February 17, 2010
Posted by Ryan Graves
Where Google failed at the email based social network, Flowtown succeeds.
Flowtown is a new service that will let you submit the email address of any person and be presented with a list of all the social networks that individual is a part of. It is just as they put it on the site: it will let you “turn an email address into a social profile”.
That sounds familiar doesn’t it. It’s because Google just launched a service called Buzz that tries to do the same thing, turn an email social network into a twitter-friendfeed-flickr-facebook-ish type of social network. They’re going to need to do some serious pruning in order to get that product fun and usable. But in the mean time, there’s Flowtown’s social emails for social marketing. And these guys mean business.
Do know the amount of money that businesses pay for an individuals occupation, location, or even just name and age? A lot. Flowtown can get that information with a click of a button, and the collection process is only the start for them. The analytics that can be executed on the data that Flowtown will collect are really interesting. For example, this screen shot shows my most influential friends on Twitter:
Another thing I like about Flowtown is that they charge real money for the service, many web businesses don’t, and they’re able to do that because they provide real value. Dan Martell & Ethan Block are solid entrepreneurs that know what the hell they’re doing. I spoke with Ethan on ActionTalk way back and his passion is obvious & very contagious.
You can test it out and upload a few hundred contacts but in order get the masses you have to pay-to-play. As it should be. This may not be for Joe Twitter User but for anyone in the marketing space this tool will become a must have.
Lastly, if you haven’t read there blog, there are some hilarious social media and blogging comparisons; you’re missing some good stuff…
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5 Comments
February 18, 2010
I see the value here, but this isn't a social network, is it? This is hyper-targeted email campaigns filtered by social network, which gets them to connect to you on other platforms.
Have you talked to these guys? do you know if they're planning on doing data analysis and aggregation for demographics? That would be extremely useful.
February 20, 2010
I have talked to these guys and I think you're right, they're not a
social network. But they are doing a great job of extracting social
value from email alone…has google done that?
February 22, 2010
No, they haven't. But it's apples and oranges. I'm interested to see where
Flowtown goes with this. Keep us posted.
February 22, 2010
Steffan,
No, we are not a social network or plan on doing an “identity” play (some have asked us this).
Our vision is to help companies understand who their customer are and provide tools to help them engagement with more relevance.
What were building is the social graph of your customers, from there we can extract A LOT of information ;-) [that's what I spend most of my day trying to test and figure out].
If you have any questions / ideas – let me know.
Appreciate your comment.
Dan
Co-Founder
@danmartell
February 23, 2010
Hi Steffan, just wanted to pop in and let you know that you can check out high-level demographics of any imported list via the insights panel – > http://twitpic.com/14v7jq
Ryan – thank you for the <3 !!
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