So in my desire to restart the blog, I started to write a post about The Whuffie Factor, an excellent book by Tara Hunt about social media, social capital and marketing. If you are interested in these things, then I definitely would recommend the book.
If you don’t know her, Tara is one my favorite thinkers in the whole marketing and social computing space. I originally came to know of her through Jane McGonigal who gave one of the keynotes (audio / slides) at SXSWi in 2008.
Jane is also one of my favorite thinkers. If you haven’t seen the linked slides or listened to the keynote and you are interested in design or business or marketing or games, then you really should. You can thank me later for sharing it with you.
Tara’s book is indeed very wonderful, and I will probably finish and post the blog entry about it later, but as I was writing it, I decided that there was a related but different topic that I wanted the first post on my restarted blog to be about.
Jane and Tara share an idea (in fact Jane credits Tara in one of her presentations) that I think is the single most important, intriguing and interesting idea that I’ve been exposed to over the past two years. Essentially, what it boils down to is the application of positive psychology (i.e. the science of happiness) to design.
Each has their own approach to the idea; Jane proposes that we can make life as a whole better by incorporating those things that make us happy into the design of reality.
The most interesting elements of her keynote (and her ongoing work) were that the “Economics of Engagement” or those things compel us to actively participate in experiences align directly with the those things that create real happiness for us as individuals.
Specifically, they are:
- Satisfying work to do.
- Experience of being good at something.
- Time spent with people we like.
- The chance to be a part of something bigger.
Based on her work, if you want to create lasting and meaningful engagement with customers, users or any other audience; then a design that incorporates one or a combination of the above characteristics is required. Additionally, these elements are maybe best demonstrated in the design of multiplayer games, which she describes as the “the ultimate happiness engine,” so incorporating some aspects of game design into your experiences may be the best way to accomplish creating engagement.
Aside: Jane’s idea above is one of the most important elements of the Framework for Social Media Engagement (created by my colleague Gorham Palmer and myself) that has been driving my social computing strategy work over the past 18 months. Look for more about the framework in a later blog entry.
Related, but a little bit different, Tara proposes that actually making the creation of happiness your business model is one of the ways to accrue Whuffie (or social capital) which in turn leads to the accrual of success in the marketplace. Based on her research, this is achieved by organizations who help create autonomy, competence and relatedness for their customers and stakeholders. This is another wonderful idea which I am actively working to incorporate into my strategy definition work for my clients.
It’s a pretty cool thing to be thinking about how one’s work can make the world a happier place…and the fact that the research and evidence also suggests that it is a sound business idea is really (as my father would put it) kind of a kick in the head.
