This morning (Feb. 23) Sungevity announced that it hired former LinkedIn Chief Marketing Officer Patrick Crane as its chief marketing officer in an attempt to expand the company’s social media reach.

The move shows both the importance of social media as the solar industry expands and that the solar industry is starting to attract leaders from other industries.

Sungevity is one of two leading companies—the other is SolarCity—that offer homeowners in certain states solar leases. The leases allow homeowners to install a photovoltaic system on their home at no up-front cost with a set lease payment that can reduce their overall energy costs.

The company leverages federal and state incentives to reduce the cost of solar for homeowners. It’s now expanding into eastern states including Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and founder Danny Kennedy previously said Pennsylvania was also a “likely suspect.”

More recently the company announced its Sungevity.org site, which donates $1,000 to nonprofits like schools and community organizations for each successfully referral that leads to a home or business owner becoming a Sungevity customer.

Crane, who installed a system through Sungevity about four weeks ago—he’s flipping the interconnection switch today—will work on increasing the peer-to-peer connection with Sungevity customers. This will include developing apps for tablets and smartphones.

He’ll expand Sungevity’s social media presence, which includes sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others.

“The bigger opportunity is to get the Sungevity sunshine network more connected together,” he said. “A lot of the social dynamics I’ve been observing for a number of years apply to this. People are extremely interested when you are the first or second on the street to install solar.”

Crane sees that interest as a way to harness the power of social media to encourage others to go solar.

“We can use those kinds of tools on a group level to better connect those people together,” he said. “One of the major ways to focus on new customers is to focus on existing ones. If you can have a very close relationship with the customers you have, if you have the tools and incentives in place, then you grow the existing network you have through that.”

The network will use those social dynamics to encourage others to become Sungevity customers.

“If I refer you to Sungevity after showing you my system, you’re more likely join by 4 to 5 times,” Crane said. And the referrer also gets a steep incentive for getting others to go solar. “For every successful implementation you get your friends or neighbors to do, you get a $1,000 incentive payment in the bank.”

The company will look to continue expanding into more states, but certain market conditions need to be met, Crane said.

“You need sufficient consumer interest,” he said, “And the right state incentives, to be able to make the solar installation affordable. With those and the right climate, that’s the perfect storm. Where we find it, we’ll go after it.”

Image courtesy of Sungevity.