Recently Tara Hunt spoke at the Web 2.0 expo where she talked about her upcoming book ‘The Whuffie Factor’ and how to increase your social capital.

Social capital and whuffie is basically the same thing, – it’s a reputation currency. Tara got the word from Cory Doctorow’s book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom where it’s described as a futuristic replacement for money.

“A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions.”

A person’s whuffie can literally be used to pay for stuff and the more whuffie you got, the less $$ you need. But in reality, this is simply a set of guidelines on how to create relationships online. Measuring whuffie is just a way to convince companies that they can’t just ignore it, and have to embrace social media, rather than shy away from it.

Personally I’m a big fan of this approach to measuring social media capital. Social media investments can be extremely hard to measure. Traditional marketing results are much easier to transfer to a graph and show of to companies.

5 things that will increase your whuffie

1. Turn that bullhorn around
   Stop blasting your message out and start creating relationships. Listen to your customers and react to feedback as fast as possible
2. Become part of the community you serve
   Figure out who you are serving and become part of their lives. Engage, but DON’T sell. Break it down and identify who, why and what makes people interested in you and be interested in them!
3. Create amazing customer experiences
   Make people LOVE your service or product, really love. Appeal to emotion, inject fun into you or your product, give people control, simplify, make happiness your business model.
4. Embrace the chaos
   Don’t try to control the message. Basically this is about facing the chaos (problem) and actively showing that you are addressing it. See it as a chance to improve
5. Find your higher purpose
   Find a way to give back to the community by thinking ‘customer centric’. Send them to other websites, don’t cut down on customer service.

This really doesn’t do the talk justice so have a look through the 317 slides and watch the hour long video.