I stumbled across a fascinating new website called Flowtown. It has a simple but powerful premise: Import a list of email addresses, and Flowtown then matches them to the major social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In and a number of others), and returns a consolidated profile that turns an email address into a name, a location, a company name and job title, and indication if the individual has Twitter, Facebook or Linked-In accounts, even a photo. Flowtown also has an intriguing indicator to flag those who are particularly influential by analyzing how many people are reading their online posts.

Many of us have amassed email lists that we know little if anything about. Flowtown brings these lists to life, quickly and easily, giving you a fascinating picture of your audience. You can also integrate Flowtown into your own applications using a Flowtown API.

The primary function of Flowtown is to provide automated engagement with those on your list -- you can reach out to them with varying messages at varying frequencies to stay in touch and keep them interested. What particularly caught my eye was that these profiles could be downloaded as CSV files.

 

I signed up for a free trial of Flowtown, and uploaded a sample of business email addresses to see what would happen. I got about a 60% match rate (not bad at all), and the matches appeared to be of high accuracy. The free trial didn't provide the download option, so I am not exactly sure what the CSV export file looks like, but there's a lot of useful information that can be extracted from Flowtown, no matter how you use it. It's worth a look.

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