay tuned for next Tuesday with Hank Wasiak, owner of the Concept Farm.

#pivotchat: How do you reach the social consumer?

ARNIE: The first step is to understand that the consumer in social media is early on in the purchase cycle but they are in a mode in social media where they can be strongly influenced.

Consumers in social media are first and foremost following people. As a brand you really have to think about how to leverage the fact social consumers are following people and they’re less likely to be following you. Brands need to tap into that organic recommendation that’s happening. Sometimes these can actually happen 100% organically: you have a product that’s selling well on your website and people choose to tweet about it. But other times it’s easier to kick start that recommendation process with a group of influential people who can reach a large audience. This latter case is pretty much what Ad.ly does.

#pivotchat: Is social more about advertising, about marketing, about messaging, about influence, or about some combination of them?

ARNIE: I think social is really about curation. We’re all overwhelmed by the amount of content that we have to digest in social media. Take myself, I have about 1,000 connections in LinkedIn, following about 50 or 60 people on Twitter, and about 300 friends on Facebook. A couple of days ago I just looked at how many pieces of content were sent to me through these platforms in a single day and there were over 500. It struck me as impossible for me as a consumer to digest all of that information in a coherent way. When you look at social media, I think we’re really still in the infancy of content curation.

But in the meantime for a brand looking to get their arms around the curation issue, using somebody who has influence such as a celebrity or an athlete or a musician or anyone else with noted influence can cut through the noise.

#pivotchat: If we look beyond social media, what are ways to connect with social consumers that you think they can actually be brought to seek and appreciate?

ARNIE:If you can find the influential people that your consumers are following then that’s a good start. If you can then further segment those people by the audience they reach, for example I want to reach teens so show me the influencers who reach teens I think that’s a second step. And then I think the third step is what do I do once I’ve found those people. Do I get them to talk about my product? That’s nice, but ultimately I want them to come and check it out. I’d like them to spend time with content I’ve created.

But you just try and move them further and further down the funnel to the point where you have a relationship with them but it’s outside of social media where you can communicate with them one on one. For the last 20 years that method has been email and it’s super successful. If you look at best practices in social media it’s about using social media as a funnel to harvest people to get them to see your content and to compel them to build an email relationship with you. Then you have an opted in consumer who’s really excited about learning more about your company.

#pivotchat: What’s on the horizon that brands need to think about, that we’re not really seeing or hearing today, but that’s going to have impact over the next 12 to 24 months?

ARNIE:Well I think one of the questions marketers are going to be asking themselves is why build up a huge presence on each of the social media platforms, what’s the value in that? We have brands competing for ‘Likes’ on Facebook, we have brands competing for followers on twitter, for subscribers on youtube, and I think marketers are beginning to ask what’s really the value of having 25 million likes, going from zero to 25 million likes, how did that move my sales? And how did that move my other metrics around consumer satisfaction? And how do I measure that?

I think it’s going to become less about building an audience in social media and more about monetizing that audience. I think that’s a little bit scary for brands. They don’t wake up in the morning and think about being publishers, they don’t wake up in the morning thinking about I’ve got 25M followers I need to create some content for them. And so social media is forcing brands to think like publishers and maybe we in the social media industry should think about how do we actually help brands achieve the goal they had in the first place which is to reach a consumer and get them excited about a product.

#pivotchat: Any last thoughts?

ARNIE:The people who are on twitter that we follow as consumers are influential people, so as a brand you really need to think about working those influential people to start a conversation with your target consumer. This will get that target consumer to visit your website and to look at your product and take them to a point where they can sign up to your email list or you can build a relationship with them. That’s what Ad.ly does, we make it measurable. If you want to meet moms on twitter, we connect you with a network of celebrity moms who reach 6M moms on Twitter, we create messaging that drives moms to visit your website and engage with content.