TechCrunch reported today on Causes, the Facebook/MySpace application that allows you and your friends to promote your favorite charitable causes on your profile page and to donate money to them. Causes released some information about its financial performance during its first year in operation. The good news: Over 12 million users registered and installed the Causes app on their profile pages. The bad news: All those people coughed up only about $2.5 million in total for around 20,000 charities, or $0.20 per registered user and $125 per charity, on average.
Nevertheless, $2.5 million is nothing to sneeze at, considering how little it cost to reach those 12 million users, and the potential they represent for a significantly greater volume of donations over time.
What Causes has done is to expose the underlying dynamics that will lead to ultimate success in social network marketing—a dynamic that drives all marketing in fact, but is hidden from view in all the hand-wringing about how poorly social networks produce results compared to search engines.
With their left brains, marketers will readily offer that search-engine click-through represents the tail end of a process that begins with diffuse awareness of a need or desire and continues through cycles of discussion, exploration, and consideration. Search engine marketing offers little or no insight into what leads up to the click-through, and so we’re basically left in the dark about the fully burdened cost of generating response, and how to most effectively facilitate it.
Causes users install the application because they see it in their friends’ profiles or feeds. Clearly, based on the numbers, they are not installing it to make a donation, but instead because having the application itself fulfills a diffuse need...to feel like good person. That is the starting point for social, values-based marketing.
Over time, Causes will be able to develop a fully articulated model of the giving process, exposing to itself and its partners a rich and nuanced understanding of what transforms the charitable impulse into action. They will be able to implement and refine that model with their large and growing user base, driving efficiencies that are beyond the reach of more traditional marketers, whether for-profit or non-profit, on the web or off. And the understanding they gain will assist them to attain scale and momentum more effectively than any search-driven enterprise.
Even in this very early stage, Causes represents the potential for a huge breakthrough in marketing methodology, which will leave us all wondering (in a few years) how we ever could have thought that social networks wouldn’t work.
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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."
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media file links for may 29, 2008:
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