Customer Reviews

The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've become increasingly accustomed to ideas best captured as magazine articles being extended into books. It's sometimes a bit offensive to be sold something long when something short would have done.

"The Whuffie Factor" is something else entirely -- a sentence or a paragraph expanded into a book.

Here it is: Your social reputation is important, so cultivate it well.

Save your money. This book is insulting.

I liked this book. A reader might find it helpful to see why using social network sites and blogs to build (grow) a Web platform and possibly a customer following is the way to go in the Digital Age we live in today. I certainly will recommend this well written tome to my SCORE clients who either are stumbling with New Media or need to learn about it for the first time. The book has the following ten chapters:

1. How to be a social capitalist
2. The power of community marketing
3. Turn the bullhorn around & create continuous conversations with customers
4. Building whuffie by listening to & integrating feedback
5. Become part of the community you serve
6. Depositing into & withdrawing from your whuffie account
7. Be notable: 11 ways to create amazing customer experiences
8. Embrace chaos
9. Find your higher purpose
10. Whuffie "in real life"

You might not be familiar with the term "Whuffie" before reading this book. I know I wasn't. It supposedly stands for "the store of social capital that is the currency in the digital world." Marketing today in the New Media is about building relationships. It's about give and take. It's not about "in your face" or just throwing money into advertising campaigns. By reading this book you should better understand what online marketing has migrated to be about and why it is important to go with the flow.

This book is not going to tell you how to plan an online marketing campaign. The best book on that subject that I know of is Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day. And to learn more about blogging I recommend: ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, and Secrets of Successful Blogging System. This last item is kind of pricey. But in my humble opinion it is really worth its weight in gold. I have posted book reviews on Amazon for all three of these products. 4 stars!

The concept of Whuffie is that of a sort of "cultural currency"; that is, how good a person's or organization's reputation is. Ms. Hunt is obviously a veteran of the Web, and she makes some good points - in essence, that one needs to be honest and moral in order to achieve high Whuffie rather than just try to use the Web as another outlet or venue for typical one-sided marketing hype.

No argument there; certainly if we could all check our egos at the door and put out honest appraisals of products (including our own, including admitting when we screw up) then it will engender more positive feelings on those that wander around the WWW to shop, etc.

I didn't rate the book higher only because I get the sense that Ms. Hunt thinks that the Web is the be-all-and-end-all of the world of commerce. Certainly, many people (myself included) log on multiple times a day, but nevertheless I don't think of my online presence as the essence of me. Too, there are still many people who either never get to the online world at all or else only sparingly, preferring "real reality" to "virtual reality" and so not so absorbed in what happens online.

So as a general instruction guide of how to do good online, this book is fine. As an attempt to prove that it is (or will be in the foreseeable future) critical to enjoy high Whuffie levels, it falls way short.

I was lucky enough to meet Tara Hunt at the WordCamp 2009 conference in San Francisco, and heard her 30-minute piece on 'Whuffie'. Apart from being an engaging presenter with a clear perspective of her subject, she makes excellent points that are crystallized in the book. I'd thought about some of the ideas prior to hearing her but never really formed an over-arching opinion of what it meant - this book convincingly cements some of those concepts.

Rather than summarize the book in detail, the fundamental concept is that marketing to your customer has changed. The long-entrenched system of throwing money at marketers to create ads that scream for our over-stretched attention is dead: we see this in the death of newspaper ads and the collapse in the cost of TV advertising. We just get too much noise with too much disinformation to be interested, and we don't believe the messages. In the new model, we trust opinions of friends and we like companies that aren't afraid to hear criticism and deal with it, and she gives several excellent examples of this. This is 'Whuffie' - social capital that you can trade for business.

Many people I've heard talking around this topic tend to slip into vagaries at about this point, but Tara Hunt has solid hands-on practical advice to help generate Whuffie. Clearly, there's no definitive 12-step plan for every company, but there are ideas that are employable in every business. My wife's a Marketing Director and has already started to use some of the advice in the book, and her opinion is that it's *transformational* in terms of customer relationships and staking your place clearly from competitors, compared with barely incremental in traditional advertising.

If you've had a nagging feeling for a while that social media is changing everything, this book is valuable in understanding how to engage your customers and create this social capital that allows your business to flourish. I just wish it wasn't called Whuffie, but at least it makes the point memorable when trying to enthuse your co-workers.

As a Higher Education Administrator, I encourage all my colleagues to read Tara Hunt's "Whuffie Factor". As more and more colleges and universities integrate Social Media tools, it is imperative that those who make decisions about college "communications" read this book and get great insight. Listen to your students, staff and faculty and have engage them in conversation!

I highly recommend it as a must read! Thanks Tara for all your work on this wonderful book!

Since reading Whuffie, I have gained a wonderful perspective and working knowledge of social media and the value that it holds. Tara Hunt does a wonderful job of not only explaining the basic concepts of social media, but she brilliantly gives examples that send the points home. I have now become more involved in GIVING online as I have joined many conversations along the way. My followers on twitter and facebook have jumped dramatically and I even humbly found myself a list of the most influential real estate people on twitter due to my efforts directly from reading Whuffie.
I have turned the bullhorn around, and I have become a more active part of the communities that I serve. I have deployed some of the lessons in the book in my company and we are now more focused on creating amazing experiences for each and every customer.
I highly recommend this book to those who could benefit from really getting what social media is all about..and that's everyone.
If I can help you further with your decision, I would be happy to help..and that's what Whuffie is all about.
Contact me on twitter @johnreinhardt
Good Luck.

No Meatball Sundae for her.

I'm using The Whuffie Factor right now to help a client understand the broader principles at stake beyond their current weak benchmarks in terms of external links, and other mentions of company resources online.

As a practitioner of search marketing (what is often misunderstood to be a narrowly technical field), increasingly I see the companies who increase their "whuffie" across the board to be very resilient in terms of the bottom-line-enhancing digital referrals they consistently get from search engines and similar sources.

It's all interconnected.

The value of this book isn't in proving that the author herself used social media tactics to promote her own business (those examples are self-reinforcing, in a way). It's that old-school companies who now hope that you can gaze at the keyword density of a few key pages on a website, and increase "rank" and "traffic," need the practical insights here that add up to a much broader audience building strategy: increase your Whuffie.

The Whuffie concept is well chosen and will help reinforce your sense of just how universally important it is to build your social currency, in any walk of life.

This is a most read for anyone interested in social media and networking. Tare writes in an easy follow and enjoyable to read style. She give common sense useable advise and examples.

How I got the book:
It was a Christmas present, on my list. I'm serious. You'll be seeing me repeat this phrase for awhile.

Background:
Tara Hunt is a marketer and an entrepreneur who has been blogging for a number of years. This book captures her thoughts about how to build social capital (or reputation or goodwill or karma...) at the organizational level. Whuffie is the term coined by writer Cory Doctorow in one of his novels to represent a kind of currency, derived from reputation, good deeds, and favorable public opinion. In his novel, whuffie permits the individual to enjoy a higher standard of living depending on how much whuffie they have.

Hunt takes the basic concept and uses it in the real world. She also extends it to businesses as a concept for them to use as a means to build up goodwill with customers, members of the communities they participate in, and the general public. If done right, the book suggests, whuffie can help drive business growth.

The strengths:
Tara writes in a warm, conversational style. She manages to work in her personal experiences without being boastful, merely presenting them as living examples of the concepts that she's writing about.

The book intermingles both whuffie and community management, which provides the bridge to the enterprise being able to accumulate and use whuffie. There are a number of examples of companies doing things to build whuffie/goodwill from the very beginning, as well as companies like Dell that weathered a storm of negative opinion and used social media tools to help win back the confidence and trust of its customers.

The table which gives examples of how to build (and lose) whuffie is a practical tool, as is The Entrepreneur's Whuffie Checklist.

The areas for improvement:
One thing that I think would have served this book well was to reference Seth Godin's The Purple Cow(which I highly recommend if you are into marketing, spreading new ideas, and generally trying to do amazing things) and his concept of "remarkable" in the section where Tara writes about being "notable". To me it's the same thing and I think it would have been a good idea to acknowledge where Seth Godin had already gone with this concept.

Another thing is that I found that the book rambled a little bit, bouncing back and forth between personal whuffie building and community building. It felt like the book was charting a path between two similar but ultimately different subjects. I still see whuffie as something individuals, not businesses, accumulate.

Other points of interest:
I particularly enjoyed the anecdotes about Moleskine, Threadless, and Ma.gnolia.

Whuffie is social capital that is built through connections among and between people in communities of shared interest. While most of Whuffie is generated and exchanged through on-line connections, most of the principles expressed by the author are relevant in the physical realm of face-to-face networks, as well.

Community Engagement Principles for Whuffie Development
Powered by a positive psychology culture of generosity, Whuffie is built on egalitarian principles that help shape user autonomy, competence and relatedness. Here are the central themes:

1.Listen well - turn the bullhorn around...
2.Become part of the community you serve...
3.Develop and deliver remarkable experiences...
4.Embrace the chaos - expect the evolution...
5.Operate with a higher purpose - pay forward...

Hunt illustrates these principles in the heart of her book with examples from business, politics, culture, public policy and services. She could easily extend these applications to the services, media, education and religion, where collaborative thought and behavior and respectful influence are essential conduits for the advancement of these communities.

Building a Sustainable Sense of Community
The culture of community-building has been defined in many ways over vast reaches of social landscape. Hunt boils it down to four stages of community development, each of which is served by the Whuffie factor:

1.Feelings and Connections of Membership
2.Feelings and Assumptions of Influence
3.Integration and Fulfillment of Needs
4.Shared Emotional Stakes and Connections

One could easily reflect on the purpose of ethnic social clubs, athletic cultures, professional societies and policy movements to derive and demonstrate the same basic set of principles. Hunt puts these principles into the social capital context of Whuffie in a manner that demonstrates the power and dynamics of influence in a Web 2.0 world.