In “Trust Agents,” Chris Brogan and Julien Smith write about how online friends aren’t equal to “move your couch” friends.

I totally understand where they are coming from. I have more than 1,700 people following me on Twitter, but I don’t know much about most of them. God knows I wouldn’t ask them to help me move my couch, but I have leveraged many of my online friendships into deeper, more meaningful and valuable trust relationships by attending a lot of events and building social capital and goodwill with folks.

How do I know?

I sent the following tweet today in an attempt to cash in on some of my hard-earned social capital:

Within a few minutes, I got four responses — all from people who I didn’t previously think of as “move your couch” friends. The main BlogWorld account even retweeted my plea for help.

Now I know that watching over @ReeseTheDog is a lot cuter and more fun than moving a huge-ass couch up and down flights of stairs in my apartment building, but I still think this is significant.

It’s not that your online friends can’t turn into “move your couch” friends, it’s just that you have to work hard to build up the social capital to do that. In my opinion, the best way to do that is to just be helpful all the time. Be a connector. Be a solver. Be a door opener for people. And don’t do it with the expectation of any kind of favor repayment.

If you do all these things, you’re a Trust Agent in my book. See you all at BlogWorld!

Jean-Luc David and Steve Matsumoto hosted their sixth Bellevue tweetup at Seastar on Sept. 23. (Photo by foleymo)

It was really easy for me to make it to Bellevue Tweetup 6.0, because it was in the same building as my office — Civica Office Commons. The tweetup took place in the building’s first-floor seafood restaurant bar area.

I wasn’t at any of the previous five Bellevue tweetups, so I didn’t know quite what to expect. The twitvite had only the name and bio of Steve Matsumoto, and I had no idea who he was. But a list of some of my favorite Seattle-area Twitter people were on the RSVP list and I had seen a few tweets earlier in the day. I knew it would be worth at least a quick drop in over a beer.

Like most tech/comm/media networking events I’ve attended this year, I got totally sucked in by all the great personalities and conversations.

I met Steve and had a quick conversation with Jean-Luc David (who I met at Gnomedex last month). Jodi Church was there and she brought her mom, Darla. I also chatted up some other tweetup regulars — Joe, Sean, Colleen, Pam, Liana, Tim and some others I’m forgetting at the moment.

Dave Manningsmith and I got into a deep philosophical conversation/debate on whether optimists are diluting themselves by ignoring the reality of the world. (I bet you can guess what my view is.)

I also met a couple of other cool people for the first time: Yumiko Sikora and Cathy Lalley.

Yumiko is a marketing manager with Quantum Fusion and she tweets in both English and Japanese. We talked about how people build community around language and how it’s no different online.

Cathy is the neighborhood marketing manager of the Bellevue Seastar and a few sister eateries. I blabbed to her about my grand scheme to help tiny neighborhood ma and pa food joints with their social media presence (perhaps a future blog post). We also had a quick discussion about the difference between nationalism and patriotism. (You didn’t expect me to go a whole night without talking politics, did you?)

All in all, it was a pretty good tweetup. I’ll be on the lookout for the next one Steve and Jean-Luc put together.