Knoxify

Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, social media isn’t the end of civ­i­liza­tion as we know it. Face­book didn’t put a stop to inter­per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. LinkedIn doesn’t neg­a­tively impact the vital, vibrant pulse of the busi­ness com­mu­nity. Twit­ter hasn’t replaced the kitchen table or the cor­ner bar for mean­ing­ful human inter­ac­tion. Rather, these social net­work­ing plat­forms and oth­ers have height­ened con­nec­tiv­ity world­wide and right here in our own backyard.  

Some folks might con­sider Knoxville an improb­a­ble hub of fre­netic dig­i­tal activ­ity. I beg to differ.

While I don’t pro­fess to be an expert on social media, I am an avid prac­ti­tioner. What I’m see­ing first hand is an explo­sion of con­ver­sa­tion, a word-of-mouth rev­o­lu­tion that is bring­ing peo­ple together from dif­fer­ent back­grounds, diverse pro­fes­sions and polar-opposite points of view. It’s global. It’s national. And it’s local. Social media is alive and thriv­ing in our beloved bor­ough, nes­tled in the friendly foothills of the Smoky Moun­tains. From Far­ragut to Five Points, down­town to the burbs, area busi­nesses, entre­pre­neurs, indi­vid­u­als and orga­ni­za­tions are talk­ing … and tweet­ing a lot.

Talk­ing on Twit­ter is called “tweet­ing,” and names on Twit­ter are “Twit­ter han­dles” pre­ceded by an “@” sym­bol.  For instance, I’m “@laurabower.” So, in the spirit of the Twit­ter­sphere, that’s how I’ll refer to my tweeps hereto­fore. By “tweeps,” I mean the folks with whom I have a rela­tion­ship on Twit­ter. Tweeps speak in 140-character sound bites in an end­less loop­ing feed of chat­ter. But these tiny tweets of con­ver­sa­tion are only the beak of the bird, so to speak. I’m mak­ing new friends and redis­cov­er­ing old ones; I’m meet­ing fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple and broad­en­ing my per­sonal and pro­fes­sional net­work expo­nen­tially, all through Twit­ter. What I’m really doing is mak­ing whuffie!

In her book, The Whuffie Fac­tor, Tara Hunt elab­o­rates on the term “whuffie” coined by Cory Doc­torow in his futur­is­tic novel, Down and Out in the Magic King­dom. Hunt defines whuffie as the “resid­ual out­come — the cur­rency — of your rep­u­ta­tion.” Doc­torow, who also cre­ated the pop­u­lar blog Boing Boing, says whuffie will be the only cur­rency used in the future — dol­lars, Euros, etc. will sim­ply dis­ap­pear. In online com­mu­ni­ties as well as IRL (in real life), whuffie is a “core com­po­nent of con­nec­tion,” accord­ing to Hunt. Whuffie is both intan­gi­ble and invalu­able. Your whuffie is “weighted accord­ing to your inter­ac­tions with com­mu­ni­ties and indi­vid­u­als.” Hunt goes on to explain that the way to accrue whuffie is to “be nice, be net­worked or be notable.”

Within Knoxville’s close-knit, albeit far-flung, Twit­ter com­mu­nity, whuffie is gen­er­ated on a con­tin­ual basis. It’s dig­i­tal street cred. It’s the prana, or energy, that fuels our organic con­nec­tions to each other.

For exam­ple, I started fol­low­ing @saulyoung, a photo-journalist for the Knoxville News Sen­tinel, at the rec­om­men­da­tion of @MikeSCohen, a senior exec­u­tive with Ack­er­mann PR. I knew Cohen IRL but only knew of Young from his byline in the paper. How­ever, I went on a vir­tual road trip with him to Bon­na­roo this year, via Twit­ter and his photo blog, For­give us our lens. Later, we met in per­son. But I’d already formed an opin­ion of him as being witty, clever and kind through our Twit­ter friend­ship. Young was nom­i­nated as Best Tweeter in the Sentinel’s Best of East Ten­nessee poll, and the honor is well deserved — he’s got whuffie!

From @saulyoung’s net­work, I started fol­low­ing @CocoHolder, a local busi­ness­woman and civic leader. Turns out we’ve known each other IRL for years. Twit­ter served to reac­quaint us. She chooses not to use her actual name on Twit­ter, so I’ll honor her anonymity here as well. She’s wicked funny and sharp as a tack, and we found out just how much we have in com­mon through our “tweet­ship.” @CocoHolder and @saulyoung have oodles of whuffie, or social cap­i­tal, due to their pos­i­tive social net­work­ing interactions.

“In the gift econ­omy, the more you give away, the more whuffie you gain, which is com­pletely oppo­site from cur­rency in the mar­ket econ­omy,” says Tara Hunt. It’s like online karma, in a sense. @knoxlight is another Knoxville tweeter; she’s also an attor­ney and the head of a local non­profit orga­ni­za­tion. As with @CocoHolder, @knoxlight was a busi­ness acquain­tance before Twit­ter. Now she’s a friend and a men­tor, because she innately under­stands the con­cept of whuffie.

There are two orga­nized groups that have formed in the last sev­eral months, devoted to shar­ing and pro­mot­ing social media in Knoxville:  Knoxville Social Media Asso­ci­a­tion and Social Media Club of Knoxville, both of which host speak­ers and events to build com­mu­nity and gen­er­ate whuffie. In fact, KSMA and SMC have joined forces with Knoxville Over­ground to spon­sor the Knoxville Twes­t­i­val, part of an inter­na­tional char­i­ta­ble event that har­nesses the local power of Twit­ter in com­mu­ni­ties all around the world.

But for those of you who say, “I don’t care what Ash­ton Kutcher had for break­fast,” an infer­ence that Twit­ter is some­how triv­ial or super­fi­cial, let me remind you of the post-election rev­o­lu­tion in Iran that rode a wave of world aware­ness via the Twit­ter­sphere. Or the deaths of Michael Jack­son and Ted Kennedy, bro­ken on Twit­ter by mul­ti­ple news sources that tapped into our shared con­scious­ness and mutual grief. Then there’s the much-ballyhooed social media strat­egy suc­cess­fully employed by the Obama cam­paign, as part of a grass­roots, word-of-mouth polit­i­cal movement.

On the local front, @jamiescoop and @gpatterson12 have pro­vided bleeding-edge cov­er­age of the Christian/Newsome trial via Twit­ter, inte­grat­ing it with stream­ing video, blog­ging, tra­di­tional print and broad­cast sto­ries. This shared expe­ri­ence has tran­scended real and vir­tual bound­aries to touch every­one in Knoxville who cares about what hap­pens here.

I’ve even forged deeper rela­tion­ships with office co-workers through Twit­ter. @iberrychick has pro­vided tech­ni­cal assis­tance with Twit­ter plat­forms; both she and @audrehepbrn2007 have attended social media events with me. Because we work in dif­fer­ent areas of our com­pany, we would never have inter­acted on such a per­sonal level with­out Twitter.

“Tweet-ups” are face-to-face meet-ups for tweeps. One local group, the Just Us Leeg, hosts get-togethers for like-minded geeks every other week. Sup­port­ing a Web site and blog series, JUL seeks to “become a social media pow­er­house in Knoxville and answer tech­ni­cal ques­tions.” The ranks of JUL’s self-proclaimed “chic geeks” include @thesnarkyone, @bc42 and @suriehl. Their tweet-ups are more laid back than those of KSMA and SMC, but equally rich in whuffie.

I fol­low “twit­terati” in Chicago, New York, Lon­don and Hong Kong. What’s hap­pen­ing in Knoxville is not unique — it’s a micro­cosm of a global phe­nom­e­non. Remem­ber Hunt’s mantra for grow­ing whuffie: be nice, be net­worked or be notable. It’s a low-cost, high-energy strat­egy for cre­at­ing com­mu­nity and affect­ing change.

Abra­ham Maslow’s Hier­ar­chy of Needs dic­tates that peo­ple meet their most basic needs first: food, water, shel­ter. It’s a the­ory about what moti­vates human behav­ior. Accord­ing to Maslow, after phys­i­o­log­i­cal and safety needs are met, peo­ple seek love, accep­tance and belong­ing. Online com­mu­ni­ties like Twit­ter are one way to ful­fill that need for belong­ing. In The Whuffie Fac­tor, Tara Hunt high­lights four stages of com­mu­nity development:

• feel­ings of membership
• feel­ings of influence
• inte­gra­tion and ful­fill­ment of needs
• shared emo­tional connection

Hunt also notes that com­mu­nity means dif­fer­ent things in dif­fer­ent con­texts. Cohe­sive­ness is a rel­a­tive con­cept. But mojo is universal.

Knoxville is a patch­work quilt of close-knit com­mu­ni­ties, but these groups don’t always mix well with each other. Twit­ter bridges the gap between West Knoxville and East Knoxville, between Old City java heads and Atomic City quant jocks. Twit­ter unites UT stu­dents, mommy blog­gers, news hounds and sports junkies. It’s acces­si­ble, con­ve­nient and free. All you have to do is par­tic­i­pate. @unmarketing, a Toronto tweep­ster, puts it this way: “Tweet. Reply. Retweet. Repeat.” Embrace the chaos. Let go of con­trol. And spread the word — Knoxville’s got whuffie. Who knew?

All pho­tos copy­right © 2009 Saul Young, Katie Granju, Cathy McCaughan, Car­rie Thomp­son, All Rights Reserved.