It was just about a year ago that I was thrilled by my discovery of a brilliant startup helping businesses profile their customers through social network data. While we’re all excited about the promise of social marketing and media, understanding who is paying attention, what works, and who cares is still a challenge. For all the brilliant sophistication of Google Analytics, innovations through scores such as Klout, and demographic data available from an email address, and in spite of the compelling wisdom locked up in Facebook and twitter, it’s still difficult to really understand your customers. Last year, my discovery was of a startup with which you may too have been familiar but of which this post is not about. That company, Flowtown, made the first compelling headway toward helping us understand and manage our customers based on social networks.
From there, the industry was thrilled to learn that MailChimp was adding similar insight, called Social Pro, to their email marketing platform. In the span of a few months, we had gone from very little data about our audience’s social profiles, to a goldmine of insight about who, what, when, how, etc. The marketing world rejoiced.
Then it all came tumbling down.
The company behind the scenes, RapLeaf, caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal (and others). The work being done at RapLeaf was game changing for the marketing world and showered with praise and scrutiny. That scrutiny, and the privacy scandal that rocked Facebook, led to significant changes in the RapLeaf platform (you can read about it here), changes that left marketers and agencies scrambling for alternative data sources as the projects underway at Flowtown and MailChimp were shelved.
From the Ashes Rose A Better Solution
Coming out of beta today is a service that “unlocks” that goldmine of data in both social profiles and email subscriber lists. And what they can tell you about the world of social networking is exceptional.
Provide the email addresses and social network IDs for your customers and Fliptop profiles name, age, gender, company, occupation, location and all the key social networks that person is on. From there they track new signups, clicks, and engagement across all the subscription channels; providing a single dashboard of social engagement with your business. More (yes more), Fliptop tracks every post, tweet and email campaign, measuring for you reach, engagement and conversion like never before possible.
Out of beta and awesome, if you have any interest in your social marketing beyond what you can learn from Google Analytics and Hoot Suite, check it out; you can try it free. Plans are tailored for users of every type, from small business to agency. Let me know what you think.
