Virtual vs. in Real Life: The Value of Relationship Perspective

Hello Skip,

Welcome back and thanks for the question and comment. Let’s explore your topics together.

First, there are many context to the concept of influence. The social media influence model was developed under a marketing/sales oriented context. In such context there is a goal for influence, which is to drive someone through the purchase funnel. Whether it is moving you from unaware to awareness or from awareness to consideration, there is a definite objective for such type of influence.

However, I think the context that you are speaking of is more of a learning/education oriented context, (which is quite different from the marketing/sale context). In such context, it is not very clear what is the ultimate goal. people learn things for many reason. Sometimes it is merely to gathering more information for other goals (which can be anything), some merely for fun and intellectual satisfaction. Because knowledge and facts doesn’t really have a notion of timing and expiry (unless it is something that is proven wrong), people can learn things whenever they want, wherever they want. Some information may be old, but may still be valuable to those who seeks them. So if the goal is purely for education, then timing and channel alignment in essence become irrelevant for educational type of influence.

We are constantly learning new thing and influenced by the information we learned day to day. Some of these may be news, but some may be age old research from the past. Some of these may be on the internet, some may be in a book. Therefore, by providing a recording of the event it may seem like that we are extending he timing and alignment for the target. But for the learning and education context, these factors may not be relevant. It really becomes an information retrieval problem that Google does so well. If you are looking for a piece of information purely for education purpose, then as long as the information is relevant and accurate, you don’t really care when it is created, or where it is recorded and stored, as long as you can access it. So I would be careful not to over generalize the influence model into realms that may not be applicable, even though it was my own creation. This is just my point of view.

To your second question. I think that having a map that outlines the different dimension of different forms of human communication is definitely helpful. But to truly evaluate and compare them quantitatively, we need to be able to translate them and put them on level ground. That means we need to map these different dimensions to a common attribute.

For example: although we cannot directly compare an apple and orange, the way a business typically do to deal with this is to compare things is through their value. For example, we can compare their price (assuming the market is efficient so that price is a good reflection of value) of an apple vs. an orange.

In the scenario I talked about in this post. I’ve map everything to the strength of relationship. However, what I haven’t done is go further to quantify how much does a strong relationship worth and how much does a weak tie worth. But I will leave that to you, because as I mentioned in several discussion earlier, there is a continuum of tie strength, and people draw the line that separate strong ties from weak ties pretty arbitrarily. So different people will have different values for a stronger ties.

Just as an example: Hypothetically, if a stronger ties is worth 3x (say $1500 each) as much as a weak ties ($500 each). Then the examples that I analyzed about the virtual summit can be evaluated in the following way. We have potentially reduced the tie strength of 25% (this is our most conservative estimate) of the people by making the summit a virtual event. So we lost $1000 for these 25% of the attendees:

     $1000 x (25% x 708 attendees) = $1000 x (177 attendees) = $177,000 Lost by going virtual.

But we’ve gain $500 from the 75% who wouldn’t have been able to make it if it were a IRL event. So the gain can be calculated as follow.

     $500 x (75% x 708 attendees) = $500 x (531 attendees) = $265,500 Gain by going virtual.

So, even if the stronger ties is worth 3x more than a weak tie. The gain is still lot higher going virtual. But only you would know how much is a stronger relationship worth to your business and how much does a weaker one worth. And there are definitely situations where virtual doesn't make sense. So I will leave this exercise for you readers out there.

Ok, thank you for the interesting questions. I hope I’ve addressed your question. Hope to see you again next time. And have a wonderful and relaxing Thanksgiving.