Social Media Marketing has often an ambiguous fascination for the neophyte. On one side, there is the happy face that promises free viral promotion, on the other a darker and scarier world, where success is an obscure secret for the few. Both faces are false. There are no mysteries to be unlocked, no gatekeepers with a superior knowledge, no secrets. Once you understand that, you’re already ready for success. And luckily a few new start-ups are emerging, which promise to take social media beyond the obscure buzzword fascination, and help make it a profitable channel.

One of them, recently reviewed by AllThingsD, is called Flowtown. What Flowtown does is as simple as potentially disruptive. All businesses with a digital presence collect emails from their prospects, partners and customers. Be it a signup form, a landing page, an event registration, a newsletter.  But in most cases these emails addresses have become no more than zombies, that every now and then (and always less) open a newsletter and maybe click-through it.

This is where Flowtown comes into play.  By entering in someone’s email address into its system, you can find out who a person is: name, age, gender, occupation, location and  the social media profiles that are attached to that email address: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Myspace, Flickr, Amazon and Stumbleupon. It makes the emails suddenly relevant, and allows them to be targeted and better performing.

To start using Flowtown, create your account and start importing your contacts. The free version will import 50 of them and entitle you to 250 emails/month. But with only $14.99, you can upload unlimited contacts and send up to 10,000 emails/month (pricier packages are available for larger businesses).

Once your contacts have been processed, you can access them through the Dashboard where each account is associated to its social media profiles. Suddenly you get to know who your customers are, what social media sites they use. At an individual level. Imagine using this tool in combination with “influence” trackers, to identify the influencers among your customers.

And there’s more. Through the Insights section, you can access an aggregate view of your contacts broken-down  by age, social network, gender and location. This part per se is of incredible value for (small) businesses who don’t collect but email addresses, and know little to nothing about their audience.  I’d recommend using Flowtown just for this customer intelligence service.

But the most exciting part of it all is still to come and it is the campaign manager. When you create a campaign on  Flowtown, or via MailChimp (now integrated to Flowtown), you can target your message by the social network of your contacts, for example send it only to users with a Facebook account. The advantages of using this segmentation feature are immense: say you’ve created a LinkedIn group, you could only invite users who are on LinkedIn, or if you are planning a chat on Twitter, that email would only go to users who have a Twitter account.  No wonder Flowtown already claims higher open and click-through rates for its clients.

The brilliant minds behind Flowtown are its young CEO and founder, Ethan Bloch, and CMO Dan Martell.  You can follow their blog http://flowtown.com/blog/ or their Tweets at @flowtown.