I clipped your post here with some references to similar posts by others on this topic
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/26869292326

Here’s a bit:

“Once we have a history and have shared personal stories we create a bond. In the future if that person needs help or you see them in a bind, you will make time to help them out…if you come across something you know they would like, you are more prone to share.
Basically you tend to look out for each other when you have a bond.

A key point here to nurturing this is by creating situations/events where people can have opportunities to create bonds, as well as providing online environments that do the same”

Here’s some anecdotes
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/2720475858

Larry Irons has done some research into this, which inspired my gigantic post on organisational wellness
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2010/12/15/the-science-of-social-relationships-for-organisational-wellness-and-performance/

…it covers sharing personal stories, touch, the limbic brain, oxytocin, etc…paying attention to these things helps create high performance teams due to the focus on individual wellness

And I just have to share this magic quote from Karen Stephenson:
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/12924934006/trust-is-the-energy-field-that-binds-social-networks

“Trust is not unlike the shared electrons that bind benzene…Cursory calculations reveal that ‘matter’ matters little. Rather it is the field of energy that makes brick walls, steel plates and diamonds impenetrable. So it is with culture. Culture is impervious to process changes, change management or reengineering because of its field of energy: the networks of trust. Thus new knowledge will be accepted only if adopted by the networks.”

Small talk allows you to discover and create that mental map of what other people or groups find interesting, uninteresting, inspiring or repulsive. Small talk is making the attempt with the less vulnerable viewpoint on a topic that you can to discover what another person thinks of it.

Trust is moving up in degrees of vulnerability, and solidifying that mental map of topics you can discuss with people you know

Long ago, the Whole Earth Catalog was produced by people in two buildings, separated by an empty lot. In the empty lot was a volleyball court. Every day before lunch, people played volleyball. Then the landlord built a parking lot where the volleyball court used to be. The people on the production side and the people on the business side began referring to each other as “the other side of the parking lot.” Conviviality deteriorated when the volleyball games stopped. The problem, as noted previously, is how to scale the kind of trust that grows this way. It is only partially transitive. I’m willing to give a friend of JP’s the benefit of the doubt, but that doesn’t mean that JP’s friends’ recommendations carry much weight until I get to know them better. When social media first came along, it was my hope that it could help scale the kind of trust necessary for a group to grow its own social capital. To a degree — to a significant degree — this can be true. But just getting people to communicate online isn’t enough. Facilitating vulnerability, openness, the steps toward trust online is very much an art.

Place compassion and integrity ahead of celebrity.
Offer trust even after it proves misplaced.
Walk more than talk.

My comment about trust derives from the real experience of applying radical transparency in our work, which would bring years of defamation and then hijack. It would leave us empty handed after 6 years effort , such that our founder would be unable to fund urgently needed medical treatment and would die.

Yet, I knew only by offering trust could we expect it to be propagated. The Tao te Ching says that he who does not trust is not trustworthy and the following dramatisation makes the point that doing good depends on trust.

I find this notion of a state of vulnerability as a necessary facet of trust very interesting in the light of how sharing occurs in social networks today.
This is just a bit of brainstorming on that thought:

For one to feel vulnerable, they first need to feel a stake in it; consider it important; consider it on some measure of value in their own view.
They need to consider that it ties to their identity or that people will at some level associate them with it that (e.g., “I heard it from ____”). Depending
on how much they know the identity of the original author versus the person sharing it, the associated identity may get remembered differently,
per the end-receiver’s view.

Consider the trivial effort it takes to share in many such public social systems today, to the point of one-click behavior. For many it becomes as trivial to
reshare it under their identity and many consider it low-risk. There is little feeling of vulnerability or accountability — “It’s what someone else said/posted”.
One could argue that social networks today encourage less vulnerability and in turn create less trust.

That, or vulnerability itself is considered a lower significance at the risk of being irrelevant in the masses of public audience.

This I think is a population size problem, and problem with having power laws for network significance. In general, the more influential one is in the network
(high trust), the more people tend to listen to them, and the harder it is for newer potential influencers to disrupt the status quo. You get the “long tail”
effect with a tiny group of top influencers that then to perpetuate their leadership position and a large population of others at the mid and lower
ends of the curve looking to stand out.

Their options: share a-plenty. They may trade vulnerability (reputation-risk) simply for visibility, by pushing and sharing more messages without worrying
about the quality. Yet sometimes that simply works as memes catch on.

One key point is the “public” aspect of this. When the conversation is on a smaller group or audience level, there would seem to be more at stake.
The networks are smaller, so you don’t get to “hide” in the masses; your identity and reputation in that group is more directly known and impacted by
your actions of sharing. Vulnerability becomes a more important factor here.

In summary, there may be different rules to vulnerability as a factor of trust in small versus large audiences.

-rawn