Gen Y's Immense Social Capital There is no doubt about it: Generation Y is an exceptionally social generation. Yes, humans are a social species and people have loved to connect with other people throughout the ages. That is no different today than at any other point in history. What is different about Gen Y is that, with the influx of mobile technology and social networking sites dominating the web, we are more likely than ever to keep in touch with the people we meet.
My mother studied in France after high school. That was in the 1960’s, long before cell phones and the Internet were ubiquitous. She keeps in touch with one person from that time, a man that she dated briefly and who has now evolved into a retired bank CEO and intellectual eccentric. Two of my four sisters have spent up to a year living with this man and his family in their Paris apartment while studying abroad. I shared a bottle of wine and a masochistically satisfying crise-de-foie with his wife while I was in Paris interviewing young people for The Lattice Group. Afterwards, he took me on an historical tour of the neighborhood.
 My mother’s steadfast relationship with this man from her youth has without doubt yielded countless benefits for her and her family, but this kind of friendship maintenance of yore is also demanding and time-consuming. You have to call each other regularly, send Christmas cards and birthday notes. You have to make an effort to update all of your acquaintances’ many changing numbers and addresses. But what if you lose that over-stuffed address book? The contacts are lost into the abyss. Sure, you can track down your closest friends, but what about the bow-tie-wearing hedge fund manager you shared that fascinating conversation over bouillabaisse with two years ago? To me, a restless Gen Yer, this sounds like a really big effort. I am terrible at keeping in touch with people in the traditional way, and have gently (or not so gently) let acquaintances drift off my radar at a rapid pace. Until…Facebook.
Suddenly, not only my friends and acquaintances, but also interesting people I’ve met once or twice, are at my very fingertips. I don’t even have to call or write them to find out that they have changed numbers, cities, girlfriends, cats. They readily tell me so themselves by changing their status, or the details of their profile. There is no longer any excuse to lose touch with anyone. Now, you won’t even miss out on what used to be reserved for the most intimate of friendship circles. Just last night, Vetta and I put on our detective hats after spotting an unusually shiny ring on a far-away college classmate’s left hand in a Facebook photo album. Within minutes, we knew that she was engaged, where she had been proposed to and what dress she had been wearing when it happened. As for the fellow, he wasn’t in either of our personal networks but through his fiancée’s photos and profile, we could discern that he was a law student, had an annoying tendency to write sappy comments and liked double-stuffed Oreos. That’s good market profiling, right there.
This kind of information is not only handy for late-night stalking; it is a fantastic resource for career-building. Go onto any random person’s Facebook profile (or Myspace or Linked-in or any other equivalent) and you are likely to see that they have literally hundreds of “friends” listed in their personal networks. What a goldmine! Gen Y promises to have enormous social capital to throw around as they begin their professional lives, and that has the potential to translate into equally large business capital. Take our own modest endeavor: The Lattice Group. We post blogs and updates on social networking sites daily. It takes us little time and it reaps generous results: literally thousands of visits to our website and an immeasurable rise in awareness about our project, with hardly any budget or maintenance at all. Click, click, bingo.
We recently posted a guest blog about Networking by Wharton Business School student and Lattice Group board member Sarah Shaikh. She says that, “a large part of being a successful leader or achieving high goals is recognizing your weaknesses and then finding people to help you patch up those holes— only then can you fully realize your potential!” With the Internet and its proliferation of social networking sites, those hole-patching people will be easier to find.
The larger repercussions of how Gen Y leverages its immense social capital in an increasingly digital world will be interesting to follow. I know I’ll be following it. On Facebook. - Astri Photo on Flickr by luc legay under Creative Commons License.
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