Suffering From Social Network Overload? Constant Contact, NutshellMail Might Help

LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are among the most popular social media marketing tools for organizations. Add WordPress for blogging and lightweight website content management. Then supplement all of that with Constant Contact email newsletters and event marketing for a powerful, yet relatively inexpensive social media suite. The problem is that it can get complicated keeping up with all of those accounts. Constant Contact, with that in mind, just acquired NutshellMail to help small organizations coordinate their growing social media networks from their email inbox.

“We made email marketing simple for small businesses and nonprofits. Now we’re going to make social media marketing simple for them,” said Gail Goodman, CEO of Constant Contact. NutshellMail is a free service that makes it easy to monitor, manage and interact with friends, fans and customers through social media. It works by collecting and organizing the latest messages and activity from social networks–including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace– into an interactive email snapshot that is delivered directly to your email inbox. Users can customize the content they want to track, add search terms, and choose how frequently they want to receive email updates.

So, for example, an organization might have its blog or website running on WordPress. That same organization could use LinkedIn and Facebook to have conversations with its constituents. It could use Twitter to broadcast information of interest, including its own blog posts, to its followers, and to have conversations with them. A few times a month, it could summarize recent blog posts, any interesting conversations with constituents, and other news of interest, then send that out in an email through Constant Contact. Links to the LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook accounts could be posted on the blog, along with an invitation to subscribe to the email newsletter. The Twitter feeds and the blog posts could flow into the LinkedIn account. And, now, thanks to NutshellMail, an interactive email snapshot can be delivered to that organization’s inbox, once a week, once a day, or several times a day.

“We started NutshellMail to help solve the problem of social network overload. 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. It’s like a DVR for your social networking activity,” said Mark Schmulen, co-founder of NutshellMail.

That’s the theory. I just signed up for a Nutshell account, so I’m interested to see how this will work in practice. To read more about Constant Contact’s acquisition of NutshellMail, you can read this announcement on the Constant Contact website. [Update: As of June 1st, 2010 I’m very happy with my Nutshell account. Several times a day, NutshellMail provides me with an easy-to-read summary of several social media accounts. Having this allows me to process relatively large amounts of information in less time. So far, so good.]