I wrote a post yesterday about 33 Million People in the Room – Part 1 – Juliette Powell – today I wanted to tie in a few more thoughts about it – how it ties into a  concept Juliette mentions on in Chapter 7 with the Social Capital, Cultural Capital and Financial Capital.  I’ll also throw out a few “measurement” ideas – after all, this is a Web Analytics blog (and a Social Media blog, as well).

I have met most of the people that Juliette Powell writes about in 33 Million People in the Room and some of them, such as Jeff Pulver,  Gary Vaynerchuk and Tara Hunt –   are leaders in Social Media, people who have amassed a very large degree of Social Capital and both have showed us how to build Social Capital.

Social Capital? On page 63 of her book, bottom paragraph …

” … Social Capital  refers to both the network of relationships you have and the access to resources provided therein.”

Virtual relationships are similar to “weak ties“,  casual, tangential relationships; in contrast, people who you have shared experiences with, close friends and colleagues, are thought to be “strong ties” (see page 79, bottom paragraph).  Strong ties and weak ties also  key into “influence” and “affinity”.

On page 80, Juliette mentions that a “weak tie” in a Social Network could be …..

“….people you meet at a networking event and whom you share only a conversation or a glass of wine.  ….. Perhaps, given the opportunity, these tangential relationships could flourish-yet rarely do we give ourselves the chance to find out”.

Social Networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, allow us to keep in touch with individuals whom we have developed “weak ties”.    These weak ties add “Social Capital” to our balance sheet by giving us greater access to potential resources.

But … at the end of the day, if all Social Networks do for us, is multiply our “weak ties”,  that’s not good enough – we also need to know how to transform some of those relationships into “strong ties” when we want to.

My first take - turning a “virtual friend” into a “real friend” it’s vital, the first time you meet, that  it  is a good experience – like an interview.  You don’t really know that person yet – except online – and your first meeting can be defining of that relationship, or even the continuance of it.

In my case, a virtual friend visited NY, and via a communications issue, it became very frustrating to meet up;  when we finally did, the frustrations colored the meeting.

That got me thinking that .. there ought to be a protocol guide to developing virtual relationships into real friendships  – a lot of it might just be common sense - but still – I don’t think anyone wrote about this, at least, not in any depth, yet.

My idea of a guide to illustrate the “do’s” and “don’ts” of building on virtual friendships are appropriate to 33 Million People in the Room because it’s a way of building Social Capital – which is what Chapter 7 (Social Capital, Cultural Capital and Financial Capital is all about – if you can’t build a virtual friendship into a real one – can you achieve Financial Capital?  I don’t know – but I question it – that you can, without the ability to develop those virtual relationships into something more – when you want and need to).

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Juliette also talks about “cultural capital” on page 82 and 83 of her book, and explains it as “influence” you have on your wider circle of  friends (Social Capital); it might be that a person can use their “twitter influence” and “facebook influence”, their blog readership and syndication to reach a much larger audience and influence them to make a decision (which may be measurable – if you set up tracking for it, in other words, prepare for it, ahead of time).

Then, there is one further step, which is building cultural capital into money – which is just about what everyone at SocComm, a conference I attended last week, wants to do.

For example, Gary Vaynerchuk managed to take the love he has for wine, and his knowledge of people, and what makes them tick (see Chapter 5 – The Need for Authenticity) and augment a family Wine Business that made $4 million per year into one that makes $45 million a year – a 12 fold increase (and this is the first time, in Juliette’s book, that I heard of the exact amount).  

Everyone wants to do something like that with Social Media – but hardly anyone has figured out how to do it.

Figuring out how to take Social and Cultural Capital and harness it to amplify a business model becomes what Juliette Powell calls “Financial Capital” – but, I think she ought to call it something slightly different, the term “financial capital”  is used for other things that don’t have anything to do with Social Media (consider -  “unique visitors” means many things, depending on the context – ie: Comscore Media Metrix vs. Site Analytics – same term, two, largely different meanings and methodologies).

At the end of the day, as  few have figured out how to create financial capital out of Social Media, it helps to explain why many businesses are hesitant to move forward with Social Media – and in many cases, there’s no budget or place in many organizations for Social Media, as there is for Search Marketing and Web Analytics.

It looks to me, like Chapters 8 (which sketches out Barack Obama‘s Social Media campaign strategy that helped win him the White House), Chapter 9 (CrowdSourcing), Chapter 10 (Communications Channels for Social Media) and Chapter 11 (a Chapter on defining what Success is, for Social Media) lay the groundwork to building Cultural and Financial Capital, and I’ll review those chapters in my final post about 33 Million People in the Room coming soon (as I finish reading her book).

It’s also nice that I can read a book such as  33 Million People in the Room and get insights connecting to my own life (in my case,  figuring out how to turn virtual friends into real ones – what to do and what not to do); perhaps her book  set the stage for realizations, or perhaps it supports what is already happening (or both).

To end this post – here’s some videos I personally took of Gary Vaynerchuk, the times I met him, questions I asked him, or listened to him personally try to answer – that addresses how he turned his Social Capital into Cultural and Financial Capital.

What Gary did, probably won’t work for most people, or even scale well – he admits that – but it does suggest that, while we all should strive to gain Social Capital and transmute it into Financial Capital – we have to find our own path to it.

Gary’s path won’t work for most of us – but we can still learn a lot from it that you can apply to your own situation – which is all Gary is really saying- find your own way.

The above footage is from the Soccomm conference last week in New York, and some earlier footage, below, is from a meetup I atteneded with Gary last fall.

In this clip, above, Gary Vaynerchuk seemed to be speaking to me, almost, in the way he suggested I could take the readership of Webmetricsguru.com, or ArtNewYorkCity.com, with it’s regular readership, and turn it into a money making business – something I haven’t really tried to seriously do – but that’s kind of what is meant by taking Social Capital + Cultural Capital and turning it into Financial Capital.

It’s also sobering to realize, just as in any successful business, a very large part of it is time and effort spent – and there are no real shortcuts – and a lot of Social Media is really tied to offline work.

Anyway, I didn’t intent to end my post by pumping Gary Vaynerchuk (he doesn’t need it, and he’s got a pretty big ego, anyway) but I struggle to find anyone who’s as good a poster child for Social Media Success, as he is, especially when you can turn 4 million dollars a year into 45 million dollars a year – talk about metrics – that’s a metric for you!

However, in the book,  Juliette Powell is trying to set the ground work for ways to do that, that can work, generally speaking, for the rest of us; reading  33 Million People in the Room you can learn about techniques that are similar to what Gary Vaynerchuk has been doing – but more, the general how to’s and not so much exactly what he did.

So my last post about the review of 33 Million People in the Room will be about those last 4 chapters and what I make of it – how can the rest of us use Social Media to change our world, and maybe, make some money at it too (nothing wrong with that), plus measure the effectiveness of Social Media in achieving those goals.