Taking the Off Ramp from Social Networking

We’ve been doing more and more presentations on using social media in business. We’ve also been getting busier and busier helping small businesses find ways to create business value from social capital.

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 Hear George & Mary-Lynn discuss today's topic on The Bigg Success Show! Click the player to listen [5:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Social capital is intangible. So it will never show up directly on the Balance Sheet of any business. However, it very well may be the single most important form of capital in today’s business world.

Defining social capital
Conceptually, we can define social capital as the amount of emotional goodwill that exists in a single relationship with a key stakeholder (or potential stakeholder) in a business. Our total social capital then would be the sum of the goodwill in all those individual relationships.

To add to our social capital, we must invest in our relationships. However, unlike other forms of capital, the investment is non-monetary for the most part.

You may share knowledge (which cost you money and/or time to obtain).

You may invest your time (of course, time is money).

Or you may do what our friend, Debby Auble, did. 

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Exit from social networking to the real world

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George and I both had terrible colds. I updated my status on Facebook, saying maybe if we took enough cold medication, the Super Bowl commercials would be even funnier.

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Well, apparently Debby was paying attention. She noticed that a number of her friends were feeling puny. She took the information she learned in the virtual world into the real world.

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The next day, she showed up at our house with some yummy homemade chicken noodle soup! She made up a whole batch so she could take it around to all her sick friends.

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Debby’s a local realtor. She also remodels homes. She has one that she finished recently that is just incredible. She took painstaking details to make it the model green home. Now it’s a cool house with a cool story.

The expected returns on the investment
What Debby did had nothing to do with business. She did it because she’s a good person, a good friend. She didn’t do it with an expectation of any personal benefit.

That’s how social capital is built. You don’t invest with the expectation of a return. You give – just for the joy of giving. Fate (or whatever you want to call it) tends to reward people who do that. 

Integrating the two worlds creates opportunities
Social capital is best built through integration. It grows – not as an “or” – not online or offline – but as an “and” – virtual and real.

If it weren’t for social networking, Debby probably wouldn’t have even known we weren’t feeling well. So social networking creates opportunities to create social capital that wouldn’t exist without it.

Debby could have sent a digital get well. That would have been nice.

But what she did was much better. She reached out in the physical world in a way she couldn’t have done in the digital one.

That’s how the intangible becomes real. This post is one manifestation of her kind act. 

Word of mouth offline is good but it just kind of floats. It’s still intangible.

Word of mouth online is very tangible. It’s there for the record. It’s powerful because it’s visible for everyone to see.

Opportunities to build social capital are all around you. Sometimes they’re inclusive to the space. Sometimes it pays to take the off-ramp to find the recipe for bigg success. 

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