Interview with Ethan Bloch of Flowtown

Last week I had the opportunity to beta test a cool new product from Flowtown. By entering in someone’s email address into the Flowtown system you can find out who a person is: their name, age, gender, occupation, and location.

The cool feature is that Flowtown also lets you know the social media profiles that are attached to that email addres. So you canfind out whether a prospect/customer is on Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, etc and so can tailor a campaign specific to them.

Last week I spoke with Ethan Bloch, co-founder of Flowtown to learn more about their company and product and this is part of that conversation

Can you tell me a little more about the Company and why you developed this product?
We’re in the businesses of helping businesses do better business. Specifically Dan Martell (the other cofonder) and I are both passionate about helping small businesses move the needle and do more with less. We developed this product because the technology was ripe. So many people are now on social networks, you can get an accurate picture of who someone is and where they are based on information they’ve made available to the world at large. The difficulty lies in sifting through it all and finding the gems, and that’s where Flowtown excels.

What makes Flowtown.com different from its competitors?
Our core focus is on ’social’ – other marketing or CRM platforms expect you to manually collect information on your customers and contacts. Well when they’ve already share everything you need to know on the internet, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. We aggregate all of this into rich customer profiles which you can they use for email marketing, customer service, call centers, outreach etc…

After using your demo, this seems like a great tool for a hiring manager or HR person. Can you talk a little more about the benefits they would have using your site?
Sure. Starting with just an email address Flowtown can tell you the persons is: Name, Age, Gender, Occupation, Location and what Social Networks they’re on. You no longer have to Google someone and spend 45 minutes find all their social profiles. Within 60 second we do all this starting with just an email address.

Other than HR, who is your target audience and why should they use Flowtown.com?
Our target audience is small businesses. They should use Flowtown because we help them ‘care at scale’. Delivering world class service to every prospect and customer is how you’ll win in the decades to come and Flowtown is set on making this easier and more lucrative then ever.

Can you give me an example of how a company is using your site.
Feed Projects is using Flowtown to build stronger relationships with their community and donors nationwide. Just last week they we’re throwing a New York only event and wanted to send a personal invitation to those only in NY. Because Flowtown know’s who’s in NY they were able to do this and begin their email along the lines of ‘Being that you’re in New York…’