Today, I am thrilled to announce that Flowtown has been acquired by Demandforce.

If Dan and I continued to build Flowtown independently, Demandforce would be exactly the kind of organization we’d envision building.

Demandforce’s customers are dentists, auto-garages, salons, spas, etc. And with 24 quarters of over 80% year-over-year quarterly growth they, now reaching 80 million consumers, are a leader in marketing automation for the small business.

Now, as part of Demandforce, we will be able to move our vision and products forward 10x faster and work at a scale we could have only dreamed of before.

What does this mean for our existing customers?

All our technology and products are being integrated into the Demandforce platform, with some new things yet to be unveiled.

As for each product:

• Flowtown (Gift Marketing), which helps businesses with social gifting campaigns, will be integrated into the Demandforce D3 product. This will supercharge the D3 referral management system. We will also continue to support customers of the current version for the next 2 months.
• Timely.is, now with over 26,000 professionals, will remain exactly the same and will become Free for absolutely everyone. In addition, Timely has become the social publishing tool inside the Demandforce D3 product.
• The Flowtown social marketing blog will continue to crank out some of the best social marketing content found on the web.

Many thanks to all

To our 50,000+ customers and users, thank you for your trust and for being a part of the Flowtown story. To our small team of 5, you guys are incredible and I’m excited to continue building amazing things with you at Demandforce, and to our awesome group of angel investors, thank you for believing in us and making it all possible.

Demandforce is changing the world of marketing for the small business. What they’ve built and continue to build is incredible.

We are humbled and excited to now be a part of the Demandforce story.

Ethan Bloch
CEO and Co-Founder, Flowtown

This has been the most requested feature since Timely launched last November.

From within your Timely account, if you don’t have one get one here, just click ‘Add Account’ and you’ll now see an option to ‘Connect to Facebook’. Click that bad boy and you’re off to the races.

The timing algorithm works just as it did for Twitter. We pull in the performance of your previous status updates and crunch’em to figure out your best time slots.

The rest is easy peasy. Queue Facebook posts from within Timely and the Bookmarket and get analytics on Click, Likes, Comments per post, all within a single view on the performance page.

Enjoy!

A lot of questions arose that day and we tried to answer them as best we could. However due to contractual obligations and the sensitivity of the situation we couldn’t disclose 100%.

I’d like to go back now and tell the full story.

Life Was Good And Growing

We launched Flowtown V2 (“social discovery”) in November 2009. By January 2010 we were ramen profitable and in February we raised a $750k seed round from a tremendous group of angel investors.

By October 2010 we had signed-up over 26,000 businesses, closed 13 big integration deals and had been growing revenue 30% month-over-month for almost 12 months straight.

Then things got turbulent.

Getting Shutdown

The main reason we turned off the social discovery service is because we were shutdown.

In late October 2010 the Wall Street Journal published an article slamming Facebook for leaking user data. But Facebook wasn’t leaking user data. Certain application developers on the Facebook platform were selling this kind of data to third-party brokers who would turn around and sell it to other data providers and advertising networks.

This article and the publicity that followed caused Facebook and other big social networks to take a strong stance against companies indexing and selling user data. Here’s one particular blog post from Facebook.

The thing is we didn’t start Flowtown to sell data. We started Flowtown to make social simple, to show businesses how you can really get and keep customers through social media.

So we decided that it’d be best to start working on new products that pursue our mission, instead of staying to fight a losing battle.

Doing What’s Right

Once we made the decision to shutdown the service, we decided it was extremely important to treat all of our customers how we’d want to be treated.

We emailed and called all of our customers and gave them a 2 month notice that the social discovery service would shut down on January 1, 2011 and offered alternative solutions. Additionally we told them we’d continue to support all Flowtown email functionality for the foreseeable future.

We called all of our integration and API partners and broke the news. We thanked them, big time, for being partners, for investing in the relationships.

Back To The Drawing Board

On an early Monday morning in November, we brought the team into the conference room and told them “everything we’ve done for for the past 12 months stops today; here’s what we’re thinking for the future…”

I thought we would lose people. Everyone stayed.

We went to the white board, drafted several product ideas and started working on them that day.

We wound up building 3 products. It was after we saw which ones were getting initial traction and holding our attention that we started to focus on a prototype code named Ambassador.

Gift Marketing

Fast forward to today and we’re starting to invite people to the new version of Flowtown.

I’d like to reiterate that the new Flowtown has nothing to do with our old product – turning email addresses into social networking information.

The new Flowtown, or just Flowtown, makes it really easy for businesses to give gifts to fans and followers and customers. We’ve coined this Gift Marketing also known as Social Sampling.

If you’re a social marketer or community manager interested in building brand loyalty and attracting new customers, you do not want to miss this. So if you haven’t already, be sure to signup for an invitation to Flowtown here: http://www.flowtown.com

Finally I’d like to end with a BIG THANK YOU to our awesome community, supporters and customers who’ve been so good to us through these challenging times. If it wasn’t for you, none of this would be worth doing.

Ethan Bloch
CEO and Co-Founder
ethan(at)flowtown.com

(Photo credit: flickr/G Crouch)

Ever look at your Performance page, see a few Retweets only to wonder who RTed you?

You then have to goto Twitter see your @replies to see if it’s a Classic RT, nothing there? Then you goto Retweets, click the drop down, and select ‘Your Tweets Retweeted’.

So many steps! So much wasted Time.

Starting today, when you’re on your Performance page in Timely, just click the stats of any of your Tweets and an activity stream will appear (like so). Revealing all reactions to a Tweet including: Classic and Native RTs as well as @Replies.

But that’s not all! We also make it really easy for you to reply inline, never having to leave the page. #win

And finally in this release, we’ve rebuilt Timely’s Performance service from the ground up. Meaning, your stats will be much more accurate and calculate much fast. So to everyone who’s seen donuts for stats even though you know you got clicks and RTs that all ends today!

Related posts:

• Timely Updates Features for 15k Users
• Be More Timely with Your Twitter Updates
• Social Interaction On Time
• Are You Reading This Tweet? If yes, [Thanks Timely!]
• 3 Ways To Use Timely If You Are Running For Congress, Hosting an Event or Selling a Product
• A Timely Update

Timely helps make sure that when you Tweet, you actually have an audience.

And today we’re thrilled to launch Timely + unlimited accounts + unlimited collaborators to everyone!

Anyone can now:

- Add Unlimited Twitter Accounts: there is no limit to how many Twitter accounts you can add to Timely and/or collaborate on.

- Invite Unlimited Collaborators: invite as many friends and colleagues as you want to work on the same twitter account. This is perfect for when you have multiple people that manage the same Twitter account, now you can all work together!

To mark the occasion we’ve given Timely an official home at http://Timely.is.

A big thanks to all our users and everyone who helped us test Timely over the past month. We couldn’t have made it this far, this fast without you!

And with that I invite you to join the Timely family:
http://timely.is/#/signup

* It’s Not Just You: 71 Percent of Tweets Are Ignored

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)

When it comes to Twitter knowing exactly where you should spend this 10 minutes is the difference between a thriving vs. dormant Twitter account.

The acquisition of Who Should I Follow? will help us better answer this question for our customers. We won’t be necessarily be recommending people you should follow (as the name would suggest), Twitter is already really good at that! But more like people who appear to be an ideal customer and/or ideal person to engage with.

Over the coming months we’ll be taking social marketing to a whole new level, so stay tuned and sign up for Who Should I Follow updates here.

Finally I’d liket to add that Mike Champion and Gary Elliott have been awesome to work with through the transition and hand-off of WSIF. We’re proud to be the place where they can see their baby grow up!

What does that mean? Social Notifications.

1. Someone comments on a blog post
2. This person gets automatically imported into Flowtown
3. You get notified if their an influencer, have a particular occupation or is in a certain location
4. Instantly send a follow-up email or follow them on Twitter
5. Wicked cool

Download the Plug-in here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/flowtown-webhook/

Big thanks to Chuck Longanecker and Dave Shepard from Digital Telepathy for building this.

This means that any Constant Contact user can instantly dump a ton of demographic and socialgraphic information into any Constant Contact subscriber list.

Segments like Age, Gender, Location, Social Network and influence can be added to any subscriber list in seconds.

How’s it work?

1. Choose the Constant Contact import option in Flowtown

2. And you’re done

It’s really that easy!

We’re happy to extend 500 free imports to any Constant Contact user who upgrades to a Flowtown monthly subscription. Just email help (at) flowtown.com after you’ve upgraded your account and we’ll apply the free imports.

We’re really excited to see SnapABug’s Flowtown integration go live today.

Imagine This

1. A visitor hits your website
2. You start a SnapABug chat with them
3. You instantly see the visitors name, occupation and influence score (Klout)
4. That visitor gets imported into your Flowtown account as a lead
5. Flowtown follows them on Twitter from your Twitter account
6. Your 30 day follow-up Flowtown campaign starts
7. Whoa.

Now you have the ability to tailor your communication to each visitor, get more relevant and take that relationship from 0 -> 60 that much faster. Powerful stuff.

If anyone upgrades their Flowtown account to a monthly plan in order to use the SnapABug integration we’ll give them 500 free imports. To claim your imports just email ethan.bloch (at) flowtown.com and let me know!

K I S S I N G… first comes visitors, then comes leads, then comes customers who you’ll love to please.