Some Flowtown customers are achieving a staggering 300% or higher open and click thru rates vs. industry averages.
What follows is a slightly edited version of our chat, the full version of which you can find by doing a twitter search for #mediachat or by clicking here.
Our first #mediachat twitterview (an interview using Twitter as the communications medium) will take place on Tuesday, June 22nd at 2pm EDT, with @hughmacken(that would be me;) “twitterviewing” Flowtown
‘s
co-founder and CEO, Ethan Bloch( @ebloch), an ambitious, pioneering and incredibly bright young entrepreneur
out of Baltimore, and currently living in San Francisco. Ethan is passionate about marketing, finance, social technology and bold new ventures. And speaking of new ventures, he and Flowtown co-founder Dan Martell
have been extremely supportive of my latest venture, the #mediachat twitterview series. Thanks guys!!!
One of the original marketers to use Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Ethan founded his first business, BlocHardware.com. at the age of 13. He was the host of WSYK, an internet
TV show which was syndicated to Revision3. In January of 2009, he and Dan Martell( @danmartell) co-founded Flowtown in order to help companies craft targeted marketing, engagement and retention campaigns that use rich customer intelligence mined from all over the social web.
The topic of our twitterview, which you can follow at #mediachat, will be the evolution of social media and how businesses can build customer loyalty through the use of social channels – online and off – using a synergistic combination of high touch and high tech. To his credit, Ethan insisted that we not spend too much time talking about Flowtown but instead focus more on the social space in general and the unbelievably exciting things that are just starting to take shape online.
That said, I would like to give my readers a primer in advance of our chat. In a nutshell, Flowtown turns email addresses into social connections allowing you to heighten engagement with customers, prospects and online influencers. With a few clicks of the mouse, the Flowtown platform allows you to funnel tons of demographic and socialgraphic information (like age group, gender, location, and social network memberships) into your email subscriber list. They currently have integrations in place with email marketing services Mail Chimp
and Campaign Monitor
as well as a Forms integration with WuFoo. In the last week or so, they’ve also added integrations with BatchBook, icontact
and Plancast.
The beauty of the platform is that all you need is an email address to automatically generate a full social and geographic profile of all of your contacts.
In case you’re wondering, Flowtown has taken off like a rocket ship in recent months, and currently boasts 10,000 customers. You can be sure I’ll be asking Ethan how he managed to grow so quickly and what he has planned for the future.
There’s so much confusion these days about social media strategy largely because foundational principles of presence management, listening and engagement get lost in the noise of continual hype about the latest and greatest technologies that are 1000% guaranteed to generate instant ROI.
Earlier this year, at a presentation for folks in broadcast media
who were looking for some clarity mixed with a healthy dose of common sense on social media, Tom Webster, VP of Strategy and Marketing for Edison Research, (co-presenting at the time with Triton Digital’s Jim Kerr) provided a simple, usable framework to help media professionals formulate an engagement strategy for social media.
I’m not a broadcast media professional, nor was I in attendance at the conference (though I wish I was!) but I read about the framework shortly after the conference on Tom’s blog, commented and made a mental note that this was definitely worth sharing with those of you who are kind enough to partipate in the dialogue that occurs here on the VMR blog. The salient point, in my view, was the following:
“You need to have a strategy for your own web properties, and a strategy for web properties you don’t control or own.”
Sounds straightforward enough but try explaining that to those who are not very familiar with social media and you might just get them to scratch their heads and look at you funny but not much more. If that’s their response, this matrix
will help you to begin your social strategy conversations on a simple, straightforward note.
Without going into too much additional detail, I’m going to strongly suggest that you hop on over to Tom’s blog
and read the entirety of his post explaining the simple but very useful matrix (which Tom has graciously given me permission to copy here) below.
It’s an oldie but a goodie. I call it the Webster Engagement Matrix and a classic worth referencing time and again.
What about you? Have you come across useful matrices like Tom’s? Do you think this will help you explain social media strategy to those with whom you work or to your clients? I’d love to know so please do share the love!
TechCrunch’sMichael Arrington, one the world’s leading bloggers, reported today
that social media monitoring technology provider ScoutLabs
is expected to be acquired by social CRM
provider Lithium Technologies
for between $20 million and $25 million. The deal is expected to be announced shortly, according to Arrington.
Lithium is a leading provider of enterprise social CRM solutions. Lithium’s platform provides enterprise-class security, analytics, APIs, and multi-language support according to the company’s website.
ScoutLabs is a leading technology provider for social media monitoring and reputation management. According to Arrington:
VMR Communications is a ScoutLabs agency partner and will update this post as we learn more.
Earlier today, I received a comment on social media monitoring that I was not expecting, from “Barry”:
Rather than reply within that post, I think Barry’s question is a good one and merits a response more lengthy than a simple comment. Here, then, is my response:
First, thanks for your question, Barry. I really appreciate your comment.
But questions remain as to why it makes sense (which I believe it does, by the way) to hire humans to analyze sentiment as opposed to relying solely on computer algorithms
which have been shown to be less reliable than humans.
One insider asking some very good questions – and providing intriguing answers too – is Zoe Siskos, who, in a comment on Jason’s blog, referenced a recent study
she co-authored with five of her colleagues from Syncapse Corporation
‘s Measurement Science Team. I’m not going to go into all the details here (it was a brilliantly conceived, well-designed and highly scientific study) but here are the conclusions I came to (slightly different than what the authors came to):
1. Ambiguity in the instructions given from CMOs to human analysts need to be crystal clear to prevent tonality scores that are competely inaccurate.
2. Unambiguous instructions will be much easier to formulate if your enterprise has clear business goals that tie directly into what Jeremiah Owyang
of Altimeter Group
insightfully referred in a special report
as the 5Ms and the 18 Social Uses Cases.
CMOs and Service Providers: What do you think: Are human analysts worth hiring for sentiment analytics or not? How is your company dealing what sentiment analytics? Are you using only auto sentiment analysis? Only human? A combination? Not at all?
UPDATE: The Blog Talk Radio portion of this chat has been cancelled. The twitter chat will still take place at #monitoring. Our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.
Next week, on Thursday, June 22, at 11AM (New York) / 3pm (GMT) I’ll be chatting with the folks at Synthesio
about social media
monitoring. You are welcome to join us as we explore the following topics:
1. What are the differences between free and paid monitoring tools?
2. When is it time to make the jump free to paid tools?
3. What factors should companies consider when choosing a monitoring platform? Follow twitter hashtag#monitoring using www.tweetchat.com during this lively discussion!
International callers: If you’d like to join the live on air conversation, youcando so free if you have a skype account byclicking here. Look for the “Use Skype to Talk” button which will appear on the day the program airs.
Callers within the US: To call in and ask a question or make a comment on air, simply dial (347) 884-8912 during the program.
Will Google offer services that upend the social media analytics market?
Earlier this year, renowned enterprise social technology experts and Altimeter Group
Partners Jeremiah Owyang
and Charline Li, held a webinar entitled “Developing A Social Strategy”
that had over 495 participants. Regrettably, I was not present for the live webinar but I watched a recording which the Altimeter Group was nice enough to post to their website.
One observation in particular made by Mr Owyang has gotten me thinking about the effect of the slowly evolving semantic web
on analytics platforms like Radian6 and ScoutLabs.
Here’s what Owyang had to say about Radian6, Scoutlabs, and the many other analytics platforms (the words after “produce” were hard for me to decipher):
I do not know what was meant by this comment but it has prompted me to consider the following:
1. Will search engines like google directly compete with the services offered by these very sophisticated analytics platforms which now include customizable, multi-user interfaces, such as the recently announced Radian6 Enagagement Conssole?
2. If so, what role, if any, will the semantic web play in prompting the search engines to contend more aggressively in this space?
Comment away! I would really appreciate any insights the community would like to share.
On April 9th at 1pm EDT I‘llbe chatting it up with venture capitalistT.A. McCannand technology innovatorBuzz Bruggeman(on Blog Talk Radio) about a useful and increasingly popular tool for networking and online business intelligence gathering: Gist.com.
T.A. McCann
Long story short: This is one interview you will absolutely positively not want to miss. Both TA and Buzz are extremely sharp, well-rounded and experienced businessmen. So whether you decide to use the Gist service (which is currently in beta and free) or not, I suspect the insights we will collectively gain about how to improve our networking and relationship building skills will be well worth the 30 minutes of your time and mine.
T.A.’s past experience includes Vulcan Capital
and Polaris Venture Partners
where he was an entrepreneur-in-residence. Prior to Polaris, he held senior positions at Microsoft, leading product planning for the Exchange Server Group and developing the Service Delivery Platforms group focused on mobile applications. He currently serves on the board of Art with Heart
and is an advisor to Wishpot, Asset Archives and Notary One. Did I mention, T.A. is a founder of Jump2Go
– providing innovative solutions for the radio industry, HelpShare – a web Q&A company and Soft Labour, a web design
and development consultancy. Somehow in the midst of accomplishing so much T.A. squeezed in sailing around the world and winning the oldest active trophy
in international sport -the America’s Cup.
I’ve listened to T.A. a few times online and the one thing that really impresses me is his determination, confidence and focus. But along the way, T.A. has, evidently, not forgotten about the importance of building and cultivating relationships with people by knowing what is going on and matters most in their
world.
Buzz Bruggeman
One of those people is technologist Buzz Bruggeman, who is a big enough fan of Gist to share his personal experiences using the application with us next Friday. Buzz is one of the co-founders of ActiveWords, e.g. http://www.activewords.com/. He graduated with honors from Coe College
and from Duke University Law School. He runs the outward facing aspects of ActiveWords, and as such is responsible for evangelizing ActiveWords to everyone he meets. Buzz has spoken at many tech industry events, has been on the advisory board of the Demo Conference, e.g. www.demo.com, won a Demo god award, and has been featured in books by Dan Gillmor
and Robert Scoble. Buzz has been a long time participant in the blogging community, and routinely speaks on using new media tools to market and evangelize software.
One more important note: If you’d like to share your experience using Gist here or you have questions you’d like me to ask T.A. or Buzz, be sure to jott me a comment here. Rest assured, I will be listening!
If you’re curious as to how Gist works, this video provides a good overview:
In a blog post
published the next day concerning the research paper, Vittal pointed out that “Far too often, [marketers] focus purely on the software costs associated with such tools.”
Vittal makes an interesting point and one that marketers will ignore at their peril: When budgeting for listening, don’t forget the internal costs of human resource allocation.
How is your company or organization dealing with the human element of listening?
