Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace – it’s dying and reads as cheap / generic. Remove all Flash from your website. Remove all stupid intros and load-times. MAKE IT SIMPLE TO NAVIGATE AND EASY TO FIND AND HEAR MUSIC (but don’t autoplay). Constantly update your site with content – pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time. Put up a bulletin board and start a community. Engage your fans (with caution!) Make cheap videos. Film yourself talking. Play shows. Make interesting things. Get a Twitter account. Be interesting. Be real. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested. NEVER CHASE TRENDS. Utilize the multitude of tools available to you for very little cost of any – Flickr / YouTube / Vimeo / SoundCloud / Twitter etc.

All of the above can really be boiled down to one word, whuffie. Yes, that wacky term from Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom but the idea is very relevant to anyone since the more you interact with people, the more ways you are judged.

Each time you Google someone’s name to see what they are about or what they’ve done, you are checking out their whuffie. The open source world thrives on the idea of whuffie. You know people based on their IRC handle or email address. When someone who has earned the right to commit code into the main repository, they have done so by creating enough whuffie that they are trusted.

All of this comes together in Tara Hunt’s new book, The Whuffie Factor. The main focus of the book is how companies can increase their whuffie with customers, how they can focus on creating conversations and communities. This whuffie is enhanced by interactions with social media, things like Flickr and Twitter or even Facebook. Every company is different and how they interact with their customers needs to flow from within the company not just what others have done. There’s nothing worse than seeing a company try to hard to do this and it come off as shallow or insincere.

I read the book thinking how my company and even my parent company could do more to create the positive whuffie necessary for survival in the 21st century. It seems like such a big task, one that doesn’t seem feasible. But that’s the challenge for each of us, find places where we can interject and move our companies to have a customer-centric outlook instead of only viewing things from a purely revenue-centric model.

The only critique I have for the book is not really a fair one. I was looking for a silver bullet on how I could increase my personal whuffie instead of just the company’s. My hope was much the same as any writing books I’ve picked up through the years, that I’d find the secret, one that didn’t require much work but instead a simple formula and BOOM!, I’d be an author.

But that isn’t how you write nor is it how you create your whuffie. You do so with each blog post, each Tweet, each Flickr photo, each comment on someone else’s blog, each time you get involved in something larger than yourself. That’s how you build whuffie up. Tara has created an amazing amount of whuffie for herself in all that she has done. I’m very glad she was able to share some of the ways she did in the book. Definitely pick it up if you have the chance, it is well worth it.

Just as a disclaimer, Tara’s publisher sent me a review copy. I didn’t have to promise anything in return and I definitely would have purchased the book on its first day if it would have been necessary. In fact, I probably should just to support @missrogue.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit. My only quibble was the lack of real meat in the discussion about the math and the systems but it’s understandable since this was a book for the mainstream not geeks like me.

The ability to take large amounts of data and analyze it would seem to be something only companies would be able to do but I think individuals can do their own now. You could use the combination of EC2, Hadoop and Mahout and become a Numerati yourself.

One of the main points I took away from it was how the lowering of transaction costs caused new ways of communicating to happen as well as causing people to interact with each other and other things in different ways.

I work for a newspaper which is part of a large media company. We are definitely aware of what happens when transaction costs are lowered. The transaction cost for getting news used to be high enough that people were happy getting their news printed on paper once (maybe twice) a day, usually in the morning. Now, those costs are non-existent and the explosion of choices for finding news is proof of that. Sure, we could whine and complain about it (and lots of people do) but there isn’t a way of putting that genie back in the bottle. The transaction costs for the acquiring of news will continue to be low and the need for a daily print edition of a paper will become less and less.

I’ve been thinking about the transaction cost for RSS lately as I’m trying to get our blogs to have the full-text feed instead of just the partial. I’m sure others have figured this out before me but it finally dawned on me why this is important. The person reading the full-text feed in their RSS aggregator doesn’t just have lowered transaction costs for reading the blog but they also have lowered costs for sharing what they are reading. If someone has to read a snippet of a post, click a link and then continue reading before they even think about sending the link around, they probably won’t do it. On the other hand, if they are in the flow of reading something cool and can easily send a quick note off or put it up on del.icio.us, that’s way more likely.

If you want traffic, you need people to share links and tell others. It’s really not that hard yet we constantly miss chances to help people out.

It’s a great noir tale set in an alternate version of Alaska where the United States made it a haven for Jews after World War 2 but now the government is in the process of transferring ownership back to the hands of the native Alaskans.