Tag Archive - Social influence

What Klout Should Do Next

June 14, 2011 in Digital with 0 Comments

This is the second in a three part series about Klout.  Read my assessment of Klout here.

In my last post, I complained about the manipulability of Klout as a result of its (denied) reliance on volume and frequency to drive the score.  As I continue to think more about Klout and their kin, I realised that there are some really exciting potential uses for businesses becoming the authority on influence.

Really knowing influencers and experts about certain topics is a critical skill of experienced marketers.  There’s a massive industry of sports and celebrity endorsements of all sorts of products that short cut to influence by use of popularity.  In parallel to the notion of 1:1 marketing, social media has allowed a new type of ‘celebrity’ influencer.  Individuals who are exceptionally knowledgeable in their niche are great influencers for the category.  If channels like Twitter enable them to reach a large enough audience, tools like Klout could enable marketers to short-cut the hunt for these key leaders to promote and endorse their products.

Klout is onto this and trying to incentivise usage of advertiser products in exchange for potential endorsement.  A Klout Influencer’s endorsement might reach a smaller audience than the A-list celebrity or athlete, but their audience is one with whom the endorser has built a relationship through discussion.  That relationship should raise the trust that such a recommendation will carry.  I experience this within my friend group who often ask which products we recommend for travelling with our kids.  Indeed we’ve road tested many!  Will an algorithm be able to get specific enough to find these true influencers or is it a popularity contest?

One of the existing problems that Klout has is discover-ability of key influencers.  Although +K will begin to allow direct endorsement of a person’s expertise and influence, only the very dedicated will have the patience to note the Twitter IDs of those who influence them and enter these one by one into a Klout search.  I’ve been happy to test +K with the handful of individuals Klout selects as my influencers or influencees.  I’m not so interested in searching for people whose IDs I don’t know.

What about an alternative business model for Klout where they allow access to their data for businesses large and small to hunt down their own key influencers and create offers and opportunities directly.  Most businesses, even small ones will pay for this, and it saves Klout having to manage the entire sales force and agency relationships with big brands.  Imagine the impact of a long tail of marketers.  The platform could be so much more powerful.

Is Klout really about Clout?

June 7, 2011 in Digital with 2 Comments

Playing to our vanity, Klout is on a strong PR offensive. And who among us can really resist the vanity of tracking our score over time?

Digital reputation has always been important and it was only a matter of time before the tools to access data about our digital existence were good enough to allow anyone with a strong mathematics education to figure out where influence lies, within the digerati at least.  Klout, like its competitors UK based PeerIndex and TunkRank based on an algorithm conceived by LinkedIn’s Daniel Tunkelang, uses a range of factors to determine one’s online popularity or influence.   I’ve been testing the three algorithms over the past 6 weeks to determine their gamability, and how they reflect my assessment of the value I may or may not be contributing via social media, particularly Twitter.

Interestingly, when I made thoughtful contributions at moderately spaced intervals – a few each day, my Klout score fell. When I made a big effort to tweet often and in some cases even repeat things others had said, my Klout score rose.   So the obvious conclusion I’ve drawn is that Klout is about volume, quantity and frequency more than delivery of quality content.  Of course they take into account retweets and mentions so that interaction with those with more Klout can cause your score to make a big jump.  (for anyone who’s interested, my profile is here.)

I really started to question the clout of Klout when I saw that my topics of influence included Nuclear Power, something I know very little about.  I have had some very robust discussions with friends on Facebook about the aftermath of the tragedy at Fukishima, but this hardly qualifies me as an influencer in this area.  Alex Braunstein wrote an excellent blog post illustrating the flaws in Klout’s algorithm including empirical analysis making it a must read for those interested in this topic.  Read through to the comments where Klout offers a good response.

One of the critical considerations about any indicator of online influence is the context for interpretation.  Some of the most influential people I know do not have a Twitter presence yet still manage to make things happen.  People stand-up and take notice when they act.  There is no doubt that what Klout is doing is important and I will be following this post with another highlighting some of the things I think they are doing spectacularly well, and some things I’d like to see them do.

As we go Klout crazy, I hope that it is understood for what it is – a tool to provide one angle of insight into the workings of social media.  To that end, I’m interested in the ways that brands and marketers are using Klout to navigate the social media landscape.  Have you found that there are triggers to influencing Klout?  What is the role of original content creation?  Beyond a personal branding tool, is there value in having Klout?

I would also encourage anyone interested in this area to try out both Peer Index and TunkRank.  For more insight into the algorithm behind TunkRank, have a look at this:  TunkRank :: About the Best Way to Measure Influence.  The key takeaway is that your influence depends on the amount of attention your followers can give you.