I like doing nice things for people.

Makes me feel good and usually it makes the people I am doing the nice thing for feel special in some way. I do these nice things with no real expectation of anything in return except for maybe a thank you or a quick game of spin the bottle but I got to thinking a few months back while preparing for a talk I gave about the possibility of small business/social media communities moving to a favour based economy.

Stay with me here for a minute and think about it.

One of the pillars of Social Media according to the pioneers in the space is to “do for others” and “help 12 nice people before you ask for any help yourself” so following this idea why not run your business or actually incorporate a “Favour Bank” into future strategies and carve out time and resources to help others with the expectation that resources needed for your own projects from people with expertise that you may need outside of your own will be returned for all your hard work. Please realize I am not talking about karma here but rather a real (albeit informal) system of remembering who are the helpful folks and helping them back. I do this already and I am not looking for a pat on the back but rather your opinion on if this could work…or is it already happening.

What says you?