How is your relationship balance sheet?

What does your relationship balance sheet look like? Are you making regular withdrawals but neglecting to put anything back in?

Your emotional bank account

In his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey puts forward the metaphor of the emotional bank account. It’s his way of saying that healthy relationships are at least reciprocal. The more deposits into the emotional bank account of your relationship with someone, the better the feeling that person is likely to have towards you.

Of course, the opposite is also true: if it’s all take, take, take, it’s hard to expect good feeling from the person on the other side of such an imbalanced relationship.

Social media helps us manage our accounts

When friends unfamiliar with Twitter ask me why I bother to spend my time sending 140-character updates out to a network of people, many of whom I haven’t met in person, I always tell them that I don’t view the time spent on Twitter in direct ROI terms.

Twitter let’s me reach out and provide incrementally small amounts of value to a large number of people in an incredibly efficient manner. A link here, a retweet there, a day-brightening conversation or two – none of these things individually and taken out of context are particularly valuable necessarily.

But the real value of Twitter is that it allows me to make lots of very small deposits into the emotional bank accounts of the relationships I have and maintain through Twitter. Lots of these incrementally small deposits over a long period of time actually add up and contribute to an overall surplus of value in my emotional bank account.

Importantly, this additional value also adds to the level of trust in the relationships – I have learned to trust that many of my Twitter followers will point me in the direction of things I care about, and reciprocally I endeavour to do the same.

Effectively, Twitter helps me to keep my emotional bank accounts all in the black.

Yes, but is it really worth all the time spent?

The simple (and hopefully intuitive) answer to that question is ‘Yes’ – it is always valuable to give value to other people. But instead of trying to argue this point myself, I want to cite an incredible example of the power of building trust and adding value wherever you can. This case study is also an amazing example of how Twitter is rapidly becoming a philanthropic tool of note.

How David Armano used his social capital to raise money for a family in need

David Armano has 8076 followers on Twitter. He’s an incredibly well-respected blogger (#32 on the AdAge Power 150), but more than just the numbers, he delivers heaps of value through his daily social media interactions.

David Armano makes large amounts of deposits into his many relationships’ emotional bank accounts – I’d be willing to bet that his relationship balance sheet is firmly in the black, and his followers trust that he’ll continue to help them out, deliver insight to them in 140-character chunks and generally improve their lives almost daily.

Today (Wednesday 7th January) David Armano decided to take that balance sheet surplus and cash it in, not for himself, but in fact to help out a family in need.

On his blog Logic + Emotion David posted Please Help Us Help Daniela’s Family, an appeal for his network to come to the aid of a young Romanian family who had fallen on very hard times and had nowhere to turn. I urge you to read David’s post – the family’s story is a sad one indeed.

The Twitter Effect

With just two short tweets David primed and then alerted thousands of his followers to his blog post and his amazing cause.

First he primed his audience:

And then he made the announcement:

I’d love to see the graph of traffic to his blog after that tweet :-) Asking people to retweet his original tweet also allowed his message to reach a potentially much wider audience than just his 8076 followers. Twinfluence puts David’s second-order followers number at a massive 5,525,691.

What followed was wonderful to watch. Hundreds of people retweeted David’s original tweet and the money started pouring in for Daniela and her family, who struggled to understand the process and the anonymous giving of so many people who didn’t know her or her children:

With a goal of reaching US$5000, some initial problems with the Chip In account were quickly solved to allow donations to continue to flood in:

David thanked donors individually through Twitter and got away from the incredibly emotional situation for a short while to record a video message, thanking everyone for their contributions. It’s hard to imagine what the money donated must mean to Daniela and her young family, but you can tell how emotional David is in the video:

And even though the original goal was US$5000, David has started something that you can’t put a cap on – a community chain reaction in the form of charitable donation.

So what can we learn from the ‘Help Daniela’s Family’ flash cause example?

There are so many ways to approach and think about this truly life-changing (has the word ever been more appropriate?) initiative from David Armano. Here are just some observations/thoughts that stand out for me:

• Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, tiny 140-character doses of incremental value accrue over time to represent significant social capital (and this great PDF), which, if leveraged intelligently and alongside other social publishing tools, can be tremendously valuable. This has elsewhere been termed the Whuffie Factor by Tara Hunt after Cory Doctorow coined the phrase.
• Twitter is coming into its own as a very powerful tool for initiating and driving flash causes, fast-growing viral philanthropic movements that exemplify the ripple effect. (For more on this concept of the ripple effect, check out Laurel Papworth’s post on the subject and definitely read David Armano’s own post on the subject – as usual, his diagram accompanying the post is genius) Late last year the equally transformative example of Tweetsgiving showed just how quickly money could be raised to fund a new classroom for a school in Tanzania (US$11,131 in just 48 hours to be exact).
• Although David Armano’s initiative doesn’t necessarily fit into this category, the ‘Help Daniela’s Family’ example adds weight to my argument that 2009 will be the year creative capitalism comes into its own. Cause-wired social businesses will steal the headlines for all the right reasons and we’ll all be talking about Tom Watson and Susan Carey Dempsey a lot more this year.
• Technology is not the important part of what makes social media so interesting. People are, and they always will be. Raymond Williams made this point most eloquently in his book Television: Technology and Cultural Form in 1974 and it remains one of the most profound realisations to keep front of mind when working in this space.

“But I don’t have 8076 Twitter followers…”

Stop making excuses and start making a difference. Challenge yourself to see how you can use any latent social capital you may have accrued during your time on this remarkable Earth to do some social good.

Can you bring together your own first- and second-order networks around a topic of community interest and translate your social capital into a transformative experience?

It’s got to be worth trying…

If you enjoyed this post, please consider commenting below. If you’d like to read some more, think about subscribing to my blog feed. Thanks for coming by – I really appreciate your time :-)

UPDATE (8th January):

More articles on this topic have been written – check them out for additional perspectives on this amazing example of cause-wired Twitter fundraising:

• David Armano makes Social Networks Count, AdFreak.com post by Brian Morrissey
• The Collective Power of Individuals, BusinessWeek article by Helen Walters
• Social Fundraising: Daniela and Armanos, a blog post by Laurel Papworth
• How to raise $10,000 a day with Twitter!, a blog post by Simon Small
• Digital Neighbourhood Comes to the Aid of Abused Woman, a blog post by AdRants
• Use Social Media to Help Daniela, a blog post by Servantofchaos
• Colossal compassion: a stunning case study in community, a blog post by David Griner
• Social Media Maven David Armano used his network to raise over $9,000 in a few hours to help family in need, a blog post by Beth Kanter
• The Power of Trust: helping #Daniela, a blog post by Jay Goldman
• Twitter Helps Daniela get a New Start (#Daniela), a blog post by Content Matters
• The Power of Twitter and a Good Cause, a blog post by Marc Van Norden
• Social Media creates Social Neighbourhood, a blog post by Doc Baty
• Project Daniela: Twitter in action, a blog post by Katie Chatfield

If you’ve written a blog post or article about the ‘Help Daniela’s Family’ David Armano project, please feel free to comment it below or link back to this article. I’ll periodically update this post with links to your writing.

	[Balance sheet image courtesy Creative Commons and Flickr user Scitech]
	[Cropped pennies image courtesy Creative Commons and Flickr user Somewhat Frank]
	[Daniela and her family image courtesy David Armano]

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