Lauren Cochrane has a great post today with ideas for lists organizations could create with Twitter’s new List function. If you haven’t heard about Lists yet, you’re not behind! They have only been rolled out to around half of the users so far. You can read more about Lists on the Twitter Blog here.

Lauren outlines 7 Lists that organizations may find useful, including:

Your organisation’s chapters and campaigns. Related international organisations and campaigns. Organisations that are somewhat related to your organisation. Celebrities, politicians and others with a high profile. Media. Volunteers. Retweeters and people who have contacted you.

As I added to Lauren’s post in the comments, I think there’s a lot of opportunity for organizations to leverage the List functionality for boosting visibility of their work and finding new supporters. Think about the way Facebook Fan pages work, the way we see when others add a Fan page and we may join as well, and so on. This kind of visibility work taps people’s desire to be cause-related in self identity.

Here’s my idea for an organizational visibility campaign using Lists:

Create a list for Supporters. (Make sure it’s a public list, and link to it from your website and elsewhere.) Encourage people who want to be included on that list to publicly @reply to you and say why they support you. Then, add them to the list.

So, they’ve already publicly promoted you to their whole followers list and as a member of the list can feel a bit more connected with the organization (to retweet messages in the future, help promote campaigns or other projects, etc.).

What do you think?

Would love to hear if you have other ideas about using Lists for organizations. Do you already have the Lists function enabled on your account – have you used it yet?