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.

As the readers savvy to our ranking algorithms know, there is a heavy relationship between sharing and the ranking of our search results. You can read up on the details of that here, but the gist of it is that links tend to wind up as search results on OneRiot when someone (and frequently, lots of someones) shares them online. The way we see it, each new share represents a fresh link to realtime information – the stuff people care about, right now. Obviously, this amplifies our general sentiment that sharing is pretty freakin’ important, because it is the most organic way to determine something’s importance that we know of today.

So how do you encourage sharing, embrace your share-ers, and reap the benefits of Whuffie? You enable it. D’oh, right? You’d think so. But as Tobias noticed the other day, only a small number of Internet companies are actually making sharing as easy for their users as they should be. For instance, only a handful of publishers are offering their readers easy, impulse friendly ways to share their content (like sticking a “Tweet This” button on every post). Only a slightly bigger set are putting a fair effort into sharing their own content through social media channels. The smallest set - those that are engage in a healthy mix of both (Mashable is a great example) - are winning, amassing their own social capital and capitalizing on that which already exists in the hands of their users. That said, all the “Tweet this” buttons in the world won’t amount to anything if the content you’re giving your reader isn’t valuable, sharable stuff – but we’ll save that discussion for another post.

The investment seems obvious – the more people share your links, the more valuable those links will become to you. Sharing creates visibility, visibility creates traffic, and traffic creates business. On the flipside, if people aren’t sharing your content, you’re missing out, bigtime, because today’s most effective web marketing is happening via the passing of social capital from computer screen to computer screen.

When Tara shipped her unreleased book off to a nice guy who happened to be very interested, she set off a series of events that led to a big increase in social capital for her – one that’s still paying off. Tara gave her online community the tools they needed to share information, and they essentially took over a chunk of the marketing campaign for her book. The difference between that story and the ones we now get to write is the ease with which we can create ours. Enable people to share your content, and they will. Share your own content, and people will embrace it. Make Whuffie, make it to the top of our search results. Every day.

Now if you don’t mind…Tweet this?

*The author of that great Whuffie Factor review was Chris Patterson, by the way. You can find him here and here. Killer post, Chris