The first speaker was Tara Hunt, author of the Whuffie Factor, who talked about the concept of whuffie, which represents a person's social capital. Whuffie comprises reputation, reach, positive sentiment, influence and other factors. The higher one's whuffie - as opposed to one's profile - the more value a person has.
The second session was a panel featuring Klout CEO Joe Fernandez, blogger and adviser Louis Gray, RapLeaf CEO Auren Hoffman, Buzzlogic co-founder Todd Parsons and Lookery CEO Scott Rafer. The panel talked about the slow migration of traditional marketing in terms of its understanding of the evolution of the influence, with the industry still three to four years from a tipping point. Hoffman talked about the whole industry as probably being worth about US$100 million today.
Much of the discussion was about the value of influencers and how to identify them, and how to measure the networks that they are influencing. The discussion also covered negative influence - the propensity of people who have had a bad experience to talk about it more loudly than many people who have had a good one - and how to quieten them by trying to fix their problem immediately. There was less discussion about how to actually recruit influencers however, particularly how to do it without sullying the value those influencers had in the first place.
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