Book Review – The Whuffie Factor – Tara Hunt | Broadcasting Brain - different thoughts about thinking differently

Book Review – The Whuffie Factor – Tara Hunt

28th January 2010, 07:00 am

This is a book review of The Whuffie Factor – Using The Power of Social Networks To Build Your Business by Tara Hunt of HorsePigCow.com.

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.

Verdict (out of 10): 8 (recommended; some good ideas to help companies to grow a heart and a soul)

My methodology for book reviews and affiliate links: I’ll provide an Amazon.com affiliate link (or other related affiliate link) for content if I think it’s worth buying and reading. If I don’t, I won’t provide an affiliate link. The affiliate link helps fund my content creation activities.

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