My new favorite rebuttal to any argument from economic ailment to political controversy is: “I’d like to see a social currency thrown into the mix”.

It is really convenient to have the same position on all issues; Health Care, Terrorism, abortion, financial meltdown, education reform, and political scandal – my response is the same. “I’d like to see a social currency thrown into the mix”.

What the heck am I talking about?

Several recent blogs articles (and here, and here, and here) have converged around the idea that social currency is something that people earn from being active in a community, network, or social organization. Social Currency in lauded upon the recipient in many forms such as Google juice, respect, engagement, trust, re-tweets, reputation, merit badges, check-ins, tokens, Whuffie, wiggly worms, etc…

Regardless of what you call it, all social currencies have a very unique characteristic that differentiates them from a financial currency. Social currencies reward high integrity and punish low integrity.

Social Currency can be earned or converted:

Organizing a community around a common goal is serving a need that government and corporations do not have to fulfill in their “Social Charter”. So it has value.

• Helping a neighbor find a job supplants the work of the government funded unemployment office.
• Helping an elderly neighbor with their shopping supplements the Department of Health and Human Services.
• Adopting a child alleviates expenditures in the foster care system, abortion, and possibly the courts and prisons.
• Helping local vendors stay afloat by organizing a community of group buying or groupons reduces the demands on bankruptcy courts and social services.

Social Currency can also be eliminated:

• Public servants and politicians who squander the trust of their constituents through acts of corruption and impropriety
• Corporations who decimate local priorities in favor of Wall Street priorities.
• Breaking the law, endangering others, neglect, fraud, breech of social contract .
• Consumption far in excess of social contribution.

Take any issue and apply social currency

The health care debate is an excellent example. First, let’s apply a social currency to all of the people voting on the bill. Next, let’s apply a social currency to everyone arguing against the bill. Next, let’s apply a social currency to everyone arguing in favor of the bill. Let that count establish the burden of proof of the argument.

Next, let’s pay for Health Care Reform in social currency, not financial currency. That means people with a surplus of social currency receive health care at a certain rate. People with a deficit of social currency receive health care at a different rate.

Finally, compensation to health care providers would also be biased by a social currency. Providers with a surplus of social currency are paid at a different rate than providers with a deficit of social currency.

What about cheaters?, who pays these subsidies? how do you count it?, It’s a job killer, corporations will go bankrupt, losers still lose, Holy cow, this messes everything up!!!!

Actually, it’s not much different than how we allocate money on a credit scoring basis. It’s not any more difficult to count than the blood-money coursing through the veins of an unvetted financial / insurance system. Most importantly, constraining a Financial Currency with a Social Currency sets up a whole new landscape of benchmarks and incentives that accelerate innovation, in effect, printing new currency.

That’s what I mean when I say; “I’d Like to see some Social Currency in the Mix”

The idea of trust as social currency is appearing in more articles, conferences, and books.  This is all highly consistent with the TIP thesis on Innovation Economics which describes the necessity of a vetting mechanism among the knowledge inventory as a means for the emergence of a currency in a market – that is, a conversational currency.  People need to trust the currency if they are to trade the currency.

Shefaly Yogendra provides some excellent insights below.  Keep in mind that American Culture does not have a monopoly on the definition of trust.  It should not be an American expectation to define the conversational currency in our own image.  Indeed, convertability of such currency will be, and must be, global.

I kept the analysis sparse on this article because it is a valuable exercise to form one’s own perspective on trust prior to diving into someone Else’s opinion.  After all, it’s your currency – you own it.  Good luck.

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by Shefaly (please see her Bio here)

Trust is a non-negotiable essential in business. The post linked here refers to web-based business-to-consumer interactions. But as social currency, Trust is the most significant in interactions amongst organisations, customers, employees and regulatory bodies.

Definitions

Wikipedia defines social currency as “information shared which encourages further social encounters“. Social currency is different from social capital which refers to “connections within and between social networks and individuals“.

Social currency – some characteristics

a) No distinction between ‘physical’ and ‘virtual’ worlds

b) No distinction between ‘individuals’ and ‘corporate entities’

c) No distinction between validity of negative or positive normative labels

Determining the value of Trust as social currency

a) Verifiable Identity and antecedents

b) Consistency

c) Reliability

d) Peer recognition

e) Value of the network

f) Individuality and collaborative consciousness

The original article can be found here and it elaborates on each of the points above.

Money represents human productivity.

Recent headlines declare that 78 billion dollars worth of fuel and productivity are wasted each year by congestion on highways. 1.2 Trillion dollars per year in productivity is lost due to past failures in education. The US spends 7% more of our GDP on health care than the average of other developed nations leaving nearly 1 trillion dollars of unknown ‘productivity value’ in vapor per year. 200 Billion dollars per year is spent on war, whether necessary or not, that has not increased American productivity in an economic sense.

2.5 Trillion Units of Human Productivity

Without even trying hard, 2.5 Trillion Dollars per year in stuff not produced is wasted on activity that does not increase human productivity (stuff produced). Obviously debt is a promise to produce stuff in the future. But we’re wasting stuff now? At some point the logic falls apart but no matter how you look at it, money represents productivity and the only way out of this mess is to innovate at an astonishing rate.

Conversational Capital

In an earlier article, we conjured up a rough tabulation of productivity gains due to social media:

One billion messages are sent on Facebook every day. Suppose that each Facebook conversation has a net value of $1.00 per person. That comes out to 730 Billion dollars per year of human productivity saved.

Twitter is worth a cool 100 Million tweets per day. Let’s assign a net productivity gain of $1.00 per tweet delivered. That is $36 Billion per year in increased human productivity.

Suppose each blog article published increases human productivity by $0.50 each. With over 100M blogs, that is 10 billion dollars per day – or1.8 trillion dollars per year.

The grand total is 2.5 Trillion Dollars worth of conversational currency.

In Search of Waste Economics:

Now, return to the waste side of the balance sheet let’s reflect on the areas of impact that social media has on: transportation, energy, education, health care, and world Peace:

Social media reviews automobile quality and drives social priorities toward green industry. Social media allows people to find work close to home, social media vets energy systems such as wind, solar, nuclear. Social media is driving journalism to value added roles and away from corporate collusion. Social media provides richer and more current content than textbooks. Social media is driving social priorities over Wall Street priorities in health care, energy, politics, industry, and science. You Tube is seeing a 1700% increase in downloads as people set up video cameras all over the world searching and reporting injustice.  Little Brother is watching.

Social media strikes back

In order to predict where social media will strike next all we need to do is look for the waste economy; areas where world governments, institutions, and corporations are inefficient, wasteful, co opted, or corrupt.

Liquid Swords - by Megan Olson

Invisible Currency

On my birthday, I received many greetings on Facebook from friends and family.  So, let’s say for example that Hallmark sold 10 less cards (@$3.95 ea), the telephone company sold 10 less long distance phone calls phone calls (@$.60 minute),  FedEx delivered no additional packages, oil companies sold no gas, and my friends did not deploy, say, 20 hours (@$25/hr) of human productivity buying stuff, licking stamps, or delivering mail in my honor.  Total productivity savings can be valued over $500.00; or roughly $50.00 per message.

Conversational Capital

One billion messages are sent on Facebook every day.  Each message sent and received constitutes a conversation.  Each of these conversations has a value that can be expressed in terms of productivity saved and assigned a dollar value. Suppose that each Facebook message has a value of only $1.00 per person engaged in a conversation.  That comes out to 730 Billion dollars per year of human productivity saved – enough to fund TARP.

Twitter is worth a cool 100 Million tweets per day.  Let’s assign a net productivity gain of $1.00 per tweet sent (not received).  If you think that tweets are not productive, follow the Iran Crisis; a revolution fought with liquid swords.  So let’s assign Twitter $36 Billion per year in increased human productivity.

Next, according to Google analytics, about 100 real people spend enough time on my little blog every day to read at least one article.  Suppose each blog article increases human productivity by $1.00 each. Technorati tracks well over 100M blogs.  That is 10 billion dollars per day – or a whopping 3.6 Trillion dollars per year.  Let’s discount that by 50% to only $1.8T in fairness to the skeptics.

The grand total is 2.5 Trillion Dollars worth of conversational currency – 2 times the 2009 national deficit and 5% of America’s entire debt obligation – and growing.   Where is all this productivity going?

What’s happening is what’s not happening.

People are NOT sitting through hours of TV commercials anymore.  People editorialize their own news and do NOT watch what is designed to corrupt them.  People are NOT letting their ideas die unheard.  People are NOT letting politics run them down and have now elected health care, the environment, and the end of warfare to the Presidency of this and other nations.  People have become far more focused and more productive through the rediscovery of family, friends, Art, Music and social priorities over debt enslavement.  Next, social media is coming to the neighborhoods.

Millions of people practice “social media” in their spare time.  This is invisible productivity that effectively magnifies the productivity of others with an astonishing multiplier effect.  Craigslist, CarFax, Zillow, Epinion, Amazon, and Expedia are all eliminating arbitrage opportunity and sending brokers scurrying for a real education. Product reviews are killing the scams and delivering the right product to the right market.

The Anti-buck

Maybe the Dollar is not so overvalued after all. Maybe the dollar deficit is counter balanced by this new invisible currency.  Suppose the more inflation that occurs, the more this invisible currency will affect the overall economy.  Suppose people are hedging dollar currency with conversational currency.  Suppose social priorities are replacing Wall Street Priorities.  Suppose we are approaching a new equilibrium rather than an impending free fall – except for those who try to control it.

Special Thanks to Megan Olson