Play Whuff

Tara Hunt, author

Reviews
Embrace the chaos! The Whuffie Factor weaves stories from Moleskine, 37Signals, Threadless, Willitblend, and Gary Vaynerchuk into a compelling story of the way business is now done. Tara doesn’t just talk about it, of course, she does it herself.

Social capital may be the most powerful currency of the twenty-first century, and this book is a guide to its care and feeding. Bursting with energy and enthusiasm, Tara Hunt shows us how to win friends and influence people in a Web 2.0 world.

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.

Whuffie is slang for social capital: your reputation, your credibility, your personal bankability. It's not as simple as the number of followers you have on Twitter, because that doesn't necessarily indicate your trustworthiness - there's plenty of spammers who've mastered the art of the followback. It's not as simple as the number of posts you've made on a forum somewhere, because that just indicates you're really good at clicking the Submit button.
Tara writes about marketing in new ways that I'd never considered. Marketing wasn't just a bunch of sexist guys designing magazine ads of barely-clothed women holding their product in provocative positions. Marketing meant understanding that places like forums, web sites and Twitter are, as The Whuffie Factor explains:
"...a simple but powerful online community where thousands of buying decisions are made every single day."
This message isn't just for companies: it's for employees. "Who cares," you ask, "if I'm not selling a product?" Even if you're not working a street corner, you're selling yourself. Future employers, future clients, and future coworkers are taking stock of your every action.
The Whuffie Factor demystifies the workings of social capital and marketing, and these explanations work great for IT geeks. Let's face it: we suck at networking, and we suck at marketing. We need all the help we can get. This book is the help, and we don't need a marketing background to understand how it applies to us.
The chapter "Become a Part of the Community You Serve" and the book's repeated message about turning the bullhorn around especially resonate with me, and it illustrates the problems with so many IT communities. Tara discusses how she worked with a web site to throw away their imaginary user profiles and connect directly with several real users instead using their own product. They became more and more intertwined with their own customers, and as a result, built better products. I've learned these lessons personally, and I found myself nodding over and over - and not because I was going to sleep.
Throughout the book, Tara gives simple, straightforward explanations of how to get whuffie, what happens if you do it right, and what happens if you do it wrong.

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.

By traditional marketing standards, this book is everything I detest. It has an annoyingly cute and trendy title. It is about a subject I think I already know a lot about.
Too make things worse, the first paragraph inside the fly cover starts off "The book that catches the crest of Web 2.0 and shows how any business can harness its power ..." If I were browsing books at a bookstore, that would probably be enough for me to put the book right back on the shelf, assuming I would have taken it off the shelf in the first place.
However, Tara Hunt sent a message out on Twitter asking for people to review the book, and because Tara has incredible whuffie and knows how to use it, I agreed to review the book and I'm glad I did.

Before starting a coworking space, I interviewed Tara Hunt, and was suitably informed. I told her I wanted to keep up with what she's doing, and she said "Oh, just follow me on Twitter."
I'm not exactly an internoob, but from what I'd heard, Twitter was a gossip engine for adolescent shut-ins. But I joined, and followed, and initially thought my initial suspicion was justified. There was a lot of "OMG, I can't believe the way my hair looks today" and "saw the cutest shoes at Macy's" and "having lunch with @bff", etc. And then, "registering for this conference (link)".
Turned out to be a conference in my industry. One I'd never heard of. And in two days. I registered, went to the event, discovered there was a huge segment of people I'd never reached before. Because I'm not using the channels they pay attention to.
Since then, I've been learning all I can about the statusphere and its importance to growing a business in the 21st century. Tara Hunt's new book is an essential primer for anyone whose business is dependent on the good will of their customers, suppliers, partners, and team members. Which is to say: all of them.
I don't care if you're a one-man-brand or a 20 billion dollar corporation, if you don't master these fundamental community-sustaining competencies, you will fail.

Interview with Tara Hunt
Tara Hunt is a name that means a lot to Social Media experts but not only. Enterprise marketers are also - or should be - familiar with her earlier attempts at promoting a new form of marketing philosophy entitled Pinko Marketing, the aim of which was to prolong the work that had been initiated by the cluetrain manifesto team at the end of the 1990's. Beside her involvement in Barcamp and the coworking project, the San Francisco-based Canadian online marketer has got back to writing a new book The Whuffie Factor which is now available in the UK. I have asked Tara to present her new opus to our Orange readers in this exclusive interview:

Tara, I saw in Twitter and on your blog that you were preparing a new book entitled "the Whuffie factor". Why did you choose that name and what is the message behind it?
The name evolved for me and was suggested by the publisher. The working title of the book was 'How to Be a Social Capitalist: building your business with online communities' but the publisher thought that social capital was too vague and meant too many things. When he saw that I told the story of Cory Doctorow's Whuffie*, John Mahaney (editor) shopped the word around and found that people really responded to it. First they would laugh, then after the term was explained, they would remember it. The Whuffie Factor means, in basic terms, that people should pay attention to their actions in online communities.
(*Whuffie is a term taken from SF writer Cory DOctorow's book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.)

And what has it got to do with Social Media and marketing?
Well, the key point to understand about social media is that it is meant to be social. Facebook and Twitter and Flickr weren't built as platforms for sales pitches, they were built as platforms for human interaction: conversations, relationship building, trust, support, etc. The Whuffie Factor is about how well you do on that level. The 'marketing' part will just happen naturally in these communities because people are talking about their everyday lives, looking for guidance on their purchases and choices and looking to get that guidance from their trusted circle of friends. If you've built good relationships, you will do well. The book is about how you get to that point.

Before we delve into Social Media, can you please tell us why enterprises have to do marketing differently?
I don't think this is news at all, but people have been talking about this little thing called the Internet for a little while now. And what the Internet opened up was the ability for individuals to increase the size of their networks and expand their conversations. In doing that, the one-way communication of mass media started to lose it's power. There have been a few good studies lately that show that Word of Mouth recommendations between friends and 'people like me' are only getting stronger. Therefore, the marketing that uses pure bullhorn type techniques (ads, SEO, etc.) are missing out on a huge opportunity.

So Social media can help us get to grips with this new way of marketing products and services. Can you explain?
It's about taking the marketing out of it all together for the time being. I don't even like calling the fantastic interactions I have online 'social media'. Prior to online communities, I didn't call my relationships 'social face to faces'. The way you can come to grips is by taking off your marketers hat and putting on your customer hat. When you hang out with your friends, what do you talk about? I'm guessing you are open and honest with them. You share stuff with them. You ask them about their lives. You figure out what their needs are so you can help out as a friend. And...when the time is right...you can help one another out. There are just more sophisticated tools available so you can do this with more people. That's it.

As a consequence, Social Media isn't just a toy for geeks, it's serious stuff for serious business people. Does it mean that the role of managing communities is the job of the future?
I'm torn on that one. On the one hand, having the role puts priority on it. It says, "community is important to us, so we're paying an employee to make sure it is taken care of." On the other hand, by delegating that role to one person, a company loses many opportunities to build multiple relationships between customers and the company.

So should we start considering pricing our products in Whuffie rather than dollars or pounds?
Ha. in my opinion, no. I'd like to stay away from measuring it in the near future. Cory Doctorow, who came up with the term, warned us of the inherent problems of measuring whuffie in his book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. The biggest issue is that, once measured, it is totally gameable.

If you had only one piece of advice for our readers to get the Whuffie factor right, what would it be?
Imagine yourself at a party. How do you act if you want to meet people and make friends? Do you enter the party and just talk about yourself and leave once you get what you want? Or do you slowly enter the conversations, listening to people, joining in when you have something to contribute, asking people about themselves, exchanging jokes and being light-hearted? Probably the latter. That's also how you need to approach online communities if you want to raise your Whuffie.
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