Jay Deragon argues in a short piece on AlwaysOn that social media and related tools are generating a new currency that is created by the propagation of your conversation and its relevance to your audience, and whose worth increases over time.
“A conversation turns to currency when people discover something meaningful in a “conversational” experience, they are prepared to spread the conversation as if it were their own. [...] Conversational currency is created by the propagation of a conversation by others that incorporate your conversation into their own narratives. The more valuable your conversation is the more likely they are to be propagated by others.”