We recently released a cool little WordPress plugin called Social that pulls the conversations on Twitter and Facebook about your blog into each post and makes it easy to broadcast to social channels when you publish. We were scratching our own itch. We’ve pined for a better way to handle comments on our blog, so we teamed up with our friends at Crowd Favorite to make a tailor-made solution. It turns out that we’re not alone. Ten thousand people have tried Social on their blogs too. After months of usage, we discovered a few things we could do better. Today we’re releasing Social 2.0 with a whole bunch of improvements:

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We first joined twitter after hearing a lot of buzz about it at SXSW a few years ago. Being more of a “long form” writer, I didn’t quite understand how this “crazy fad” would fit into our marketing and branding. Long story short (see what I did there?), it eventually caught on for us — but not so much for marketing. It’s become more of a customer service tool. Like everything else on the web, apparently.

But it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing…

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We’re launching MailChimp v5.3 late tonight. The changes are big, but they won’t require any reboots of the server or anything that would affect scheduled email campaigns or reports. While we’re launching, you may not be able to log in to the service. We plan to begin around 10PM ET (see this in your timezone), and the upgrade process should only take a few hours (if all goes well). The changes might take some time to propagate to all user accounts, but by 9am ET tomorrow, all accounts should be upgraded.

Here’s what’s in v5.3…

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Email marketing can be a one way conversation sometimes. It doesn’t have to be that way.

For example, whenever I send our MailChimp newsletters, I usually get a couple dozen replies and I reply back to every single one of them. Sometimes, the conversation gets really interesting and it’s a shame that all our subscribers can’t join in.

So in our upcoming v5.3 upgrade, we’re adding Facebook Comments functionality to MailChimp campaigns. This way, you can keep the conversation going with your subscribers after you’ve hit the send button.

Here’s how it works…

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MailChimp Dashboard with subscriber avatars

When we launched Social Pro, it gave our customers fascinating insight into their subscriber lists. Suddenly, their databases were no longer full of “prospects” or “records.” We could drill down into member profiles to learn more about them and actually see what they look like (“gasp! these are humans!”).

Seeing those social avatars and gravatars is so profoundly fun, we decided to make that aspect of Social Pro a lot more front and center. In a few days, we’ll be launching MailChimp Faces. When Social Pro is activated, a random sample of your subscribers will be there to greet you whenever you log in to the MailChimp Dashboard. It’s a not-so-subtle reminder that these are real live people you’re sending to, and they deserve useful, relevant emails…
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