Social networks, eyeballs, & small organizations

If you work at a relatively small company or nonprofit, you may have a built-in advantage over larger organizations in the social network space. When traditional marketers at large organizations look at social networks like MySpace and Facebook, their eyes light up. They see those networks in terms of audience. The term "eyeballs" sums up this attitude: we don't really want the whole person. We just want access to their eyeballs, en route to the purchase-making part of their brains.

So it's great to see, via The Social Customer Manifesto, this article in AdAge: Marketers Start to Use Social Networks for CRM Instead of Ads.

"For all the talk about how much money Facebook and MySpace are making off ads -- and whether or not those ads work -- there's a growing sense of concern that the promise of social networking as a marketing vehicle is getting lost. Some marketing execs are suggesting the space should be used less like a paid media vehicle and more like a customer-relationship-management tool."

In other words, social networks allow us to treat people like people. Y'know, build relationships and understand them and offer them something valuable to them. The reason so many small organizations are ahead in the social network space is that they've been conditioned to operate on the level of personal relationships. Doing that online is a natural extension of their modus operandi.

And if you haven't jumped into this space yet, be encouraged. It's not scary out there in Social NetworkLand. It's just like what you're doing when you're dealing with customers and donors and affiliates every day.