Social Network as a CRM

I've spent a lot of my time at work over the last 4-5 years working on lead generation and lead management or customer relationship management systems. As social networks became more and more prevalent and more integrated in peoples web habits it occurred to me that many features of a social network could easily be adapted to function as lead management.

The first thing you need to do is classify people. Typically in a simple system you would have something like prospects(people how you know of but haven't contacted directly), contacted leads, qualified lead, not qualified leads, buyers. If I was to implement this in facebook I would have to use the list tool in friends (I think there used to be better ways but that was the old facebook). You could make a list for each category and assign people appropriately.

Once you have your lists sorted you can now use the system to deliver targeted messages to each lead category using the facebook inbox tools. As a person moves along the buying process you can move them into a new list and remove them from the old list.

The essentials are really classification and communication. Social networks typically contain these tools and that's how you can adapt them for CRM use. Of course some system may be more useful than others and I only use facebook as an example. Ultimately marrying social network features into a CRM would be extremely useful for many businesses.