You gets what you votes for.....

I was thinking about Social Capital and Social Capitalism (its been on my mind a lot since I went to Berlin) when I saw this on Seth Godin's blog:

In a world where consumers have so much power, we now have two responsibilities:

- If you don't like what an organization stands for, work actively to spread the word and force them to change

and

- If you will miss a product, a service, a book, a site or a professional when they close up shop, stand up, speak up and bring them masses of new business.

We get what we promote.

You get what you vote for with your attention, money, karma etc.

I was set to thinking about how this applies to the things that money doesn't buy, that, as Joni Mitchell noted, you don't know what you've got till its gone. And I was thinking that Amplified 08 - great that it was - is only the starting point in rebuilding the sort of Social Capital that previous generations took for granted.

The problem with a lot of Social Capital infrastructure is you can't actually buy it, you have to build it, and you have to do that in collaboration with others. And the only way that really occurs is to agitate and campaign, and put up a structure that a community can vote for.

And the one thing, the one new tool we have, is Social Networks. Which is why I was so exasperated by the way Twitter was abused in reporting the Mumbai attacks, and also so energised by the way we used it at Amplified 08. Same time, same service, different usages.

Still, its early days - and if you believe, as I do, that Social Media is the next major comms tool to create non-zero-sum behaviour in our world - and that it will be essential given the crises we face, then there is still so much to do!