Do a search for “The Whuffie Factor reviews” on a traditional search engine, and something interesting happens. In the area that SEO experts lust for – those glorified first five results - a blog post pops up. It’s a modest post, just a few flattering paragraphs covering Tara Hunt’s guide to social media for businesspeople, but there it is - smushed right between Amazon’s own review and the book’s official website. A quote from within the post unveils the significance of that blog’s page rank – and quite serendipitously proves the power of the “Whuffie” movement as a whole:

“When Tara tweeted offering to send folks an advance copy of her book The Whuffie Factor to review I responded right away, though I didn’t expect to be chosen. Virtually nobody reads this site.”

No one reads this site. Right. As so many of us are exasperatingly aware of, things don’t just hit the front page of a traditional search engine by sheer luck. So how did one “readerless” blog become the go-to place for a review on a popular marketing book? Well, it was Whuffie.

“Whuffie,” a term coined by the author Cory Doctorow, is a friendly word for a powerful concept: social capital. Social capital, also known as the return on investment that comes from gathering trustworthiness and approval online, is one of today’s most compelling reasons to be deeply entrenched in social media. But does the investment pay off? If that self-described small beans blogger turned Whuffie pro-evangelist* is any indicator, yes. However, that post didn’t SEO the heck out of itself just because Tara believed in investing in her community - it got there because her community had money of its own.

For a blog post to reach the top of a traditional search engine’s results, a rather huge, combined community investment must be made– one that is very rare to come across. Not only does a blogger need to write about the search topic, but they also must inspire a ton of other bloggers to write about it, linking their posts back to the original one so that it builds page rank. In terms of social capital, blogs are expensive, taking up tons of the time and effort of very nice, willing people. Thankfully, this mass investment is no longer needed in the area of realtime search, where significantly simpler shares are highly influential in the ranking of search results. Shares are effortless compared to blog posts, taking only seconds of user’s time (yet offering plenty of that same good Whuffie) - and everybody loves to share.

Michael Arrington recently penned something like this: “Re-tweets are the currency of the web.” At OneRiot, where a realtime result’s PulseRank is influenced by those retweets, we agree – but we venture to take it one further. The currency of the web lies not in a simple re-tweet, but in sharing as a whole. Whether it’s via email, thru Twitter, across Facebook, over IM, or hyper-dispersed thru a tool like Yoono, a share indicates a web user’s assignment of value. When a person shares something of yours, they’re assigning that value to you. How awesome is that.

In business speak, shares are to the web what referrals are to the real world – they are the word of mouth marketing of the internet. Online friends listen to online friends because they have already built up the same complex rapport that forms the online backbone of Whuffie. They trust each other and they respect each other – so they click on each others’ links. A lot. And when people click on links, cool things happen. Articles get read. New products and tools are discovered. Links get re-shared. Sometimes, people even buy stuff. Sounds a bit like the kind of stuff you’d want a marketing campaign to achieve, doesn’t it? To us, it sounds like the building blocks for a new kind of SEO.

In business speak, shares are to the web what referrals are to the real world – they are the word of mouth marketing of the internet.

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