One of the most interesting things about social wealth is that, like financial wealth, it can be invested and leveraged to accumulate outsized value. Like a muscle, the more it is employed the stronger and more massive it becomes.

Say you know someone highly regarded in the biotech field. He shared with you that he is looking for qualified candidates for a position. You happen to have a friend with deep experience and high integrity in genomics. Upon introducing them, your social wealth is spent, but in this case it is more akin to an investment, because you now gain additional social wealth with both sides.

Don’t get me wrong, there are cases where one can spend his social wealth and lose it. When you call in a relationship favor to get better service or a discount, your social wealth is diminished.

It makes sense to think of social wealth as something you can not only spend but also invest and grow. It would thus behoove us to spend social wealth only when absolutely necessary.

Lastly, because social wealth is such an ephemeral thing, one may destroy a massive amount without even realizing what he has done. Any activity that reflects poorly on our credibility or integrity is a massive destroyer of social wealth. The repercussions can continue far and wide, for social wealth is inherently viral.

What we need then is a way to purposefully and deliberately, yet flexibly, measure and monitor our social wealth, so that we may grow, invest, and spend it wisely.

As we launch our Xfluential Private Beta today on Android, I’m reminded to explore a statement I made to some friends during lunch a few weeks ago, “Mobile is the new cigarette!”  It gave my 3 lunch partners pause and some reflection.  Mind you, these are mental giants, and 2 of them are incredible entrepreneurs.  One is an incredibly successful “super-angel”, and the other is the owner and founder of a successful high-tech incubator.  The third is one of the most accomplished attorneys in the area.

Having made such a statement in front of people I highly respect, I feel the need to back up, or at least explore, the validity of my rhetoric.

Is mobile the new “cigarette”?

These days, when we stand in line at Subway, when we wait for a lunch appointment to arrive, or whenever we fidget for something to do, our hand automatically gravitates toward our smart phone.  Its effect is calming and restorative.  We feel once again secured, that we are connected back to the world, albeit a virtual world, which, for many of us, is one on which we spend more time than the real world.  When we feel embarrassingly empty-handed, unoccupied, we reached for the smart phone to focus our attention, giving us an out from the awkwardness of not having anything to do.

What does this mean to the future of our social interactions, the future of high-tech immersion in our real world?  If  smart phones are the new cigarette, are they addictive?  Are they bad for your health?  Should they be banned in certain places?  Is there dangerous “second-hand smoke” from the smart phone?

The analogy breaks down when it comes to the matter of degrees.  Whereas cigarette is always bad for our health, moderate and appropriate use of the smart phone is good for you.  Duhh!

But yes, smart phones are banned, or at least frowned upon, in the theatre, in hospitals, while driving, and, of course, who can forget, when our plane is taking off or landing.  Maybe mobile is the new “red wine,” recommended in small doses, but never in over-consumption.  No matter, the line to be drawn between suitability and over-consumption is one that will be debated, and in individual cases, comes down to a matter of personal needs, preferences, and values.  I need to know how much usage of my smart phone is appropriate in social situations.  I also need to know when to keep away from the device so I can have some personal tech-free space.

Perhaps the mobile apps of tomorrow will allow you to customize your appropriate levels of usage and access.  Perhaps usage and access will also be automatically cut off as soon as it is sensed that we are in certain environments, e.g., cars, churches.

For us at Xfluential, we are still optimizing the utility of our app for influence building, and mobile allows us the best access and the closest experience to our customers.  Influence is built everywhere, not just when an influencer is sitting at a desk or in front of a laptop.  As a matter of fact, it is sometimes built when one is not even connected at all to any device.

I guess you can say that, by deciding to put our product on Android first, I am backing up my statement to my lunch buddies that the smart phone is the new “cigarette”.

The blog below addresses one of the key opportunity areas in digital business today – social capital.  In my book, .wealth, published last November, I detailed the various strategies in digital business, from crowdsourcing to LBS, from mash-up to mobile.  One of the key strategies is based on social capital, of which relationship capital is a subset.

The advent of digital technologies have ushered in a new era of value capture.  Whereas in the dotcom era of the 1990′s, digital businesses are focused on virtualizing services, from Amazon bringing book-selling online to Craigslist bringing the classified into the digital world, today’s digital business boom is about the capture of social value.  Witness the emergence of Kickstarter, capturing the value of sponsorship in a cause that one believes, while also eliciting the social value of keeping sponsors “in the loop” when the project organizer communicates regularly on its progress.

Not only is digital technology helping us form groups to get better deals, as in the case of Groupon, it also helps us aggregates the value of opinions of the multitude into a valuable feedback loop for retail establishments, as in the case of Yelp.  Now relevant thoughts, ideas, opinions, intentions, and social acts can be leveraged, even when they result in no hard financial numbers.  Because they still affect the hard financial numbers of the businesses that rely on them, they are ushering in a new era of social responsibility.

Relationship capital is a subset of social capital, as it represents the value of social connections that an individual possesses.  Social capital, however, also includes group affinities, such as ethnicity, nationality, and fraternity, as these affinities give rise to groups and their collaboration and interdependence to create economic value.

With Facebook and LinkedIn, we are able to connect and organize through relationships to perform tasks from creating the best t-shirt designs at Threadless to overturning plans for an unpopular charge a wireless carrier is intending to implement.  Relationship capital is enabled and accelerated by social networking sites, but are there further ways to elicit even more value out of relationship capital?  That is the mission of Xfluential.

Until my next post, let us celebrate this golden era of social value capture, especially when we see how that value is transformed and channeled back into making products and services around us better and more responsive to our needs.