A while back, the folks from Flowtown contacted me about how they integrated with MailChimp via our API. To be honest, I wasn’t immediately sure how I felt about Flowtown. If you’ve never heard of them, it’s a service that lets you import an email list, then they cross-reference that data with public social profiles. I definitely understand how that can help a salesperson with a handful of local clients he wants to follow (and that scenario might even be where they got their name and logo). But what about my email marketing list of 25,000? Okay, so I can find out who among my subscribers is on Twitter and Facebook. It might even tell me who’s influential. What now? It’s not like I’m going to bug those subscribers with “more targeted emails” just because they’re “social.” I got one of those emails recently, and I can think of no better way to lose my hard earned subscribers. So I didn’t really think about this Flowtown thing much. Great for 1-to-1 sales, not so much for 1-to-many marketing.

But over time, we added engagement scoring, geotargeting, and the ability to download segments in MailChimp.

The combination of all these new tools changed my outlook completely…

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MailChimp customers, if you enjoyed the story of Jon Hicks and our Freddie logo, you’ll love the story and technical details behind Mozilla’s dino logo. There’s even a creative brief posted there, for all you Brand New snobs. And in case you missed it, our own DesignLab submitted a little creative love to the Mozilla Community store, with this retro Thunderbird t-shirt.

BTW, a lot of people ask me, “who’d you hire to do your logo?” I used to say, “Jon Hicks, but he’s not freelancing anymore.” But it looks like he’s back on the market.

So, you’ve decided to do some email marketing. That’s great! Email is quickly becoming one of the most effective tools for generating interest and sales for your business. It provides a wonderful opportunity for your company to speak to an audience who is actually listening (they’ve opted-in to receive emails from you, essentially saying, please send me information!).

But, how do you create email communications that succeed?

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Whoah, I just noticed a new feature in SurveyMonkey. Thought I’d share it with everyone else out there, in case you didn’t see their announcement.

A little while ago, we posted a survey link to Facebook, Twitter, and The Jungle. I was looking at the data today, and noticed a new “create chart” link:

I actually jumped in my seat a little from excitement. I mean, normally I’d have to download the data to Excel (and I never do pick the correct export options) then generate my own charts. But now, they’ve gone and made it a single-click link. Woo-hoo!

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We’ve been using twitter for quite some time now (you can find us @mailchimp). At first it was supposed to be a way for me to post announcements to our customers about server maintenance. Then it morphed into a powerful tool to stay connected with our users and learn more about them (we follow our followers, print their profiles & hang them on our walls to remember our audience).

Twitter gets messy. Fast.

But as more and more customers started using twitter to talk to us, we had to get more staff involved. We even hired Amanda, our full-time CTO (Chief Twitter Officer). Obviously, giving multiple employees access to one master twitter account can get hairy (like the day 3 of us replied to one question with the same answer).

“How business does twitter”

So we looked into CoTweet (still in private beta). So far, it’s been really handy. If you run a business and use twitter a lot, you should definitely consider CoTweet. There are other reviews of CoTweet out there, but they’re from social media sites, who imho incorrectly describe CoTweet as “an inbox for tweets.” Who the heck wants that?  There are other reviews from big companies managing their brand, like this post from Microsoft. Nice post, but not very thorough.

What if you’re a small business using twitter to connect with customers? Is CoTweet right for you? Here’s our review…

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