May 27, 2010 Written By: Jay Baer 192 Comments

The More Things Change, The More Things Change

Social media hates the status quo the way Kobe hates Shaq. The way Donovan McNabb hates T.O. The way Lindsey Lohan hates non-alcoholic beverages.

Just when you think you have some modicum of a handle on this industry, new developments come along and shake up your head like a snow globe.

The good news is that with the typical exception of Facebook, most of these changes are positive, well-communicated, and understandable.

In that spirit, here are some interesting updates from companies and tools I’ve written about previously here at Convince & Convert.

Swix Adds Facebook Tracking

Speaking of Facebook, our friends at Swix, the incredibly nifty Canadian social media tracking and reporting service, have managed to wade through the ever-shifting tides and add Facebook fan page metrics.

This was an item requested by approximately 125% of Swix’ customers, and the company was finally able to pull it off. Now, you can track number of “likes” and daily interactions on your Facebook page, in the same place you can track RSS feeds, Twitter followers, and all the other awesome data points Swix provides.

Flowtown Just Keeps on Getting Better

Flowtown, the uber-awesome social anthropology tool that allows you to enter customers’ email addresses, and find out where they’re active on the social Web, has rolled out an amazing new integration with Wufo0 – the easy-to-use online form builder.

If you use Wufoo to power your forms, you can hook up Flowtown to investigate, score, and sort your form submissions, and then alert you based on custom business rules. Let’s say you have a white paper for download on your site. If someone fills out the form to download the document, and they have a large following on Twitter (as determined by an instant Flowtown look-up), you can automatically send and email to your PR team to follow up with that individual. WOW. Although Flowtown leans toward the B2C mass market culturally, I see monster B2B possibilities here. (agencies, you should be experimenting with this too).

Here’s the video demo from Flowtown CEO Ethan Bloch (I love it that the CEO is doing his own product demos)

(disclosure: Flowtown sent me a free T-shirt because I hype them all the time)

BulbStorm and Tornados Crack 100,000

I wrote a bit ago about Phoenix-based Facebook app company Bulbstorm, and their new Idea Challenges app they rolled out for Tornados (a frozen taquito company).

Since then, Bulbstorm has run several more Idea Challenges promotions for Tornados, with a success level that’s pretty astounding. In six months:

More than 100,000 fans (I’m pretty damn sure that makes Tornados the most popular frozen taquito brand on Facebook)
More than 6,500 content submissions from fans
More than 250,000 votes
More than 4,250 posts to the Facebook wall from fans

Overall, users of the Idea Challenges app are spending an average of more than 5 minutes with it, and viewing more than 11 pages. Now that’s engagement that goes WAAAAY past just clicking the “like” button.

To celebrate their 100,000th Facebook fan, Tornados gave away 100,000 coupons for free boxes of taquitos. I’m bummed I missed that one. Maybe Tornados will send me some to review?

Great job Bulbstorm. I know you’ve got a bunch of exciting new products that I’m excited to try.

What have you seen in the social media world lately that’s excited you? (I’m psyched about the Kurrently search engine). And you? Comment away!

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