The other day, I ran across an article in BusinessWeek explaining a study by IBM and MIT that tries to correlate social/professional network connections with higher revenue production. Or, in other words, does that Twitter followership or LinkedIn network actually translate to a potential to earn more? It seems that your contacts might increase your net worth to the tune of $948 per person. I think that the study is certainly curious because their test group of several thousand IBM consultants probably isn't a true microcosm of American society. Still, your instincts probably align with their determination that a larger network can lead to more opportunities whether you are a consultant or not.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar once concluded that the average person can effectively maintain 150 simultaneous relationships with friends/acquaintances, but I think technology can augment "Dunbar's number" significantly. In a Wall Street Journal article written before the prevalent rise of Facebook and Twitter, Carl Bialik supports that notion. Imagine how easy it can be to exceed 300 or 400 when you add your professional network, family, friends, former classmates and club/association contacts into the same group. Before the technological advances of the past few years, you would have certainly lost touch with many of those people. However, with all of the electronic communications vehicles available today, we can manage two or three times as many friendships as we once could.

Although I know some people use it that way, I really don't see Facebook as a social networking site. After all, a social network is a place where people are introduced to the friends of their friends in order to make new contacts. Less than 2% of my network consists of people who are not primary contacts of mine, and I don't have much interest in artificially expanding that list. Instead, I use Facebook as a friendship management solution. Trust me, left to my own devices, I would easily forget your birthday, rarely send you a note, and have trouble following along as your life unfolds. I need Facebook to keep track of all of these things for me. I probably wouldn't read your annual holiday letter if it wasn't chopped up into weekly status messages. I wouldn't know your child's name if it wasn't listed in the caption of your family photo. I certainly wouldn't know which 80's movie defines you and we would almost never have a chance to play Scrabble together. Before Facebook came along, I had a friend who I admired for his ability to remember everyone's life events and his delivery of hand-written notes to them on their special days. Then, I learned that he had a personal assistant doing all of the legwork, and many of her responsibilities could be replaced by Facebook.

Of course, none of us are naive enough to overlook the fact that Facebook, if properly monetized, is more of a personalized advertising vehicle than a friendship management solution. A recent article showed that 75% of the Internet Retailer Top 100 sites (and 56.8% of IR's Top 500 sites) have a presence on Facebook, and 41.4% are benefitting from YouTube videos. Smart move...why spend a dollar per direct mail piece or a few cents per deployed email when you can communicate with your Facebook or Twitter followership for free? In that regard, it's worth a lot more than $948 per contact for a top retailer to make some friends than it is for regular consumers like us. I'm sure that a retailer's Facebook fans all have great RFM scores. From that perspective, I bet the "social networking" sites could find a lot of success in developing tools to help marketers manage their relationships just as easily as email marketing vendors have done over the years. Imagine that...a powerful e-communications platform for personalized messaging at a fraction of the cost and a smaller fraction of the deliverability headaches. Amen, Facebook, you might just meet those hockey stick revenue growth projections after all.