There were many great discussions at the three-day Social Capital Markets (SoCap) conference this week at Fort Mason in San Francisco.  We’ll keep reporting and referring to these in the days, weeks and months to come.  Among their many accomplishments was a mastery of social media, including a dense twitter feed, viewable at #socap09, as well as an intelligent collective blogging approach.

One of the themes, championed by Jed Emerson, among many other high-profile thought leaders, was taking the concepts of impact investing (seeking social and environmental returns alongside the financial) into mainstream finance.  Within the broad context any community, this is just one of the many goals and missions we heard about.

But it is the one The Economist picked up on, unsurprisingly, in their day-after summary (tip of the hat to Ben Metz for bringing it to our attention).  Remember, this is the same publication who published  the cover (image at right) that Woody Tasch is using in his Slow Money road show.

They introduced their framing with the capital markets collapse a year ago:

The first SOCAP conference took place in the middle of the meltdown a year ago. There was a surge of registrations in the days after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, as some people disgusted by the traditional capital markets, and others who had lost their jobs and sought a new outlet for their skills, decided that social capital markets were worth a look. The event proved long on optimism but rather short on coherence. A year on, the thinking is more rigorous—if no less idealistic—and is increasingly being put into practice.

In their summary, they seem to agree with the Emerson premise:

Although these are still early days, “This philanthrocapitalist approach has begun to be taken seriously,” says Kevin Jones of Good Capital, a social-investment and consulting firm, and the creator of SOCAP. The amount of money in the social capital markets is still small compared with that in the traditional capital markets, albeit growing fast. Some of the bright new ideas will turn out to be turkeys. (But then so did the version of capitalism that imploded a year ago.) Hopefully, some of them will fly.

We’re not at all sure that this is the most important trend emerging from SoCap ‘09. With leaders like Emerson and Tasch on different trajectories, it’s clear that several narratives are commanding attention.

But it bears further review.  Just as those on the social entrepreneurial side expect that one day, there will be no distinction — all enterprises will internalize social and environmental factors into their decision-making — those on the progressive capital side of things think this is the fulcrum we must make to transform capital markets and support our collective goals.

Stay tuned here and at the SoCap blog and tweet stream for more perspectives.