Special Treatment of Select Customers Isn’t Anything New
Just as companies have been treating wealthy customers, or customers who are more likely to spend more with preferential treatment, there’s no surprise that some companies plan to segment customers based by influence. As more consumer data appears in social media channels, relying on influence metrics like Twitter followers to blog readers will help companies identify those that can hurt or help the brand on a grander scale. As a result, companies naturally will seek a standard measurement for measuring influence.
Businesses are Relying on Easy-to-Understand Klout for Finding and Prioritizing the ‘Elite’
Klout, is starting to integrate into many digital touchpoints. From hotels in Vegas offering special services to those with high scores, to a growing range of services that Klout is integrating with, and even politicians, the service is starting to grow. In fact, I just learned that social integration and curation vendor Echo is already helping some clients sort which content appears on the corporate website based on their Klout score, see their documentation to learn more. Just last week, we learned that Klout is starting to integrate their service right into Twitter.com using browser extensions.
Relying on a Single Metric is Dangerous
In fact, this interesting case study below shows that Kenneth Cole’s Klout influence increased significantly during the Twitter debacle, as Klout fails to take into account sentiment measurement –just raw reactions and network growth. See this image and read my additional comments on the photo.
Above Image: Kenneth Cole’s Klout score ascends nearly 30 points during his self-inflicted PR disaster.
While Useful, Klout Offers Significant Insufficiencies:
- Alienating your mainstream customers in desire to serve influentials. Careful when using Klout to segment customers priority, while high scoring Klout users may appreciate the ego boost –anyone with less than the ideal number of points may quickly fall out of love with your brand if you display elitist behavior. No one likes a ‘better than thou’ unless they are the ‘thou’.
- Consumers will game the system –reducing validity of metric. Expect many people to start gaming the Klout systems, in fact I see some ‘influential types’ tweeting over 200 times a day to try to hopefully raise their Klout scores, which just ends up annoying their followers.
- Klout is not representative of a customers real influence. Currently, as I understand it, Klout only siphons in content from Twitter and Facebook if the user allows for FB connect.
- Without sentiment of the influencer –the gauge is incomplete. Klout lacks sentiment analysis, so true opinions of what’s being said about the person may be ill-informed, see Kenneth Cole example above.
- Relying on this single metric alone is dangerous. as Frank Eliason of Citi (formerly Comcast Cares) indicates the “sleeping comcast technician” was uploaded by someone who had practically zero prior online influence.
- Influence is not a gauge of true buying potential. Perhaps the most important point is that influence scores don’t necessarily impact the revenue or customer satisfaction of your brand to your core set of customers. While we trust Scoble for technology choices, relying on him for the latest in landscaping design may be a mis direction worth avoiding.
Recommendations: Brands Must Factor in Relative Influence –not just Absolute Influence.
The folks at Klout have done a good service to the industry, but I must warn against blind enthusiasm to note that a single metric is not sufficient. In fact, a single metric, like Klout’s 100 point scoring system applies well for Absolute influence (global influence) it’s unable to provide Relative influence, or influence related to a specific market, like baby diapers. For example, Ashton Kutcher who has very high absolute influence, has relatively low influence when it comes to bio-engineering or pottery arts. As a result, brands need to recognize there are more than one type of influence required. As a customer strategist you must factor in both forms of influence before making a decision. Learn more about the various types of influence, NPS, and what the ideal metric would look like Remember, there is NO “Standard for Influence” –every market is different.
Companies must not rely on a single score like Klout alone, but develop their own formulas to factor in a variety of influence metrics that relate to their specific market
I look forward to the comments below: How should companies gauge influence? Also, see the SCRM pioneers thread on this topic. Update: Joe Fernandez, the CEO of Klout left a comment, kindly read.
Good eye Jeremiah. There has been a lot of hype in the personal reputation area and I’m glad that you realize that all social media measurement is flawed right now. I’ve been studying these metrics ever since I was doing social media for EMC and it hasn’t been resolved. Sentiment is very hard to capture, especially when sarcasm is used.
Good eye Jeremiah. There has been a lot of hype in the personal reputation area and I’m glad that you realize that all social media measurement is flawed right now. I’ve been studying these metrics ever since I was doing social media for EMC and it hasn’t been resolved. Sentiment is very hard to capture, especially when sarcasm is used.
Dan, as a personal branding expert, what metrics do you recommend to brands to figure out who really has true influence?
Dan, as a personal branding expert, what metrics do you recommend to brands to figure out who really has true influence?
Excellent Jeremiah. This is very helpful for social business designers to not get hung up on one set of tools or to limit their listening to a favorable chart or results page. You are not getting the whole picture if you do, and you certainly are not in the best position to advise your clients moving forward. Thanks bud.
Klout is good as a “first pass” metric, which should be followed up by a vigorous examination of the what/when/how/why the person has a decent Klout score. (In your visual,this would be taking a look at why Kenneth Cole’s score went up.) Metrics and tools should be used as a way to ease the burden of and speed along research, not as an excuse to abandon it entirely.
Yep, was just thinking about this topic last night. Wondering the pros and cons of focusing effort (and reporting time) on metrics like Klout, etc. Agree that NPS is a good business metric but difficult to connect the dots when it comes to social and other kinds of earned media. Will dive into this a bit more — thanks Jeremiah for starting the conversation.
Right now, I’m relying on word-of-mouth. Of course there are metrics such as # of followers, # of retweets, # of clickthroughs, conversion rate, website traffic, etc, but I trust my inner network above those. If my inner network knows who you are and thinks your influential, then I assume you are unless proven otherwise. For instance, if I brought up the name of a blogger to you,,I would trust your assessment of them.
Thanks for the great post. I would love to hear your take on Peer Index next : )
Great insight Jeremiah. I think it is important to recognize that social media should not be siloed and that multiple considerations in regards to analytics helps open you up to the bigger picture while relying on some tools for the birds eye view can have consequences to your brand.
Great insight Jeremiah. I think it is important to recognize that social media should not be siloed and that multiple considerations in regards to analytics helps open you up to the bigger picture while relying on some tools for the birds eye view can have consequences to your brand.
Great insight Jeremiah. I think it is important to recognize that social media should not be siloed and that multiple considerations in regards to analytics helps open you up to the bigger picture while relying on some tools for the birds eye view can have consequences to your brand.
What Dan is really referring to is “true influence” in a sense Jeremiah. It’s really beyond just a network and moreso your “ability to create and affect action within your network.” That’s real influence and I don’t see these platforms doing that yet.
Jeremiah:
More and more the sincere local social media practitioner will become important. Engaging, knowing, and earning the trust of the local community is very important. In that practice will you find your true influencers, they rarely show up in the metrics. Another abuse of the “social media metrics” system are the “social media marketers” that use their numbers as a selling tool to earn more customers.
Dan: What you refer to as your inner network, is what I call “local knowledge” — you can’t build a community without knowing the culture of that community. But, I’m preaching to the choir here. 🙂
Jeremiah, I™m glad someone as influential as you (in this case, absolutely true!) is talking about the importance of looking at category-specific influence. I was a PR gal for years before I dove into social media, so I™ve always thought of Klout (and similar measurements) as something that™s for entertainment purposes only. If I™m developing a press list for a client, I have to suss out every reporter INDIVIDUALLY. I have to read their work, get a sense of what angles would appeal to them, and maybe even craft my pitch a bit differently for each one. Yeah, this is really time-consuming! But there are no short-cuts and sometimes trying to look for one will just bite you in the ass later.
For example, Walt Mossberg is an extremely influential journalist, but I would probably be banned from his inbox for life if I tried to pitch him a story about cosmetics “ which might happen if I use a press list somebody else created without my parameters. Later, when I™m working for a consumer electronics manufacturer, I™m already screwed when it comes to pitching Walt.
Same goes for so-called influencers. If you hope to approach them on behalf of a brand, prepare to put in some elbow grease. I™ll even go so far as to say that marketers who have never pitched journalists or bloggers should probably stay out of influence outreach altogether.
Thanks Carri.
Agreed on the Mossberg example. Also, to be clear, I have relative influence over a small but loud sector in technology but limited ‘Absolute’ influence.
Thanks Mike, that analysis requires a lot of manual work –it’s not really baked into the system from my perspective, or am I looking at this wrong? Great preso thanks for sharing.
I know the Twitterlyzer folks, also some interesting stuff going on there.
Great perspective, a good “First pass”
It is manual work for now, but it looks like it won’t be for long.
My point exactly! 🙂
Glad to see you tackling this Jeremiah. I’ve heard all sorts of ridiculous things about Klout, even witnessed techy blogger in a spat with a true KOL because he said his Klout score was higher. Terrible measure of influence. There’s also employers who haven’t hired people based on their Klout scores. Ironic, since mine is currently higher than some Digital SVPs.
Suggestion: Have someone look at Klout scores for obvious spammers or “Follow Backers” on Twitter. The ones I’ve looked at average 25, but I’m sure you could find some with higher scores.
About Kenneth Cole though: I wouldn’t call that a disaster just yet. I’d check out their sales reports over a few months and by year’s end before calling it a disaster.
Suggestion: Look at the
Glad to see you tackling this Jeremiah. I’ve heard all sorts of ridiculous things about Klout, even witnessed techy blogger in a spat with a true KOL because he said his Klout score was higher. Terrible measure of influence. There’s also employers who haven’t hired people based on their Klout scores. Ironic, since mine is currently higher than some Digital SVPs.
Suggestion: Have someone look at Klout scores for obvious spammers or “Follow Backers” on Twitter. The ones I’ve looked at average 25, but I’m sure you could find some with higher scores.
About Kenneth Cole though: I wouldn’t call that a disaster just yet. I’d check out their sales reports over a few months and by year’s end before calling it a disaster.
Suggestion: Look at the
Thanks for the great insight. I have many clients asking this question all of the time and we definitely focus on individual influence from a holistic perspective and it always depends on the specific campaign or objective.
Also, as a side note, I saw recently that LinkedIn is going to be in beta with Klout to pull in data, too. Thanks again.
Thanks for the great insight. I have many clients asking this question all of the time and we definitely focus on individual influence from a holistic perspective and it always depends on the specific campaign or objective.
Also, as a side note, I saw recently that LinkedIn is going to be in beta with Klout to pull in data, too. Thanks again.
Thanks for the great insight. I have many clients asking this question all of the time and we definitely focus on individual influence from a holistic perspective and it always depends on the specific campaign or objective.
Also, as a side note, I saw recently that LinkedIn is going to be in beta with Klout to pull in data, too. Thanks again.
Thank you *again*, Jeremiah, for assessing and speaking out on a topic about which many are deliberating!
It is interesting to see that such influence analysis is occurring and the direction in which it may be heading, but it would seem wise to wait, watch, and assess. People, however, appear to be very excited to jump on this band-wagon, perhaps because 1) it quickly and easily solves a problem for them, without doing the hard work of research, or 2) they are being nicely rewarded by companies for their Klout scores!
Many people with whom I have discussed Klout assessments see glaring personal errors in some of their findings, and are thereby skeptical of the overall scores. These are aspects that still need to be re-worked. Validity and accuracy, however, are not pre-determinants of something’s success! I hope Klout, especially given their increasing clout, will make a strong effort to fine-tune their analytic methods!
Great article, Jeremiah!
I think that “big picture” metrics of most kinds ought to be taken with that same “first pass” philosophy Jen outlined. Influence, just like sentiment, has elements of subjectivity that are really hard for an algorithm to figure out. What’s valuable is giving you a starting point to take a deeper look. Jen hits it exactly right. My concern with metrics like these is that people use them as a crutch to avoid doing the necessary research.
Jeremiah, you are absolutley right! It all comes back to setting objectives for social strategies and measuring (as best we can) the outcomes.
If we want to drive an increase in our positive share of voice with our market (the only thing we can impact), we would never even see those with “absolute influence.” It all starts with the target market and their influence in total. Then each individual member has influence relative to that baseline.
Thanks for helping to keep this topic on everyone’s mind and in the right perspective.
Jeremiah, you are absolutley right! It all comes back to setting objectives for social strategies and measuring (as best we can) the outcomes.
If we want to drive an increase in our positive share of voice with our market (the only thing we can impact), we would never even see those with “absolute influence.” It all starts with the target market and their influence in total. Then each individual member has influence relative to that baseline.
Thanks for helping to keep this topic on everyone’s mind and in the right perspective.
Thoughtful post…but I don’t blame Klout…I blame companies for hiring the wrong leaders and the wrong consultants.
Thanks for this great post Jeremiah! Indeed Klout is good but that doesn’t represent a “REAL” value of influence. I’ve been working with stats and metric of all kind for the past 4 years and quantifying and automating the influence graph is the hardest.
I’m looking forward to see who’s going to be the next start-up that will achieved the precision to gauge that.
Thanks for this great post Jeremiah! Indeed Klout is good but that doesn’t represent a “REAL” value of influence. I’ve been working with stats and metric of all kind for the past 4 years and quantifying and automating the influence graph is the hardest.
I’m looking forward to see who’s going to be the next start-up that will achieved the precision to gauge that.
Funny, Martin: “So far the only Influencer here seems to be Klout itself.”
I was thinking the same thing. 😉
It’s sad when businesses alienate customers to favor influentials. The last thing anyone wants is to be measured by status.
One thing I find is absent from the conversation is that it lacks context in which the ‘influence’ is acquired. I can give you my point of view about social business, enterprise 2.0 and social business, but don’t ask me anything about classical music, nuclear physics, make-up or what-not.
Without nuancing what topics a person has some insight in and the audience the influencer is likely to touch with those insights, an all-encompassing score such as Klout is even more meaningless than it already is for purposes of targeting in marketing activities.
thx for this post — good & valid points. actually we use klout the other way round: to measure our work when it comes how *we* do as a brand on twitter (of course #2 is still a valid point here as well).
Thanks Eric, I respect your opinion good points in your post.
Good point. Klout does have some data on how they get data, read here http://klout.com/kscore
Seems to be a lot of points here to consider, but always boils down to the basics – to get a true understanding of your audience, there must be a lot of effort put in MANUALLY! Tools such as Klout are great for a brief analysis, but quite rightly as Dan Schawbel states, sarcasm is very hard to detect, especially if done by a bot! The same goes for any of the buzz monitoring tools available – they are never going to be 100% accurate with regards to sentiment. Great post Jeremiah
Seems to be a lot of points here to consider, but always boils down to the basics – to get a true understanding of your audience, there must be a lot of effort put in MANUALLY! Tools such as Klout are great for a brief analysis, but quite rightly as Dan Schawbel states, sarcasm is very hard to detect, especially if done by a bot! The same goes for any of the buzz monitoring tools available – they are never going to be 100% accurate with regards to sentiment. Great post Jeremiah
Klout has potential. The problem with it is that is measures only 2 social networks (agreed, they’re big social networks), ignoring LinkedIn which would obviously be significant for business influence. It also has no way to differentiate between the context of something traveling (a tweet about the Superbowl, for example) that may not be relevant to true influence or knowledge. It’s a good start but very risky for anyone to place a high level of trust or credibility in the algorithms.
For example, Marc Benioff has less Klout than many people I know (58 at this posting). The reality is that he has way more Klout than them – even in their own topics of expertise such as Cloud computing. Because someone doesn’t often tweet or try to push their tweets doesn’t mean they’re not influential.
By the way, Warren Buffett’s Klout score is 30. I’ll trade my score of 50 for his true influence any day.
I agree Dan, the hype is not justified. I control an automated account with 2 RSS feeds on it that has an higher score than I have. The thing is that an automated account cannot influence people. I believe that the follow base is still too much of a priority in the algorithm.
I really must ABSOLUTELY agree with you and Jeremiah, Carri.
While I do believe that Klout offers certain values to certain people (just as the others in the space do, like PeerIndex), I started working on a “to be finished” post making the analogy between these services and another commonly used scoring premise.
The key point: we need to evaluate people on a holistic level, where factors and pieces of the pie can be looked at for specific reasons or needs — but only as portions of the overall picture. After all, just because you call me on the phone (okay, unlikely – probably email) doesn’t mean you can’t DM me on Twitter or reach me in another channel.
Evaluating people in social media should be no different – multiple channels, touchpoints and professional assessments. In the end, the reason social media works for me is that it allows for opportunities to connect with people for the whole rationale of the Internet: networking — whether on a technological or human foundation … or now with IBM Watson, both together! 😉
Great ponts, Jeremiah! Klout is fairly easy to manipulate… I like you points on the missing sentiment metric of the score. It will be interesting to see Klout evolve over the next few years…
Influence is a difficult thing to measure. It goes back to trust and authenticity. Does Klout take ‘off-line’ influence into consideration…it still counts.
Klout seems to be very popular also amongst recruiters hiring Social Media Corporate Strategists, a friend of mine was questioned in a job interview about her ‘relatively bad Klout score’
Again a misinterpretation of absolute and relative influence? Or just tool abuse?
What do you think Jeremiah?
While I still find any business using Klout to segment customers elitist, I appreciate the mention of “category specificity” that is the next step to a lot of business models. Klout is one, but Quora and other generic services that get an outsized influence in Silicon Valley can only scale and be massively adopted if it can become category-specific in multiple disciplines in a scalable manner. That is the challenge for 2011…
Glad to agree with you here Jeremiah. These measuring tools have a *long* way to go before they should be seen as any sort of authority.
And, similar to the previous comment, I’ve noticed my Klout score is affected by frequency of posting. So, if I spend my whole day tweeting, I apparently have high influence? It’s unfortunate that hiring managers are using this as a real requirement.
I do look at peerindex, klout and twittersentiment once/week for my brand. Agreeing with what’s already been posted, they are good data points for high level checks, but definitely aren’t worth dedicating significant time and energy to.
Jeremiah”
Great post, as always. Influence has always been thought of a single metric to solve all problems, and as you have pointed out, focusing on a single metric leaves the brand vulnerable to a number of dangers. The problem space seems to boil down to three mechanisms through which brands often get to their A-list of influencers:
¢ Importance: The measurement of a person™s ability to elicit actions in social media (absolute influence)
¢ Identification: What you call relative influence can also be, arguably, what we all know as segmentation of a population
¢ Inner network/Local knowledge: As some have mentioned under these names in this thread, there™s a non-social media component that needs to be considered
Regardless, applying the use of these concepts towards marketing is only effective in specific scenarios. Social Media is a place where all consumers get to have a voice, and ignoring the greater population leaves us back to where we started”abstracted from our own communities.
Enrico Montana, Visible Technologies
Jeremiah”
Great post, as always. Influence has always been thought of a single metric to solve all problems, and as you have pointed out, focusing on a single metric leaves the brand vulnerable to a number of dangers. The problem space seems to boil down to three mechanisms through which brands often get to their A-list of influencers:
¢ Importance: The measurement of a person™s ability to elicit actions in social media (absolute influence)
¢ Identification: What you call relative influence can also be, arguably, what we all know as segmentation of a population
¢ Inner network/Local knowledge: As some have mentioned under these names in this thread, there™s a non-social media component that needs to be considered
Regardless, applying the use of these concepts towards marketing is only effective in specific scenarios. Social Media is a place where all consumers get to have a voice, and ignoring the greater population leaves us back to where we started”abstracted from our own communities.
Enrico S. Montana, Visible Technologies
Thank you Jeremiah for a very insightful post. Great point about Absolute vs. Relative influence!
Thank you Jeremiah for a very insightful post. Great point about Absolute vs. Relative influence!
Yeah, I agree that #Klout is flawed. It’s just a matter of time until we find a “Real Way” to score influence, but at the end of the day isn’t it still a matter of how much targeted traffic you can push?
Klout is cool, traffic, conversions, and sales are the only metrics that really hold any weight in my mind.
Wow, ok that actually makes a lot of sense.
http://www.complete-privacy.tk
Here at EvoApp, we’ve created an engine with a very accurate sentiment grading system that acts as both a social media monitor (with sentiment) and direct communications collaboration tool (internal company emails, VOIP, SMS messages).
If we were to embed clout in to our system, we would be able to give our customers both sentiment of every message based on keywords and tags as well as the “social influence” of that individual, assuming that the source came from FB or twitter. Thank you Mr. Owyang for bringing this to my attention; Klout lacks a sentiment grading scale. This will fit perfectly in to our system. Now, to contact Klout. Thanks for this!
Here at EvoApp, we’ve created an engine with a very accurate sentiment grading system that acts as both a social media monitor (with sentiment) and direct communications collaboration tool (internal company emails, VOIP, SMS messages).
If we were to embed clout in to our system, we would be able to give our customers both sentiment of every message based on keywords and tags as well as the “social influence” of that individual, assuming that the source came from FB or twitter. Thank you Mr. Owyang for bringing this to my attention; Klout lacks a sentiment grading scale. This will fit perfectly in to our system. Now, to contact Klout. Thanks for this!
Here at EvoApp, we’ve created an engine with a very accurate sentiment grading system that acts as both a social media monitor (with sentiment) and direct communications collaboration tool (internal company emails, VOIP, SMS messages).
If we were to embed clout in to our system, we would be able to give our customers both sentiment of every message based on keywords and tags as well as the “social influence” of that individual, assuming that the source came from FB or twitter. Thank you Mr. Owyang for bringing this to my attention; Klout lacks a sentiment grading scale. This will fit perfectly in to our system. Now, to contact Klout. Thanks for this!
One of the other things that I would point out is that Klout scores change VERY frequently, while our absolute influence doesn’t typically change that much. My Klout score randomly changed by 10 points from one week to the next while I still have relatively the same number of people following me. Many of their metrics don’t actually have anything to do with actual influence. For example the amount that I tweet doesn’t impact my actual influence. Likewise, the my follower/following ratio has nothing to do with how many people pay attention to what I say. Klout has the right idea, but I think their metrics need some work.
Jeremiah
Specifically you have a strong authority in the spheres of Social CRM, peer influence, digital marketing. You have moderate authority in spheres like Apple and Google – but less impact on Apple than say MG Siegler.
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Hey Jeremiah,
I am the ceo and cofounder here at Klout. Thanks for taking the time to check out what we are doing here. Would love to have a deeper conversation about what we are learning from the market.
One thing I wanted to point out is that we see the Klout Score as the tip of the iceberg. An overall general score is only helpful as a starting point. All of our data has a topical element. You can see from Klout.com that we list you as influential about social media, marketing, etc (http://klout.com/jowyang). Behind the scenes we have much more granular data that we use to target for the campaigns we work on with brands. This is why when we do a campaign for Disney we only invite people influential about parenting rather than Scoble.
In terms of the insufficiencies you mentioned I think there are a few things worth noting:
– We tell the companies we work that all customers deserve amazing service. When companies use Klout and give special service right now it tends to be part of the customer acquisition process. We haven’t heard any feedback that there has been backlash from mainstream customers.
– Agree that gaming is an issue that we have to stay ahead. This is a huge challenge and somewhere we are putting a lot of effort.
– We also have data from LinkedIn and intend to add many more data services. In terms of a person’s social web influence I believe we have a very strong metric. Any person that has a blog or participates on any other social platform we don’t cover is almost guaranteed to be active on twitter or FB and is represented in our system.
– The sentiment analysis one is tough. When we used to think about this internally we would use George W Bush as an example (someone who was both loved and hated depending what side of the fence you were on). The feeling then was if someone makes people pay attention and take action, even if it’s negative, then they are influential. The Kenneth Cole example is different and something we hadn’t really seen before. We are definitely thinking about this though.
– Influence is not a gauge of buying potential but it is a gauge for network potential. I think it’s important to know that even though a customer might not be the person who spends the most money with you they might unlock a new market to you.
I love Eric and his forthrightness on this stuff – look it’s a well known trade off : choose two of time, quality and price.
Investors use Moody’s ratings because they allow fast assessments at a low price, but with only passing quality.
If you really want to know the insides of a company, you’ll need to pay through the nose and set a team of forensic auditors and corproate finance guys on it.
So it is with sociometric analysis of networks.
Joe I really appreciate the time you took for this thoughtful comment. Thanks for pointing out the areas that your team will continue to work on to improve the service.
I actually did not see the “Content Analysis” piece on my profile (or anyone else’s) for that matter till you pointed it out. It may be helpful to elevate this data type, as well as create ‘leaderboards’ or some type of visual map that indicates the influencers in these ‘relative influencer’ categories. That’s the crux of the findings in this post.
Thanks again for being open to the conversation.
Thanks this is a good first blush at understanding your service, I’d like to do a formal briefing, let’s set that up at briefings@altimetergroup dot com.
I appreciated both your post and the response from Joe Fernandez. I find the Klout score, Alexa ranks, feedburner subscription stats, and even TV’s Nielsen ratings and radio’s Arbitron numbers all to be useful tools. All are flawed.
Will someone infer to much into Klout? Yes, why should they be any different? I am not sure I agree that readership of your blog would be reflected indirectly in your facebook or twitter numbers. I find that as a podcaster (1.75M downloads last year) that there are definitely forms of influence that are not measured. We assume that people who are involved in social media are involved in all kinds of social media but this social media space, whatever that is, is a fragmented, niche-oriented and truly interesting space.
+1. Right now, to gauge influence in a subculture, you need to go native and be a part of that subculture. I’m sure we’ll get algorithms to go there, and in fact relative Klout scores correlate roughly with my sense of local authority, but just looking at absolute scores is worse than meaningless for my community at the moment.
Jeremiah, great post! I use Klout to track how I do as a cloud security evangelist for Trend Micro. It’s part of my MBOs. But I’ve also been talking with Mixtent, which uses conjoint analysis and a “hot or not” model to rank people by expertise in fields. It’s very helpful to combine both scores.
Jeremiah, great post! I use Klout to track how I do as a cloud security evangelist for Trend Micro. It’s part of my MBOs. But I’ve also been talking with Mixtent, which uses conjoint analysis and a “hot or not” model to rank people by expertise in fields. It’s very helpful to combine both scores.
Jeremiah, great post! I use Klout to track how I do as a cloud security evangelist for Trend Micro. It’s part of my MBOs. But I’ve also been talking with Mixtent, which uses conjoint analysis and a “hot or not” model to rank people by expertise in fields. It’s very helpful to combine both scores.
I agree that Klout potentially heightens the focus of the metric more so on the muscle armed influentials in the game, and incorrectly so, it seems to give them more “klout” vs the average joe, which should in some cases be valued more for their raw untainted interest, even though their reach may be significantly lesser.
As much consumers “game” the system, I’d wager that key influentials game it even more. There are more and more apps designed to help you game. The gameification of twitter is rampant, yet it works to snowball influence if you’re after it, and it works to reduce the clarity in what you can analyze, what is bs and what is not gets harder and harder.
I still feel “sentiment” is a lame analysis approach as well. It should free, given how frickin easy it is to do. If we could draw more from the social graph to actually segement these folks better, that data becomes more useful even though much of it is rubbernecking meh data. Understanding the core context that generated the chatter, that is holy grail. Transparent tracability would be awesome.
No one should reply on one metric and should routinely bounce metrics off each other to see if we’re swimming in bs or chewing on something worth while.
Not enough people consider the sheer volume of noise on twitter and the fact that anyone following over 400 people barely sees all the tweets that come by their radar. The SM douche bags of the planet drum up even more noise by using spam tweets or repeating tweets over and over each day which will slowly educate the average joe to see all of twitter expect what comes from ones they trust as trash.
I like that “go native” 🙂
There was a change in how they measured just a few weeks ago. That may be the reason
http://klout.com/blog/2011/02/taking-klout-scoring-to-the-next-level/
The CEO, Joe, above discusses how they constantly have to adjust to improve against gaming.
There was a change in how they measured just a few weeks ago. That may be the reason
http://klout.com/blog/2011/02/taking-klout-scoring-to-the-next-level/
The CEO, Joe, above discusses how they constantly have to adjust to improve against gaming.
phenomenal discussion – you’ve got Azeem and Joe chiming in which proves it’s relevance.
All should keep in mind that social benchmarks and measures of online influence are still really in their infancy. PeerIndex, Klout, and the other competitors are just scratching the surface on what it really means for an individual, brand, or organization to be a true trusted advisor online.
That being said, it does make sense for everyone active online to know what their PeerIndex and Klout-type “score” as it helps us to focus the tweeted and shared messages we deliver.
phenomenal discussion – you’ve got Azeem and Joe chiming in which proves it’s relevance.
All should keep in mind that social benchmarks and measures of online influence are still really in their infancy. PeerIndex, Klout, and the other competitors are just scratching the surface on what it really means for an individual, brand, or organization to be a true trusted advisor online.
That being said, it does make sense for everyone active online to know what their PeerIndex and Klout-type “score” as it helps us to focus the tweeted and shared messages we deliver.
I love klout… just wish they would use the reference of a facebook page verse my personal account (which I dont really do too much with…)
Since I am not seeing a lot tracking codes being embeded in many Twitter influencers’ text links that they posted, I am curious that shouldn’t companies give a unique tracking code to each Twitter influencer in order to capture all the traffic coming from that person? That is the only way to measure conversion rate and engagement rate on landing page, isn’t it?
Are there a lot of companies that have a social influencer database and calculate their own influence score for each influencer?
Since I am not seeing a lot tracking codes being embeded in many Twitter influencers’ text links that they posted, I am curious that shouldn’t companies give a unique tracking code to each Twitter influencer in order to capture all the traffic coming from that person? That is the only way to measure conversion rate and engagement rate on landing page, isn’t it?
Are there a lot of companies that have a social influencer database and calculate their own influence score for each influencer?