Article+Analysis



** Flowtown ** Flowtown is a social media marketing data mining tool that helps business owners reach and engage their potential customers better. Flowtown started in July 2009 with Ethan Bloch, Dan Martell, David John, Andrew Ng and Assaf Arkin. With the use of their customers emails, Flowtown can retrieve the social networks their customers belong to and market directly to those customers. This could be through general campaigns or if they are trying to get a particular customer based on prior information, they can use the email to send a specific facebook message, twitter message, linkedin message etc. Flowtown supports several social media platforms like; Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Linkedin, Stumbleupon, Flickr. They also have the influencers category and these are the people that are most likely to spread information about your business e.g in Retweets on twitter. Flowtown also provides a report of the percentage of your database in each social network. For example; 54% of your database might be on facebook, 16% stumbleupon 2% flickr, 3% linkedin, 25% twitter. Flowtown is able to provide such reports so that it helps you target the most important crowd. Flowtown acts like an SRM system (social relationship management). Flowtown can be integrated with your company’s CRM system e.g salesforce, highrise etc to better target new customers and existing ones. Once your customers are engaged, you can keep in touch easily with them through thank you emails specifically for contacts that you have been engaged with. The email campaigns allow for HTML customization so the customers do not feel like they are being sent massive emails; flowtown emails are usually personalized with your customers names. Flowtown is a great data mining tool that every company interested in marketing or research about the social media their customers are using should employ.

Bibliography Nate Riggs : Social Business Strategies. [] [|www.flowtown.com] []