Webinarmed / BeaconLive Blog

I came upon The Whuffie Factor almost by accident when browsing through the business section of a now defunct Borders store.  The title itself nearly turned me off the purchase, (Whuffie?  What?  What would people think seeing me reading this on the train?!), but hey, it was a book on Social Networking discounted down to $3.  I figured if I took one useful fact from this book, I would more than make my money back, so I can manage to read a crazy titled book.  Throughout each chapter I quickly realized that I was reading a Social Marketing Gem.  I was learning new marketing ideas that were not only pertinent to my job, but to all the small business owners who regularly ask me for marketing advice (in fact, I Amazon’d the book to two friends who own small businesses with a demanding ‘Must Read’ note).

I feel I must first introduce Whuffie, to get beyond the blockade that likely stands between a person in need and a person who has major whuffie (Not that any of you would judge a book by its cover, or title).  Whuffie is merely your reputation, your currency and your personal bankability in the business and social media world.  A name which takes its roots from science fiction theory (read more about that here), is a little less silly, as it is to say it (Hey, Google, Yahoo and Twitter once sounded weird before becoming a part of our everyday vocabulary).  We all live on our reputation.  When we offer advice at a tradeshow, it is our Whuffie that allows our conversation participant to determine our value and credibility.  When we sell a service, its our word that determines our worth.

Besides the extremely useful social marketing tips taken from this book, I also found myself engrossed in the case studies weaved throughout the chapters which describe the challenges that companies faced and how they found solutions by using various social networking tools.  The case studies are truly what motivate the reader, and marketer, to search for innovative ways (as well as implementing blaringly obvious ones) to look at their customers and decide how to engage them rather than speak at them and hope for the best.  It’s a rather obvious technique that we already instinctively know, but many of us ignore, as we continually don’t find our customers accepting our social proposal of engagement.  The Whuffie Factor takes on the subject well, offering varying suggestions to reattempt the conversation.

In this book, you will learn the correct ways of joining the social community that your customers are in, ways to create amazing customer experience (through trial and error examples), and ways to market your product or service in an arena where people seek what you have to say.  The whole book is extremely readable – just be prepared with a notepad for taking notes.

While most marketing books are old news by the time they are published, The Whuffie Factor does an excellent job of staying relevant by offering more than a description of social networking sites, but teaches us how to engage with our customers through a standard social media medium.  The Whuffie Factor was published in 2009 (3 years ago!) in a fast moving industry where if you aren’t the biggest thing, you hardly deem to exist, but still manages to be a reliable source for how to use social media effectively for your business (just ignore the section where they introduce that new micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters- you already know that part).  I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in using social media for their business, small or large, but needs to know where to start.  This book is also a great read for all the social media experts out there who assume they know how to engage their customers, because, its can’t hurt to learn a little bit more.

Update: While I did purchase The Whuffie Factor at Borders, the two copies that I purchased for my small business owner friends were titled The Power of Social Networking: Using the Whuffie Factor to Build your Business.  It seems, I wasn’t the only one potentially scared off by the Whuffie title, as the second editions name was changed.