Let’s Get Social! Learning Social Media from Business Sector

It is generally known that nonprofit sector and business sector are quite two different stories. However, after reading Networked Nonprofits, which talked a lot about developing nonprofit organizations by using social media, we can hardly avoid taking a look at the for-profit area. When it comes to marketing and promoting production (if we consider donation a behavior of buying idea as a production from nonprofit), no one thinks more thoroughly than business people. So knowing cases from business area may give us more ideas in nonprofit area.
Let’s look at Emerson Salon in Seattle, an example that might be help for new and small nonprofits. See the link below:

http://www.localadzoom.com/blog/?p=14

From the case of Emerson Salon, there are at least two lessons that can be learned for small nonprofits: first, start using social media! It won’t hurt, and may surprisingly help. Don’t worry too much about potential risks and intangible costs, from the book, we know that getting involved in social media is not to ask you to discard the present way of running your organization, but to combine co-location work with social media. Face to face is important, but why don’t do something more? Second, for new or small nonprofits, this most important way to expand donors is to let more people know your existence. So consider each staff member a potential resource of promoting yourself. If one staff member has 100 friends on facebook and more on twitter, there is a chance that 100 more people will know your organization. As example of social capital in the book, getting a Email asking for donation from a friend increases the chance for people to donate than getting that from strangers, start expanding your social network from people you know can be a good idea for small nonprofits.