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

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your discernment between differing objectives in Social Media -- and how those objectives may impact our analysis.   I will keep in mind your focus on sales/marketing for future reading on your influencers... although I suspect that many elements of your influence model could translate over to other objective categories (such as knowledge dissemination/education, relationship/brand building, etc.) .  

I also appreciated your pointing out the role of search engines in this respect.  The ability to retrieve knowledge-centric events via search engines underscores the importance of looking at search and social together.  Search will provide lift and amplification of efforts through social channels. Google's efforts to index tweets around some topics and provide them as search results further amplifies the reach of an influential tweeter.   If that tweeter is aware of the search volumes relative to his/her domain of expertise, then they can craft tweets that are better optimized for user's seeking their kind of expertise.

Your exercise in illustrating relative value computations for weak and strong ties could be helpful for an organization that has a decent sense of these relative values.   It strikes me that this could be a metric to be computed by organizations that are deploying marketing efforts through multiple channels, both IRL and Social Media.   This would look much like the value computation of a sales funnel (purchase funnel - as you highlight in your earlier response) looking at stages such as a f2f meeting, delivering a proposal or receiving a verbal commitment.   Yet gathering the data for such metrics would require a level of sophistication with Social Media measurement that I suspect few companies have today.   

Looking forward to the next installment!