Constant Contact Buy Adds Social Media Tools

Email marketing company Constant Contact, Inc. has announced the acquisition of social media management firm NutshellMail. Terms were not disclosed.

Privately held NutshellMail, based in Menlo Park, California, helps small businesses and non-profits to monitor and engage with social networks from their email inbox, collecting and organizing messages and activity from the likes of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace into a customisable email 'snapshot' and allowing users to post their own updates to these sites. This capacity will be added to Constant Contact's existing email marketing, event marketing, and online survey tools.

Constant Contact has more than 350,000 customers. 'We made email marketing simple for small businesses and nonprofits. Now we're going to make social media marketing simple for them' comments CEO Gail Goodman.

Mark Schmulen, co-founder of NutshellMail, says his firm was founded 'to help solve the problem of social network overload' and adds: 'As part of the Constant Contact family, we're going to help some of the busiest people on the planet, small business owners, turn what might seem like social media chaos into a smart marketing tool for growing their business.'

Constant Contact has also announced it will open a Bay Area office later in the year, to be led by NutshellMail co-founders Schmulen and David Lyman, as General Manager of Social Media and Director of Software Development, respectively. Existing offices are in Waltham, MA, Loveland, CO and Delray, FL.

Constant Contact was founded in 1995 and went public in 2007. Its competitor ExactTarget acquired social media CRM specialist CoTweet two months ago.

Web sites: www.nutshellmail.com and www.constantcontact.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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