Havoc Inspired

The Whuffie Factor

Tara Hunt is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, karaoke lover and one of the most influential women in technology (according to Fast Company Magazine in 2009). In this weeks episode Tara talks to me about how she got started and her career to date, her love for karaoke, writing her book The Whuffie Factor, her experiences with public speaking and what she’s most excited about. You can find Tara on her personal site HorsePigCow.

Interview Transcript

Ryan: So what is your job title?

Tara: Well, I like to say author, speaker, karaoke lover.

Ryan: I saw your tweets about karaoke when we were in South By South-West, I saw that you were in the Sixth Lounge.

Tara: All about the karaoke at South By South-West for sure, yeah.

Ryan: Cool. So what’s an average week like for you? Is there an average week?

Tara: Average week… Well it depends on the week, so yeah there is not really an average. Quite often I am on the road, traveling, so a lot of the average week is spent in airports and hotel rooms. My favourite weeks are at home, quite often working on my startup with my cofounders. A lot of business stuff right now, like documents and getting those ready and presentations and looking over different open source code repositories to see if there is anything we can get out of there and web architectural documents, wire framing, that sort of thing. I try and spend a lot of time reading as well, but I am particularly in love with my lifestyle because there is not really a set routine and perhaps, for me – because I am easily distractible, a set routine would be a good thing, but I can never really stick to it.

So, I wake up when I want to and I have an average thing that I do every day which is to take my dog for a walk for an hour in the park, to get my head in the right space, and then get back home and turn on my computer. Usually there is a lot of email, I haven’t really found a good alternative to email, but that seems to be where all my business opportunities are, my potential speaking engagements, it sets the stage for things I need to get done and articles I need to participate in, send in quotes for or write myself. Sometimes I get inspired to write a blog post from certain interactions in the morning.

It’s very all over the place. A lot of fussing around, checking out what sort of links people are posting and the news of the day on Twitter, like where peoples heads are at, what the latest meme to follow and figure out is. I just discovered the other day through something somebody posted on Facebook that there’s this thing, oh… what is it called? I just forgot the name of it, “scraps”, I think, no it’s “shreds”. Have you seen shreds?

Ryan: No?

Tara: So shreds are basically where you take a music video, it was started by some guy in Finland who goes by St. Sanders, he takes his guitar and he records over his interpretation of what the guitar and the vocals and whatever else, like the clapping, would sound like.

Ryan: Right?

Tara: It’s pretty hilarious. I went through all these different shreds videos and figured out, I think it was on Jimmy Kimble Live, that it was this big meme, it’s not new news, it’s quite old news. But these are interesting things to me because I like to say that if there was any job title that I was allowed to give myself it would be, like, “Curious”, I guess. I’m really curious about human beings and our behaviour in web culture, our participation and why something like shreds has been picked up by such a wide audience of people to participate in, to create themselves and then pass around. A lot of these videos have well over half a million views and hundreds and hundreds of comments on them as well as video responses to them. It’s interesting to me that it’s really a silly thing, definitely fun to watch, and that it would create a whole community around shredding, as such.

I’ve always been a karaoke lover for my own reasons, but as soon as it occurred to me that it was a huge phenomenon in our social geek community and something that a lot of us have in common, this love of karaoke, and if you’re with an average group of people where somebody says “Oh, let’s go do karaoke” then most of the people in the group are like “No, way. I’m not going to subject myself to that.” But if you’re in a group of social geeks and everybody is like “Yeahhh! Let’s go, I know ten places that I love to frequent.”

So this was such a major phenomenon in our group and I really think that it is the participatory nature of karaoke and shredding, where you get to take a video and interpret it yourself so that you are participating in it, and like anything that allows the audience to talk back in that way, or for the audience to become the artist themselves, is something that’s taken up with great gusto in our community.

Which I just find fascinating and I’m finding more and more examples of this and fascinated by it and wondering how this is going to transform general culture. Like, how is this going to transform the World and what is business going to look like ten years down the road? What is our urban planning going to look like ten years down the road? All the ways that people are finding to participate rather than idly stand by and watch others perform and just be a passive audience is what is interesting to me.

Ryan: Okay. So you mention that you’re now working on a startup, do you want to tell me a little bit about this startup?

Tara: Yeah. It’s sort of along the same threads, but once again it is putting the, formally known as passive, audience into the drivers seat. So I’m looking at something that’s near and dear to my heart which is shopping, online shopping, and putting the customer into the drivers seat.

So we all know that word of mouth is the strongest form of “marketing”, whether or not you can call it marketing or just the way we interact with one another, and we see evidence of this all the time. Somebody will post to Facebook or Twitter that they are buying a new digital camera for themselves, that they’ve kind of seen somebody with a Canon and seen somebody with a Fuji or a Nikon and I like all those three cameras but can people give feedback, which you’ll see in the comments or @ replies on Twitter that there are numerous “Oh, I have a Canon, I love it, it’s a really hearty camera which takes beautiful pictures. Here, take a look at my Flickr stream and you’ll get a good idea of the kind of pictures it takes in low light, in nature, etc.” Then everybody will do that with the camera of their choice or maybe with a camera that they’ve been looking at themselves, admiring and thinking about buying. Then at the end the person get’s to make a decision based on real people and real people’s feedback, not like if they’ve gone to a Canon or Fuji or Nikon representative, they’ve actually talked to their friends who have used the devices and been told how they are enjoying them.

So we see this all the time, that we’re influencing each other and we’re asking one another for opinions on shopping. So there’s a lot of recommendation engines out there and stuff, but they aren’t really vendor focused. If you go to Amazon there are recommendations based on what you buy and what your friends buy, that sort of thing. You go to, even something like, Style Feeder you get the same thing, you go to Kaboodle and even the social shopping sites and a lot of it is driven off the vendor participation.

We’re looking at it purely from the customer’s point of view. If you take a look at Blippy for instance, I love Blippy and have been using it, have you seen it?

Ryan: I haven’t no.

Tara: Okay, well it’s kind of freaky and interesting all at once. So with Blippy you put in your Amazon and iTunes account information, some people put in their credit card information, and it records, basically by pulling from the feed of transactions, everything that you buy. Then it shares it and your friends can comment on your purchases and be like “Hey, man. How did you like that movie that you watched?” I think I rented Good Hair, the documentary, on iTunes and a whole bunch of people jumped on and were like “Oh, I haven’t seen that, is it good?” and then I can answer back “Yeah, it’s great, I really enjoyed it.” That’s really interesting to me because it’s really from the point of view of purely what you buy, right. You’re getting a really good live stream of just what you’re buying and what you’re paying attention to with your money.

We’re already thinking about this in terms of like what would happen if you took this step further and you also took a step back with the privacy of it. Blippy is fabulous because you can record everything really easily, you don’t even have to do anything and it records it for you, so we’re thinking about it from a bit of a different perspective, you don’t give us any passwords or anything. But then once you’ve got all your purchase history from all over the place, across wherever you are buying, you are not only able to see what your friends are buying and comment on it, but you can also start to track who you are influencing, how you’re influencing them and what areas you have more influence in that others.

For me, personally, a lot of people don’t think of me as an electronics genius or anything. So I might buy a new remote control, something most my friends would shrug their shoulders and pass that by or maybe my music isn’t their taste, but then anytime I’ve said I’ve purchased something from Sephora, I’m a makeup junky, a lot of my girl friends will ask what my opinion is on certain face creams and certain makeup lines and whether or not I like the powdered foundation versus the liquid foundation and what kind of results I’m getting. I know a lot of them go out and buy different products because I’m using them and enjoy them.

So what happens then, on the next level, is that I can see my path of influence. If you take that data and then leverage it for better deals for perhaps even setting up my own personalised shop so that I can make affiliate money off of it, who knows, there’s all sorts of interesting ideas with that. The customer is totally in charge, there’s no bribing by vendors, it doesn’t matter what it is, it could be the smallest local store all the way up to the big giants like Sephora that you’re buying these products from. We’re going to be trying to include the online/offline shopping experience in it as well.

Ryan: Okay. So is this a service that you provide, or are you analysing other services?

Tara: This is a service where, right now, we’re in the midst of testing and setting up and then hopefully launching within the next six weeks. Just like a really tiny beta version where just tracking is involved to begin with, tracking and sharing.

Ryan: Okay, cool. Is there a URL that anyone can go to to get more information or…?

Tara: Yeah, sure. Shwowp, so “wow” and “shopping”.

Ryan: Okay, cool. So, that’s what you’re doing now. This series is called “Please Start From The Beginning” so I want you to rewind a little bit and just tell me how you got started.

Tara: How I got started… Quite, actually well I don’t know if it was, accidentally. But back in 1992, when I was pregnant with my son, I was really lost because I was about to be a young mother and somebody had pointed me towards Usenet groups and so I got a really slow internet web account to attach me to the internet and all of a sudden I was asking questions and chatting with these groups. Then I went to university, and because I was already sort of getting into it and understanding it a little bit more and more savvy, while I was in university I’d be talking to people and they’d be like “Oh, so our club here at the university should have a website but we don’t have money and we don’t know where to start.” So I started to build webpages for some clubs and for myself and for friends and then the next thing I knew, when I graduated, my first job was doing corporate communications with an oil and gas company. They didn’t hire me because I was particularly savvy in oil and gas, they hired me because they needed somebody who understood the web and where the web was going.

I thought this was quite temporary and I wanted to get into more traditional marketing and every job that I continued to get along the way was all web related because, it was like 1999/2000/2001, the bubble was just bursting, but people were really interested and not very many people, especially where I was in Calgary, Alberta, knew what they were doing on that end. So I had taught myself Flash development and Director (I was certified in Director, and yeah, it’s obsolete now), HTML, XHTML and stuff like that, a little JavaScript and stuff. I was able to understand the web stuff and so my job was Communications/Web Girl. I had no idea what was happening outside of Calgary really at the time, I was actually focused on getting out of the web because I was feeling like I was just being put into this little tiny slice. I, myself, knew that it was going to be really big but I had no idea what was in store for this wonderful World Wide Web world that I was in. So, slowly but surely, my piece of the pie started growing over the years and the more I resisted the more I was pulled into it.

Every job I had, in my post secondary adult life, was web related so the online marketing stuff just came out of that and the next thing I knew I was blogging, then there were a bunch of other jobs in between and running my own company, then being drafted down to start work for a startup in Silicon Valley, in 2005.

People were talking about it, but very few people were really just doing a purely online marketing platform, like an online community marketing platform, and that’s what I did with the startup, it was riya.com and they did facial recognition in photos. We launched within six months to a million photos uploaded, from over twenty-thousand people within twenty-four hours of launching, and it was this huge thing where people were like “Whoa, that works! So, lots of people were talking about it and she just made it happen.” Then I started getting invited to conferences and to speak about what I just did and I had no idea what I just did other than I was given a budget of zero dollars and told “Go work your webby magic.” It just evolved from there.

So now five years later I have a book and it’s all so trippy, I just really literally just stumbled my way through it. I always had this pure notion that I wanted to change the World in the way that I wanted to invert hierarchies, especially getting into marketing and feeling like there’s something seriously wrong with marketing and the way that companies view and deal with customers and see them as consumers and numbers and targets and all these awful ways, and I always thought there was something desperately wrong with that. It wasn’t until I got in, and really just gave way, to the web stuff and watched these phenomenons like shredding, these phenomenas like Rick Rolling, these phenomenas like blogging and Tweeting and all these that were happening where people really wanted to talk back and participate and contribute and be part of the experience rather than just be passive recipients. Then I realised what they key was in all of that and got really utopic about it and excited about that this is going to change all of it. We still see a lot of top-down power structures but they’re scared and they’re doing desperate things and they’re failing all over the place. We even see traditionally top-down media and corporations trying to participate and just participating badly in media because they still see this control of it and that they’re the givers and we’re the recipients, kind of. So I think over the next couple of years we’re going to see this huge drastic change and it’s exciting to me.

I know you just asked me a very simple question and I just rambled on!

Ryan: No, no, that’s the best way, that’s the best way. So what would you say you greatest achievement has been, what’s your greatest personal achievement, what are you most proud of?

Tara: Oh.. Ah, I don’t know…

Ryan: I like to throw tough questions in to see what people say!

Tara: Greatest personal achievement… Well other than being able to raise a child, from zero to almost seventeen now, and have them still be alive and have them as a functional member of society (that’s awesome), and boy, that’s the hardest job of them all, no matter what people say, probably finishing writing and finishing a book (that isn’t a plug!). It was an interesting challenge and it felt like a major achievement when I hit that, I think I saw the last line of my book, coming to the end end of it, the last two chapters, it just felt like “What the hell am I doing? I’m writing a book? I’m a web girl!” But to actually get up to that point, and write that last line, felt like a really huge achievement for me. I think it’s not just like one thing, I mean that could be like a certain peak in it, there’s like a thousand little things that lead me to live the lifestyle that I have now.

I just feel like super privileged, and I am, I just don’t feel like that. I am super privileged to be in a position where I can sleep until when I want and I get flown all over the World to speak to audiences who like to listen to me, even when I’m rambling on against corporate values being out of line with human values and things like that which I hold near and dear to my heart, but I know that’s not what they paid me to hear, they wanted easy answers and I’m not giving them. And they keep inviting me back and do that and that’s mind-blowing to me and an incredible privilege.

I think that achievement has come about because of a thousand little things along the way, things that I’ve sacrificed, the ethics that I’ve stuck to, dreams that I’ve held onto, my insane curiosity for knowledge, a whole lot of fussing along the way, lack of sleep along the way, working at jobs where I had no idea of what I was doing and sort of clambering my way through. It’s just a whole series of falling on my face a thousand times, getting back up and persevering, like being told by hundreds of people, some of the same people multiple times, “What the hell are you doing, you’re going down the wrong path.” That sort of thing, and sticking to my guns.

Ryan: So, you speak at a lot of conferences, have you got one that particularly enjoy speaking at?

Tara: Oh, uhm, gosh. I know the ones that I don’t enjoy speaking at! Most of them I do, I think probably a better way to approach it would be to say “the most interesting ones that I’ve spoken at.”

Ryan: Yeah.

Tara: I spoke at one recently, The International Cemetery and Funeral Association Annual Conference. When I was asked to speak at that I was like “Why are you asking me? This makes very little sense.” Then realised, quite quickly, that this was a really amazing opportunity to talk about something that I’m really passionate about, which is this idea that we are creating digital legacies and that it is more democratised and available to more people around the World. I had a professor point this out to me, when at university, that history was created by a couple of single stories and usually those single stories belonged to the wealthy and the privileged and, you can argue today, that there is still a certain amount of privilege involved but its wider and wider.

There are blogs on homelessness from people that are homeless, there are blogs from Iraq in the war zone, there are blogs on aging from people that are dealing with being displaced in our modern world because they’re aging, people who are living in care centres and that sort of thing, there are blogs on cancer survivors, there are blogs from people with all sorts of voices and with all sorts of experiences. The richness of our history, and the story of our history right now, it so immense. So for me to able to talk to this audience about the fact that they’re really in the business of helping us preserve our legacies and helping us discover one another’s humanity, even after we’ve passed away, was really an enjoyable moment in my speaking history. So that was an unusual, but hugely enjoyable, conference to speak at for sure. I like conferences like that which take me out of my usual techie realm and put me in front of an audience that know that the web is changing the World, but they just don’t know it changes their world. It helps me think in a different way.

I’m speaking at The Pacific Builders Association, coming up, and I just started thinking about this, like where do I begin? For me, it’s a process of I learn, I learn a lot, about their business and where they’re at and why it is they are asking this question right now and then tying these threads together with this brilliant culture that I’m so overjoyed to be part of, this participatory social web that we live in. These are the ones that are the most interesting to me.

Ryan: Okay. You also mentioned your book, what’s your book called? What’s your book about?

Tara: My book is called The Whuffie Factor, it’s actually coming out in paperback under a different name in the next month. The different name is The Power of Social Networks because my publisher recognised that the original title appeals to our audience, who already know about this stuff, and we need to appeal to a broader audience. What it’s about is, in a nutshell, social capital in online communities. The word whuffie comes from a book by Corey Doctorow, a book called Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, and it talks about this future where there’s no money anymore and we have this currency called whuffie. We all have a whuffie score and it’s sort of implanted in a chip in our brain and I can ping your whuffie chip and get back a score and if it’s a high score I’ll know that you’re probably trustworthy or a pretty good guy, that you might have a pretty good network, probably have friends in common and that you’ve done notable things. Like creating these Podcasts is a great gift to the community so you’d get whuffie from that.

So when I was reading this, I realised that Corey’s not talking about some kind of science fiction future, he’s actually describing the kind of currency we exchange, right now, on online communities and how appropriate that is. So, you friend me on Facebook and maybe I haven’t met you before and so I’ll check the first thing, the friends in common, you look at how many friends, and who it is that your friends in common are, and then maybe if theres only a couple you’d go and check out the person’s page, maybe you’ll even Google them. What you’re doing at that point is paying somebody’s whuffie, in the same way that you figured out how to interview me for this Podcast is by going through somebody that you trusted in your comments suggesting, and you probably went and Googled me after that point and said well “Let me see what this person is about.” So you’re pinging my whuffie and found out that I had pretty decent whuffie for your Podcast and then contacted me and then after that point I did the same thing for you. I was like “Ah, okay, I’m going to click on his link and I’m going to find out who these different online networks are that you contributed to, who you are and do I want to take the time to sit down and talk with you.” So, we were pinging each others whuffie!

The book explains that, and explains that in the sense of one and one, but also like how we make buying decisions, and then teaches businesses, from individuals, to small, to large, to non-profit, to whatever creative business you’re in, how to raise you’re whuffie online.

Ryan: Okay, cool, that sounds really interesting.

Tara: Yeah.

Ryan: So, right at this minute in time, what are you most excited about?

Tara: Oh… Right at this minute in time I am most excited about the fact that it’s not only me but a lot of people are recognising the gulf, the gap, between human values and business values. It’s something I’ve been talking about for just a little while now and I actually just got back from having lunch at Cirque de Soleil. Do you know that, the organisation?

Ryan: Yeah.

Tara: Yeah, they invited me to have lunch, well (Name) from Cirque invited me to have lunch, and he discovered me through my presentation that I do called Mind The Gap and it’s talking about this gulf. He saw it and it really struck a cord with him because Cirque has been thinking about this and it gave him language to approach this. I’ve received multiple emails from people within big organisations where they are like “Yes! This is what I’ve been trying to explain and I haven’t had the language to explain it, but our company says this and they say we align with human needs and human values but this is the way that we act. There’s a big gulf between that and now I have the language to try and align the business back to our customers needs and values.”

So that’s what I’m really excited about, that thread is being picked up. It is supposed to, was supposed to, be part of my next book but doing the startup now, I don’t know if I’m actually going to be able to write that but I will continue to write about that on my blog and present on that notion.

Ryan: I’m trying to remember your blog URL, it’s horse, cow…

Tara: Horsepigcow.

Ryan: Where does that come from?!

Tara: It comes from my Mum.

Ryan: Oh, okay?

Tara: If she couldn’t remember somebody’s name she’d be like “George, John, horse, pig, cow, Ryan!”

Ryan: Hehehe. That’s funny!

Tara: It seemed like an appropriate name for a blog when I started back in like 2003, or whatever.

Ryan: Yeah, because I remember when I put your name into Google and that came up and I went “That’s a weird URL!”

Tara: Yeah. Well people generally remember it, they don’t always remember the order of the animals, but they remember it.

Ryan: Yeah, like typing in random farm animals like chicken, goats… “No, no it’s not that.”

Tara: I think I actually own a lot of animal combinations and they all point back to Horsepigcow.

Ryan: Cool. So just to wrap up then, where would you like to see yourself in the future?

Tara: Erm, where would I like to see myself in the future? Hmm, I don’t know, wherever the wind blows me, right now I’d like to see myself out of the Sun that’s streaming into my living room… There we go. Which is a beautiful thing, by the way, having sunshine in the middle of March. But, yeah, I don’t know, I don’t know. That question to me is one that you’re asked a lot though life and I think that people expect you to know the answer and for it to be very goal orientated, towards that end result, but it’s always served me better to embrace whatever opportunities come my way. It makes me more open to possibilities and things change so fast, especially now with the whole participatory culture there are tons of startups and there are all sorts of people inventing cool things and more and more people are becoming entrepreneurial in spirit and with more and more people people working on solving big problems.

I just think that the World is going to exponentially explode into awesomeness in the next little while and I just want to ride that wave and be part of it and try to contribute to it the best I can whilst also trying to be just a little bit ahead of it as much as I can along the way. So that’s my answer in a round about way.

Ryan: Okay, brilliant. Well thank you very much Tara for taking the time to talk to me, that was really interesting, I really enjoyed that.

Tara: Yeah, thank you Ryan.

Ryan: Thanks a lot!

Thanks goes to Dan Millar and the guys at Decode for transcribing this interview.

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