As you know, Flowtown is at the forefront of social marketing, and we pride ourselves on our ability to help so many small businesses (now over 26,000 of you) get ramped up and successful on social media.
Recently, we’ve been hard at work building the next generation of Flowtown and starting next week we’ll be rolling-out, testing and iterating on a slew of new features and applications. Some of you have already started helping us test a few of these- thank you!
While we are excited about making you an ever better social marketer with our upcoming features, we feel it is important to let you know that come January 1, 2011, we’ll no longer offer the service of turning an email address into social network user IDs (a.k.a. “social discovery”).
This is a difficult decision for us, but a necessary one given that providing this service was becoming a distraction from our core mission.
We want to assure you that even without the traditional social discovery service we will continue to deliver on the promise of providing deep social analysis and simple social marketing tools. Additionally I think you’ll be very happy when you see the kinds of results that our upcoming features deliver.
To all our customers, users and partners, thank you so much for supporting us thus far! If you like what we’ve done in the past, you’ll love what we’re doing in the future. A detailed Q&A on our upcoming changes are below. Feel free to give us a ring (1-800-733-2414) or send us an email (help(at)flowtown.com) if you have any additional questions.
- The Flowtown Team
Update: I’m doing Q&A over on Formspring, come ask me anything about our upcoming changes: http://www.formspring.me/ebloch
Q&A: What’s Changing On January 1, 2011
Q: What’s changing on January 1st?
A: The functionally that takes an email address and discovers a persons social network information and User ID (a.k.a. “Social Discovery”) will no longer be available in Flowtown.
Q: How does this affect the MailChimp, iContact, Constant Contact and Campaign Monitor integrations?
A: When processing a third-party import we will no longer push a a contact’s demographic and socialgraphic information back into your list hosted by your email service provider.
Q: How does this affect the BatchBook integration?
A: You will no longer be able to connect your BatchBook account to Flowtown and perform the one-click social network discovery.
Q: How does this affect the Wufoo, Formstack and Unbounce integrations?
A: We will no longer be able to notify you if someone with a particular Klout score submits your webform or landing page.
Q: How does this affect the SnapABug integration?
A: We will no longer be able to show you socialgraphic insights about your website visitor when you’re chatting with them.
Q: How does this affect the SalesForce integration?
A: We will no longer be able to notify you if someone with a particular Klout score becomes a lead. Additionally we won’t be able to populate demographic and socialgraphic fields within SalesForce.
Q: How does this affect your Discovery API?
A: When you query our discovery API your contact will still get imported into your Flowtown account, but you will no longer receive a response containing social networking information of that contact.
Update: I’m doing Q&A over on Formspring, come ask me anything about our upcoming changes: http://www.formspring.me/ebloch
(Photo credit: flickr/NotForSale)
