Every once in a while, when I’m researching or just casually browsing, I come across an idea that really gets me excited.  That happened today.

I was checking out all of the great blog posts out there about Inman Real Estate Connect NYC ’09, and many of them were about the awesome keynote presentation by Gary Vaynerchuk (more on that, later).  As a result, I went to Gary’s website, where he had a video post about a recent interesting problem he encountered, and how he used social media to help solve it. His video is below, if you wanna check it out:

About 5 minutes into the video, Gary mentions Tara Hunt (@missrogue). She brings up the idea of “Whuffie.” What the heck is Whuffie? Well, Gary does a pretty good job of explaining it, and there is even a Wikipedia page about Whuffie.

Basically, Whuffie is social relationship currency. If social capital is something you can build and store, Whuffie is how you share it.

It seems to me that this is a concept that has a lot of potential for real estate professionals. Whuffie gives a name to something that I have seen and heard from more than one blogging, engaged real estate professional.

I want to write a lot more about Whuffie, but I wanted to share by initial thoughts first. There are a lot of ways I think this applies, but I’ve got to let it ruminate in the old thought box for a little longer.

Oh, Tara has even written a book about Whuffie, “The Whuffie Factor.” It comes out in April, but you can pre-order it on Amazon. I know I can’t wait to get my hands on it.