Recommend This!: Delivering Digital Experiences that People Want to Share

Chapter 5

Measuring the Value of Relationships

If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.

—Franklin D. Roosevelt

So by now, you should have a dent in your head from the hammer we’ve been hitting you with—relationships are valuable. In this chapter, we talk about a framework and an equation that you can use to uncover the value of someone in your audience, to help you understand why short-term selling (especially through social) may be undermining the long-term success of your organization.

Relationship Energy

We know relationships have value, and we believe it is important to an organization to develop relationship goals and invest resources to nurture and build engagement with their audience(s). But we aren’t myopic. We recognize that in embracing the importance of relationships, any organization is committing time and other resources. So we knew that we needed a method to determine a return on that investment. We need to understand, measure, and manage the value of relationships. We need to understand how much relationships are worth to the organization.

Recognizing that need, we have developed a system to measure the “energy” of the organization’s relationship network. We have coined the term Relawatt (yeah, maybe a little corny, but it gets catchy after you use it awhile). Relawatts measure the strength of an individual’s “relationship energy,” and ...