This video is great isn’t it?  Certainly pumps one up that social media is here to stay and continue to thrive.  But putting aside hype, there is real business value to be captured with social leverage.

I mention this because I’m speaking today at Defrag, a conference out in Denver that delves into a wide variety of social media aspects ranging from consumer to business issues.  The topic of the panel I am on is titled, “Is ‘Social Leverage’ the next big thing for VCs?”  Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Roger Ehrenberg  and Howard Lindzon are on the panel as well, all great investors and innovators in the social category. 

As I thought about the panel topic, the basic conclusion I came to after mapping out Trinity Ventures’ portfolio as it relates to social leverage (see below), is that social leverage is powerful as a business model.   It struck me how universal this model can be as it can apply to both business oriented services as well as the more obvious applications we see clearly on the consumer side.  It can create broad mass market businesses as well as thriving vertical, more private and focused communities (as Roger also pointed in the latter half of his blog post about today’s panel here). 

The business model of Social Leverage enables lower cost of customer acquisition (viral in consumer ala PhotoBucket for photo sharing and botttoms up trial and adoption in enterprise ala CubeTree for a next gen intranet) as well as lower cost of content acquisition and content management (users contribute content, rate content, moderate content ala Care.com in consumer to help find a babysitter and LoopNet in enterprise for commercial real estate listings). 

I’ll have more to say on this during the panel and I look forward to hearing how Fred, Roger, Brad and Howard define Social Leverage and to get your input.