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

Finally - this book begins the Miss Manners column for social and online networking! I've been trying to explain to my students that building social capital N-O-W is like starting a 401K right out of school or an IRA now too! Just as one should build financial capital over time, one must also now build social capital! My favorite part of the book: I LOVE the tables included in the book about the deposits and withdrawals of social capital in particular!!! YAY!

I highly recommend this book. It helps the reader grasp the concept of Social Media tools.

Brilliant. All marketing and business professionals should read this book. This is what customers hope companies understand. The Whuffie Factor illustrates some of the key objectives for companies looking to participate in the market conversation. At Idiom Strategies, a conversation marketing agency, we outline the five key objectives as: 1) Listen to current customers, prospects, industry experts and other influencers in the market space and internalize what you hear to improve your business. 2) Speak to the overall market conversation with quality, supportive and helpful content that people want to respond to, inquire about and pass on to others. 3) Care about what is being said about your products, your company, your competitors and your industry, but even more important, care about helping your customers and prospects fulfill their wants and needs. 4) Share your experiences--positive and negative--and your insights as you grow your company and evolve your product lines. 5) Build relationships with market conversation Influencers, Participants and Listeners based on the mutual interest of the consumer problems that need to be solved with product innovation.

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.

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.