Image via CrunchBase

I was just delving a little deeper into new and useful tools on the horizon for social media marketing when I stumbled upon Flowtown.  Luckily, I also stumbled upon an in depth review by a woman with impeccable credentials, including an MBA from Yale School of Management. Devon Smith, the author,  decided to dig deep to discover the value of Flowtown, which has also been discovered by such stalwarts as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, Fast Company and Inc.

As Devon tells us in Flowtown: Worth it? “Flowtown helps you discover & manage the social side of your email list….The steps are pretty simple: import your email list (whether via csv, manually, gmail, campaign monitor, iContact, or Mail Chimp) and Flowtown will tell you which of (at least) 50 different social media profiles (although I only found Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, StumbledUpon, Amazon, Pandora) is linked to each user. Or rather, to those particular email addresses. It’ll look like this (with emails erased to protect the innocent in this case):

As you can see, social media icons pop up next to each person. ”

Devon goes on to explain further:

“Who are These People?

Here’s a sample of each profile that’s created for an email entry. Now imagine this handsome young gentleman was on my list of small time donors and I’m trying to find out if he’s capable of giving more. Flowtown has handily provided me the tools to infer (new job + an MBA + shares connections with me online = big score!). Especially for younger donors, who may not yet own property or be written about in the Times (can you tell I previously lived as a prospect research stalker?), this is awesome information to be able to track down.”

This is a very full, robust, but to me and other social marketers, I would say fascinating study and overview of the nuts and bolts of  a tool that can provide an social media entry point  or multiple entry points to enable you to build a relationship witn your potential clients or prospects.  Devon walks you through the steps of how you can take your email or Facebook list, put it through the funnel of Flowtown and come out with hundreds of new Facebook and Twitter prospects for very little money and even less elbow grease.

Recommend you give both the article and Flowtown a try.  I am.