Flowtown: Worth it?

I’m not in the habit of doing product reviews. In fact, I have a terrible habit of recommending new sites on Twitter after reading an article about them, but without having actually used them myself. But I was intrigued enough by both Flowtown and RowFeeder that I decided to pony-up and take one for the team. Here are my thoughts on Flowtown. RowFeeder is coming soon.

Flowtown helps you discover & manage the social side of your email list. In a recent NYTN workshop, I recommended Flowtown as proof for the “but my audience doesn’t use Facebook” myth. The steps are pretty simple: import your email list (whether via csv, manually, gmail, campaign monitor, iContact, or Mail Chimp) and Flowtown will tell you which of (at least) 50 different social media profiles (although I only found Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, StumbledUpon, Amazon, Pandora) is linked to each user. Or rather, to those particular email addresses. It’ll look like this (with emails erased to protect the innocent in this case):

As you can see, social media icons pop up next to each person. A few months ago, I used a nifty trick to download all of my friends contact information from Facebook. I decided to use that list of ~800 people’s email addresses as a test. You get the first 50 imported emails free, and then it’s $0.05 each (or you can pay a monthly fee). Here’s the first 50:

So now I think that 1/2 of my email list comes from NYC, 30% are on Facebook, and MySpace is twice as active as Twitter. Uh oh, something seems fishy.

Garbage in, Garbage out

See, the problem is, charts are only as good as the data you give them. I know for a fact that 100% of these people are using Facebook, but only 30% have tied this one particular email address to their Facebook account (which is ironic in itself since I got their email addresses from Facebook). Think for a moment: how many email addresses do you have? Me — I’ve got 5 that I use on a regular basis, in addition to any work email domains. And more often than not, I give theatres (or any business for that matter) my “spam” email account. That hotmail account I created almost 15 years ago, that I don’t actually use, except when I have to fill out some registration form in order to buy something online. So I’m probably on your email list, but I’m not going to show up in Flowtown as a social media user, since I don’t use that particular email to log in to any social media profiles. As a side note, I recently heard of a company deleting from their email list anyone who hadn’t opened one of their emails in the past 3 months. This is brilliant. Keep your email list tidy.

Of course, this issue isn’t Flowtown’s fault, it’s just emblematic of the frustration of using email lists. And something you’ll have to keep in mind. Same goes for location, age, and gender. These charts are only as good as the info that people have provided to their social networks as publicly available.

Is 50 Good Enough?

Sadly, it looks like the first 50 imports isn’t even a good measure of your entire email list (surprising, given the law of large numbers). Below you can compare my entire list of 772 to the first 50 (above). The percentage of my list on various social media profiles moves all over the place, as does location. Gender and age don’t change much, but that’s only because I’ve got a concentrated range of possibilities. It’s too late at night (and frankly you probably don’t care) for me to run actual statistical significance tests, but suffice it to say that your first 50 (free!) imports will not be a representative sample of your entire list.

Who are These People?
Here’s a sample of each profile that’s created for an email entry. Now imagine this handsome young gentleman was on my list of small time donors and I’m trying to find out if he’s capable of giving more. Flowtown has handily provided me the tools to infer (new job + an MBA + shares connections with me online = big score!). Especially for younger donors, who may not yet own property or be written about in the Times (can you tell I previously lived as a prospect research stalker?), this is awesome information to be able to track down.

The Good News

There are still some cool things to point out. You can click on any of the categories (ie Facebook, 20s, Austin) to see the same data displayed for just that segment. You can also manually create segments, and see the same kind of charts. You can sort any of these segments, or the entire list, by their location, which social media profiles they use, even their Klout score.

Besides directly importing email addresses, you can also import your Twitter followers. As you might expect, this data is much more representative of reality. 100% of my Twitter followers were on both Facebook and Twitter, and the other social media profiles at least tripled their percentages. As a side note, this is one of the big advantages of using oAuth to log in to websites, rather than requiring someone to register anew with their “email” and password.

Flowtown also automatically creates a list of Top Influencers on Twitter for you, based I’m assuming on their Klout score. Creating a private Twitter list of these folks, and keeping a careful eye on what they do could be useful.

Some other nifty features:

• Embed a web form on your site that links directly to Flowtown (of course, that means you have to choose between Flowtown and some other contact management system)
• Integrate Wufoo forms with Flowtown. I swear I had never heard of Wufoo forms until I poked around the Flowtown site, but now I’ve seen the name appear a few other places. Either I’m way behind on this one, or they’re brand new. Regardless, this has the cool side benefit of allowing you to set instant notifications if certain keywords are mentioned in the form.
• A marketing blog that has legitimately good advice. This is a pretty brilliant move on their part.
• A whole slew of tutorial videos showing you how to use the service. Huh. They were there last night, now I can’t find the link.

The Bad News
There’s a problem with generalized influence metrics. Let’s pretend I was a consultant. Of the 26 people that Flowtown has decided are my Top Influencers on Twitter, less than 1/4 would feasibly make any possible difference to my “business.” The rest are friends or acquaintances who may be influential in their own sphere but have zero to do with theatre or social media. Again, more of a Klout issue than a Flowtown issue, but important to keep in mind.

I also couldn’t figure out a way to “clean up” my lists on Flowtown. For example, my personal email addresses show up as 4 different entries, but there’s no way to merge those into 1 profile. I wish that Flowtown could recognize duplicate entries before I’ve paid my $0.05/email. In other words, Flowtown isn’t quite yet robust enough to be your full time email management system.

Still to Come
Let’s not forget that Flowtown is intended to send emails to your lists of highly engaged social media users (now that you know who they are). For examples, you could send an email to everyone who appears to have a Facebook profile, to ask them to “like” your fan page. In theory, these types of emails should have pretty high click through rates. But, I have to admit, I haven’t used this feature. I’m just me, I have no need for email management, and I can assure you my 800 Facebook friends would be kind of pissed if I sent them a test email just to see what would happen. Which means I also couldn’t really check out their conversion tracking graphs, but on the tour they look pretty cool…

What I’d like to see in Flowtown’s future:

• Ability to create (private and public) Twitter lists from group contacts
• Ability to merge/de-dupe contacts
• Occupations chart. It’s listed on the tour, nowhere to be found in the real thing.
• Better integration with Facebook Pages (I’d like to be able to send an email to everyone who has a Facebook profile, but isn’t yet a fan). I’d also like to know who is an influencer on Facebook (via their friend count).
• Better differentiation between social media profiles’ uses. Sure a user might have a registered account on 5 of these sites, but which one do they actually use?

So…worth it?
An appropriate use of ROI! Let’s say you have a list of 10,000 email addresses that you’re regularly sending emails to, and you want to get this whole process over & done with in 1 month. That’ll be $467 up front. Now let’s assume you’ve got the same social media profile percentages as my list has. That means you’ve just found:

• 3,400 Facebook profiles
• 900 Twitter profiles
• 2,400 LinkedIn profiles
• A bunch of other social media profiles that you might not really care about (that’s okay, since this list will be different for every company)

Let’s be conservative and say you’re already connected to 1/4 of those Facebook profiles, 1/10 of those Twitter profiles, and you’ve never thought to check your company’s LinkedIn page. So that leaves us with:

• 2,550 new potential Facebook fans
• 810 new potential Twitter fans
• 2,400 new potential employees, artists, consultants, donors, whoever else you think you can find on LinkedIn

So let’s send an email to those Facebook & Twitter lists and generously assume that 20% of them click through to actually become your fan/follower. Now we’ve got:

• 510 Facebook fans
• 162 Twitter followers

That just made a substantial dent in your fan base huh? And don’t forget, these are high quality contacts. These people have already told you (by signing up for your email list) that they’re interested in the work that they do. It’s likely, so are their friends. Now, you’ve got to sell somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 tickets to this new list of fans, followers, or their online acquaintances ($467 / $30 average ticket price). That’s about 1% of your newly found fans buying a pair of tickets each. Seems feasible, no?

And, you’ve got the list of names of the people you’ve contacted; you know who clicked through to become your new fan/follower; your ticketing software tracks names. Give it a few months and see if these new fans/followers are new or renewed ticket buyers. You can now WITH ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY determine if this purchase was worth the 1 month investment. Not fearless enough to try this with your entire list? Try 1,000. That’s $50. So, sell 2 tickets and you’ve paid for the experiment. That doesn’t even take into account the possibility you’ve just found new donors, learned more about your current donor list, found new employees, or can now reach the friends of any of these new folks through their Facebook newsfeeds/Twitter streams.

That my friends, is real ROI.

Still not convinced?

• The folks at MailChimp like ‘em
• They recently got seedfunding from some outstanding investors

But I’m not here to convince you. I don’t think Flowtown will be your social media savior. It does seem to be a useful service. It’s pretty simple & cheap to experiment with. It’s a new way to get information that you want. They’re still a young start up, and seem to be making improvements daily to the service. Why not?