Doc Searls – one of the co-authors of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto recently said;

“Think of markets as three overlapping circles: Transaction, Conversation and Relationship. Our financial system is Transaction run amok. Metastasized. Optimized at all costs. Impoverished in the Conversation department, and dismissive of Relationship entirely. We’ve been systematically eliminating Relationship for decades, excluding, devaluing and controlling human interaction wherever possible, to maximize efficiency and mechanization.”

And here is a a clue to the challenge of measuring relationship capital. The issues you highlight on measurement and metrics are valid but ‘command-and-control’ mindsets approach the problem in a 19th century, as old as the hills kinda way. Forward looking companies are using Social Network Analysis techniques to identify the movers and shakers in their organisation. I know of at least one company that is turning away business from large companies for its services. Typical SNA providers run software over email servers and PABXs. They scan the conversations and build up pictures of social networks, leaders, influencers. Companies pay a lot of money for this data. It helps them plan mergers & acquisitions, succession plan for key people and understand how work actually gets done in their organisation.

The value is first in the behaviour change. How difficult is it for companies to achieve this by conventional means? How valuable is this? Second, the value is in the data. Networks like Ecademy, LinkedIN and Xing have this data. More so than some of the organisations of the very employees who exist in these networks. Data includes; private messaging stats, group contributions, peer reviews & comment, reputation ratings, network size, degrees of separation, and so on.

Don’t underestimate the work that is going on around the value of social networks – both commercial academic. Remember that ‘good will’ value in a listed company can be as high as 60% of its market capitalisation. But no one knows how to measure it. That’s why fund managers are putting up to 2% of their profits into research to discover how to measure what are essentially relationships.