Flowtown, the social marketing platform, has reported the acquisition of technology from Who Should I Follow?, a technology that recommends new people to follow others based on the people in their current Twitter network. This is considered to be a purposive step in finding new customers on the social web thus helping businesses find return on investment in social marketing.

From Flowtown’s blog, we see that the company will loop the recommendation service into its core product, saying,

“The acquisition of Who Should I Follow? will help us better answer this question for our customers. We won’t be necessarily be recommending people you should follow (as the name would suggest), Twitter is already really good at that! But more like people who appear to be an ideal customer and/or ideal person to engage with.”

The product is aimed at small businesses to find potential customers in an easy manner on Twitter and the social web, by transforming their email contacts into engaged customers, also having the possibility to filter the suggestions by popularity and location. With Flowtown, marketers can import an email list to instantly see who their customers are and where they spend time on the social web. Who Should I Follow? technology takes this social engagement a step further by also recommending potential customers on Twitter.

The acquisition is considered to strengthen the leading position of Flowtown in the social marketing domain. “We instantly recognized Who Should I Follow? as the perfect complement to Flowtown,” said Ethan Bloch, co-founder of Flowtown. “The potential is incredibly exciting, as we’re able to deliver on the two cornerstones of marketing: building stronger, more personal relationships with the customers you have…and finding high quality prospective leads.”

The acquisition also presents an opportunity to look at data portability for business marketing, as social media’s most personal of content is the subject of volleying egos in the Valley.  Facebook and Google have been spatting over email contacts and their import/exportability intensely for a few days now.  A necessary discussion, however, as both companies are currently in the throes of public scrutiny over their handling of private data.