I’m pretty sure the idea of credit cards is not something we want to embrace any further. They’ve not done us any wonders.

I believe Chris is alluding to a potential “system” of gauging one’s online currency rather than a plastic card.

Today, people gauge other’s identities, social graphs and reputations by *manually* looking across the various social stuff they use.

You look at a guy like Chris and see he’s got 3,500 subscribers to his feed, 5,545 twitter followers, etc… and you’re safe assuming he’s credible and influential, but he’s an anomally. How do you make that call for the millions of “average” people?.. Not so easy.

Now my mind is racing about all the cool things an application could do by pulling activity & data together from various sources, building a personal ’scorecard’, etc ;) Might not be too difficult to build.

Very interesting.

Gotta get medieval on you, buddy.

Credit cards are a representation of DEBT. They represent money you have not earned, that you are borrowing. In your analogy, credit cards would be reputation you borrow from someone else that you must repay later. It’s not your own reputation you’re building.

Where you’re getting confused is that you’re really talking about money as a store of value and a medium of exchange.

Money is a store of value because I can sell chicken eggs to someone who needs them and get money in return. If I bartered, I’d have to find someone who wanted chicken eggs before they spoiled - their value declines with time. Money stores that value - I can sell the eggs for money rather than, say, beans, and preserve the value of my asset.

Money is a medium of exchange because I have chickens and you have cows, and if I don’t need beef or milk, there’s no trade. Money intermediates - your beef or milk becomes money and then you can use that money to buy chickens. Someone else needs milk or beef and uses money to buy it from you. This is money as a medium of exchange.

Reputation doesn’t have a portable store of value. In fact, reputation really has no store of value at all, because you can’t exchange it for anything. In today’s attention economy, reputation degrades as surely as the chicken eggs do.

Reputation doesn’t have a medium of exchange, either. LinkedIn currency - favors done, etc. - doesn’t automatically translate into Facebook currency or MySpace currency.

If you can create a medium of exchange and a store of value for reputation, you will really have something valuable. When you figure that out, let me know - I’ll work out a lending system around it :)

Sure, leave it to the financial aid expert to set me straight. No WONDER I have problems with credit cards. (ow).

“Reputation degrades…” Interesting, true, and another whole something that has my head spinning.

Reputation in an attention economy, specifically. That’s the key point. Reputation among close friends doesn’t change all that much, but on the weak connections in a Gladwellian social network, reputation = attention garnered. How much mindshare do you have in someone else’s mind?

As Mitch Joel says, it’s not who you know. It’s who knows YOU. Ricky Mondello, the 17 year old from NY, has mindshare with me because he comments and participates frequently on my podcast. Consequently, when US News & World Report called me to ask if I knew a high school senior in the throes of college admissions fun, he was top of mind - his reputation account in my mental bank was full, so he got the attention.

How do you store something like that? How do you value it, exchange it, and trade it for something else?

I used to feel special while flashing around my American Express Gold and Platiunum Business Cards… now … not so much. Credit seems to be more and more of a scary thing in the U.S… so I will stick to my debit card and cash. I definitely agree with the first commentor here. We’ll be suffering the affects of this last “credit meltdown” for quite sometime…

Till about 2012, actually. If you look at CSFB’s mortgage charts, the crap mortgages finally come to a close, volume-wise, at the end of 2011.

I don’t think reputation’s value is quite so transitory as you imply CSPenn. Further, I think it can be exchanged for money. Not “on SocNets” per se, but certainly reputation converts to money in many scenarios. If it did not, you would sell fewer student loans and I would not have clients I love so much.

Reputation has value, and you can translate that value into money, to be sure, but reputation itself I don’t believe can be made into a medium of exchange. Hard to envision a world in which a currency of reputation could mean me PayPal’ing you 4 reputation credits in advance of a big conference you’re going to.

Reputation’s value is contextual as well. My reputation with you is valued by you at a different rate than my reputation with, say, Chris Brogan, or with Loic LeMeur or Adam Curry. Strong personal relationships give reputation more staying power, just as having gold back up a currency gives that currency more legitimacy. If you trade only on the currency and there’s nothing backing it, it’s very transitory. The trouble with the digital economy is that it’s very difficult to establish what is fiat and what is legitimate value, and therefore reputation is only as durable as context.

I would have to say that your personal reputation is on a personal basis with each of your connections. The internet has given us the ability to tune in, or out, of anything we want at a staggering speed. Anyone can make one post that will make their reputation take leaps in the community. But, they can also screw their reputation with one sentence. We are all very finicky and I don’t think a system to give you reputation will work, it is already here with the masses.

I love this conversation.

To me, reputation is your most powerful but also most fragile asset. If you develop a reputation for being good to your word in all circumstances, you gain easier access to new people through friends you already know.

For example, I knew and had a good relationship with person A. When I met person B who was also friends with person A, Person B and I started out on firmer ground with each other, and had more inherent trust, because we both knew, liked and trusted person A. This is where the relationships you build with others store value.

Your reputation opens doors for you, and if you connect your friends to others, for them as well. What the “secondary beneficiaries” need to understand, however, is that if I recommend one of my connections to you, I have in some ways, insured the connection with my social and reputation currency as well.

So if I say to Business A- “you are looking for someone in this field. I really like person C, and hopefully they’ll be able to help you out and you’ll have a good relationship”, I am essentially betting or insuring a positive experience with my reputation. If things work out, I gain reputation as a good person who points people in a great direction. Both parties think I’m swell.

If it doesn’t work out, I gain no reputation points, so to speak, but I probably don’t lose any, either. If it turns out to be a hideous experience for both parties, or even one side of the equation, I lose reputation points, and people are unlikely to look at people I recommend in the future ( bad for everyone in my social network) People will think “What was she thinking? That was a rotten experience! She must be crazy!” And the “stink” of bad experiences and bad connections, broken trusts spreads fast and his hard to get rid of.

It only takes a few public or private mistakes to damage your reputation, and a lot of work to make it shine. So everyone should keep in mind that reputation, while more of a currency than a credit system, also has very little flex when it comes down to it, and needs to be treated as a precious and hard earned item. We need to be cautious with ours, and we should make it a point not to trash others’ reputation either, without due cause and personal experience rather than just second hand information.

The social web is a place where good things about you and bad propogate like rabbits, so reputation is vulnerable, but in the end, we need to treat it a serious thing.

i don’t think that Reputation deserves the weight it’s given.
it’s a false sense of security
you think you have control of it
but you don’t
other folks do
folks outside of your circle of influence

i think anything that rests in other people’s hands
should not be something important to who you are

rating systems are much better i think
:)

Chris,

I love the discussion of the semantics of what you’re asking for in the comments—this is some of the brainiest commenting I’ve read in a while!

While reading this in my email before popping over to comment, I had only one thought, semantics or not.

You have a digital measure of your rep right here. Your commenters and your comments show your reputation to the world. Having an empty bank account doesn’t mean not being worth knowing any more than having low comments means not being worth reading Yet with more monetary “worth” comes more real-world interest in knowing you, and with (good) comments comes online reputation. Groupthink gives a quick digital read to a new viewer: all these other people engage with Chris, he must be “worth” engaging with.

It’s true, it’s not easily quantified and compared (what would we do? Add up Chris Brogan’s comments/year vs. Dosh Dosh’s vs. Caroline Middlebrook’s vs. Stanley Bing’s? What to do about Seth Godin? No reputation because he has no comments? Does quality of comment count?), but I can’t go around comparing bank balances (or credit card balances, ouch) in the real world, either.

People measure your reputation online and off in a thousand tiny ways. Who knows you and how they feel about you is critical online, because other cues are so limited. This discussion is your card. It’s just a bit bulky for the wallet.

Regards,

Kelly

Reputation = “What have you done for [to] me lately?”

Glory is fleeting but screwups endure. I don’t want my screwups impacting my reputation, it’ll make me less likely to risk failure.

Didn’t we just talk about this?