Measuring an Enterprise's Whuffie

Whuffie is a general measurement of the overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to one's favorable or unfavorable actions.

In the enterprise context, Whuffie is also an indicator of the Social Capital of an enterprise and how an enterprise gains a favorable advantage through the direct or indirect use of social connections. For our concern, we are looking at digital social connections (facebook, myspace,  linkedin, blogs etc)

As enterprises move towards the social computing era and embrace social networks and Web 2.0 components (blogs, wikis, discussion forums, twitter etc), need for managing your relationship with the social computing environment is becoming a necessity.


The first question in everybody's mind is how do I manage and filter the huge amount of information that is generated all over the web. How do I know what to track, what all matters in the digital space.

What are the various measures that can be used to calculate the social computing impact ?

• Track the source(s) where the enterprise's brand, product or services are being discussed or being commented
• Measure the number of posts, comments, tweets, links being generated about the enterprise, brand, product, industry
• Measure the context or tone or sentiment in which the enterprise's brand, product or services are being discussed. Are users/customers feeling happy/sad or are just indifferent. This can be measured using variety of techniques - text analytics, NLP
• Track the people that are writing, commenting, following, linking or sharing information about your enterprise. So if a person writes about your product, then the popularity of the post will be based on how many people view that post, how many follow that author and how popular is the post. This will give an idea on amount of influence the author. 

If an enterprise is able to track and measure the above measures, it will a have very good idea on the social communities and users are perceiving the enterprise. This will provide the enterprise Whuffie.

In order to help enterprise measure the Whuffie or the social capital, there are various products in the market in the Social CRM space that are adept in managing the enterprise social interactions in the social network space. Companies like Radian6, Lithium are providing solutions in this space.

But enterprises need to remember, measuring the social impact is not similar to measuring the discount coupon's usage. The social impact created by customers talking positive about your products/services create a much larger impact on your social capital and eventually to the economic capital. In case customers are not happy, then it is an indication that the enterprise needs to resolve the problem(s).