The Whuffie Factor by Tara Hunt

Author:Tara Hunt [Hunt, Tara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-44941-2
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2009-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

SOCIAL NETWORKING

Facebook (general social network), MySpace (music and general social network), LinkedIn (professional social network), Flickr (photo-sharing social network), Dopplr (travel social network), and many other sites are part of the social-networking umbrella of wonderful tools for building whuffie as you join up, build a profile, meet new friends online, and start building deeper connections.

One of the values of social networking is that people can draw others to solve common problems. As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg pointed out, the power in these networks is their ability to exploit the “social graph,” or the connections that people already have. Because of the myriad of communications tools built in, like messaging, events, photo sharing, commenting, groups, gift giving, and favoriting (or marking people's contributions as favorites), members of these networks are able to communicate more frequently and on various levels of intimacy. One can get to know another through ambient means: I can read someone's profile, watch their open dialogue, view their photographs, and track their news feeds to get to know them from a distance before finding a common bond through which to approach them. These public details create all sorts of opportunities for accelerating acquaintance between outlying members of a community.

Leisa Reichelt, who coined the term “ambient intimacy,” describes it as being “about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn't usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they've redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they're hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they're having drinks with tonight.”4 The community members grow bridges and bonds, and the community becomes stronger through these ongoing interactions. If you share ambient intimacy with your customers, you will get to know them so well that you will be able to anticipate their needs. If you share your own details in the same way, you will build deep relationships and bonds of trust that will create incredibly strong whuffie.

Using these tools is as easy as your day-to-day offline interactions, only you are interacting virtually and through the various web tools provided, whether it is video, chat, blogging, twittering, or collaborating on a wiki.

Whuffie flows from the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation that moves quickly within these social networks. And each of the networks that operate online has an incredible amount of whuffie to excavate. Of course, you have to follow the rules of the tools and interact appropriately. But by interacting positively and frequently, and following the lessons from this section, you increase your chances of making those connections that will lead to more bridging capital—and becoming part of the community you serve.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.