How to find your people on the social web – fast!

Hi Danny, I think Gist is more like a CRM – for an individual to manage their contacts across social networks. I’ll confess, I signed up to Gist and basically still have no idea what to do with it.

I see Flowtown as completely different in terms of potential use for associations and nonprofits – more like a one-off import to get a snapshot of where their stakeholders are. Obviously there’s more functionality, messaging and reporting that could be used over time, but all the groups we work with already have ways of communicating with their members. I think this is more useful to help them choose what public social media outposts they should focus their efforts on, particularly because EVERYONE has concerns about the resource issue for managing am organizational social media presence. I also think it might prove interesting in terms of what orgs THINK they know about where their people are and what the actual reality might be.

Here’s an example from our SocialFish point of view (though we aren’t an association of course!) – we have a pretty large email list of people subscribed to our e-newsletter, which we write as short and sweet summaries and tips. If we plugged it into FlowTown, and it showed that the bulk of those people were on Facebook, it might mean to us that it was worth providing slightly different content to our Facebook page than what we have right now, in order to cater to that group.

I really hope lots of groups try Flowtown and let us know what results they get!