Friday, June 25, 2010

Auto Communicate with Social Media “Friends”? Uh-huh.

Flowtown can automate your social media contacts. As the YouTube video demonstrates, all you have to do is import your email contact data into Flowtown and then you can email everybody with whom you’re also connected on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Flickr. The process is automatic and en masse.

At $17/month plus 4.5 ¢ per import, it’s not cheap. In fact, for an entrepreneur who works on a selective basis with other businesses, that’s a deal breaker.

Others disagree. Email marketing software developer Mail Chimp lauds Flowtown in Ben Chestnut's blog. Could be that Chestnut is onto something. He's clearly no dummy, which is apparent from the excellent pricing of MailChimp. Hurray. If you’re managing up to 500 names, you can use MailChimp for free. Now that's a good one. I signed up.

In the process of blogging today, I realized I don't feel good about automating messages to people with whom I’ve “connected.” All my social media folks are real people. I totally get sending them an enewsletter or an evite or something that everybody recognizes as mass produced. But how can I pretend to be “social” en masse? In fact, I can see that backfiring, BIG time.

-- scrubbed by Marketing Brillo

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