Posts tagged klout scores
Klout overhauls its business model, but does it answer its critics?
Aug 14th
Klout announced a radical overhaul to its scoring system, site design, and score transparency. But what is the real impact? Will it make a difference? I had a chance to speak to Klout CEO Joe Fernandez to try to determine the depth of the changes that were announced today … and answer the question on everybody’s mind — “Will my Klout score drop?”
Substantially more data points
Joe Fernandez of Klout
The new site will be introduced this week to a small set of users and will roll out in increments over the course of the next few weeks, according to Fernandez. Among the most important changes, Klout announced that it is beefing up the robustness of its scores by looking more broadly and deeply across social platforms:
- Klout will now consider 400 distinct data inputs to determine your score, up from 100 data points today. New data inputs include stuff like Facebook photo tags, LinkedIn job titles, and Wikipedia entries.
- By expanding the number of platforms and inputs being considered, Klout will analyze 12 billion data points per day (up from 1 billion) in an attempt to provide more accurate scores.
- The company is providing slightly more consideration in its algorithm to what Klout calls the “real world” influence of LinkedIn and Wikipedia.
Tempering the vacation effect
A major complaint about Klout is that people’s finely-tuned scores drop whenever they go on vacation (and stop tweeting/posting). Fernandez said that Klout is giving more weight to relatively stable data inputs like LinkedIn profiles and Wikipedia entries that will help minimize the drop in people’s scores when they go on vacation. Scores will also be considered over a 90-day period instead of a 30-day period so that sudden inactivity will have a less dramatic impact on scores.
Transparency
Klout is adding a Kred-like feature called “Moments” that allows you to see which specific activities influence your score. Fernandez says this will help people “create better content” through constant feedback on what is providing the biggest actions from your networks.
Privacy
Klout has been caught up in some embarrassing privacy miscues, including showing profiles from minors on the site and re-introducing people into the Klout system who had opted-out. Fernandez said they have hired an outside privacy consultant for a “long-standing engagement” to perform audits and also that they have a full-time team overseeing privacy on a day-to-day basis. “We’ve learned our lesson on the mistakes we made,” he said. “Our goal is to lead the industry in matters of privacy protection.”
The Bieber versus Obama debate
An endless Klout complaint is that Justin Bieber, previously the only person with a perfect score of 100, has a higher score than the president of the United States. Fernandez believes that putting a higher weight on Wikipedia and LinkedIn will provide a fairer perspective of “real world” influence. And yes, the president now has a higher score than Justin Bieber.
Gaming the system
Fernandez told me they have designed new systems that will “turn the knob down” on people who are gaming their score instead of driving action by organically providing great content. ”We will protect our system,” he said, “and reserve the right to take action if somebody is using tactics to simply raise a number artificially.” For example, he said that a person who created 100 re-tweets by sending out “100 pieces of crappy content” would be penalized compared to somebody who earned 100 re-tweets with one piece of great content.
Site Redesign
According to Fernandez, the new design, which has been in the works for a year, will “help you feel more recognized than judged” with more “emphasis on content rather than your score.” As you can see, the profile page has been dramatically re-designed, with a real emphasis on the the new “moments” feature:
The Klout mobile app
Fernandez admitted that the current Klout mobile app is “painfully crude.” However, an improved mobile app is in the approval process through Apple that will include the distribution of Klout Perks. This is expected to be available sometime this fall.
Do Klout Perks drive purchases?
While Klout Perks (free gifts generally provided to people with high Klout scores) can have the same short-term impact as coupons, Fernandez said they are getting closer to developing models that demonstrate influencer impact on purchase intent. He said that they are eliminating the noise and complexity of this work by working closely with several brands on a statistical analysis to determine a new “strength of influence score.” This score may be able to forecast buying behaviors based on patterns in an influencer’s audience.
The bottom line
Klout deserves credit for listening to their critics and attempting to knock down the problems one by one. Will it silence the critics? Of course not. If you hated Klout last week, you’ll probably hate Klout this week too. When it comes to Klout, logic rarely prevails.
I think the more important question is, has Klout improved its service offering with substantive changes? Yes and no.
- Probably the biggest concern has been privacy. It appears that Klout has taken a no-nonsense stand on this, but time will tell if they can be a role model on this issue.
- Likewise, Klout’s dead serious tone on people gaming their system is the right move. Any social platform that becomes popular eventually attracts corruption. Spammers almost killed Twitter in 2009 and Quora in 2010. Klout realizes that its ability to hold off the gamesters will be critical if they are to present legitimate “influencers” to clients.
- On “transparency” they seem to have stepped up to requests with the “Moments” feature, although Kred appears to still provide more detail in this area. If you have the time to study it, this feature is useful and provides insight into their algorithm. The company also provided a detailed list of factors that impact your Klout score.
- By quadrupling the inputs to personal scores, the scope of their influence assessment far surpasses any rival. But it also adds substantially to the complexity of the algorithm and creates opportunities for things to go wrong. The changes will not significantly impact the fact that a Klout score will still be weighed more toward Twitter- and Facebook-centric activities.
- Most of the other changes announced today — emphasizing content over scores through their design, minimizing the vacation effect, and the “Obama over Bieber” change — are simply window dressing to moderate criticisms, in my opinion. It’s not going to make any real difference in their business model or the scores of the everyday social media user.
At the end of the day, Klout, Kred, and PeerIndex only measure one thing: Can a person create content on the social web that gets shared and elicits a reaction? That of course is a legitimate source of power on the web today in this Era of the Citizen Influencer where everyone can publish and have a voice.
But after several years of effort, Klout is still missing out on a real gold mine of online influence — blogs and YouTube videos. These are the forums where rich content is created, discussed, and shared. Today, Klout scores are impacted only by activity on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Google+, Klout, and Wikipedia. You can also connect YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, Lastfm and flickr, but they don’t compute in your score.
Will Klout’s announced changes make a difference? I think they have taken steps in the right direction, but the only meaningful answer will come from its customers — the real ones who give them money, not us. Can Klout deliver effective incentive programs that nurture powerful word of mouth influencers and create brand advocates? The company seems to be on a roll, creating 400 influencer campaigns in the past 12 months, but time will tell.
And, oh by the way …
Will your Klout score drop?
(Drum roll) Probably not. Klout CEO Joe Fernandez said that the changes to the system are substantial, but only about 10 percent of user scores are projected to drop, compared to 40 percent in the Klout-pocalypse of November 2011.
I would be eager to hear your views of these changes, but fair warning — I’m weary of comments with no more rationale than “Klout is stupid.” If that’s where your head is, read this short explanation of social scoring systems before you comment! Thanks!
Disclosure: I have never taken a Klout Perk or any form of compensation from Klout. My publisher McGraw-Hill worked with both Klout and PeerIndex to offer Return On Influence as a Perk in the spring of 2012 and there may have been a small indirect benefit in terms of additional book sales.
Six hot trends in social influence marketing
Aug 5th
Now that access to the high-speed Internet and free social media publishing tools are widespread, everyone can create their own content and have a voice about topics they love. The ability to create powerful content that moves through an audience is a legitimate source of influence on the web, and something that just could have happened now. Influence has been democratized!
Companies like Klout, Kred, PeerIndex, and Appinions are tapping into this powerful new trend and attempting to quantify this new source of influence — not ALL influence, but a very small, important sliver of it — Can people effectively create content that moves through the Internet and elicit a reaction (like a RT, a comment, or opening a link). This is another way of saying, “Who creates buzz?”
While assigning influence to celebrities and sports stars has been common for decades (E scores and Q scores), assigning some measure of word-of-mouth power to the masses opens up some revolutionary possibilities. As I describe in my book Return On Influence
This begs the question … Now what? What do we do with these influencers once we’ve found them? Where is the social scoring trend heading? Here are six developments to watch for in the next phase of this fascinating marketing trend:
1) Moving out of the lab
I recently met with Azeem Azhar, the very bright and ambitious founder of PeerIndex and he noted that in 2012, social influence marketing and outreach programs are moving out of the “experimental stage” and into mainstream marketing budgets.
Frankly some of the early marketing efforts have stumbled out of the gate but companies are finding many creative ways to incorporate these algorithms in ways that find new customers and reward passionate brand advocates. This is being recognized as an entirely fresh marketing channel that will require its own research, measurement, and best practices.
2) Moving into the streets
One of the most significant development in this field in the past few months is Klout’s introduction of a mobile application. The current version is crude, but it is the first step toward making influence rewards ubiquitous.
Eventually apps like this will be able to push alerts to you when you are near any business that is interested in connecting with you and your power of personal influence. So, you can walk off a plane and receive deals, upgrades and special perks wherever you are — no check-ins, no emails, no need to opt-in to a deal.
So far, these “perk” programs have usually been limited to national companies and brands but this innovation will open the floodgate for small and local businesses.
3) Developing the channel
One of the healthiest developments is the number of blog posts I have been seeing that move the conversation from “is social influence real?” to “how do we develop this as a competency?”
Jay Baer recently pushed the discussion forward by challenging readers to better define influencers versus advocates. Chris Brogan wrote an interesting post from the influencer’s viewpoint of advocacy versus selling out. Appinions just released a report called “Why reaching out to Mommy Bloggers is a Broken Model” which is a sign that this conversation is moving forward beyond blanket mailings to anyone on an influencer list.
Now that we have found these influencers, what do we do about it? What new skills and techniques do we use to connect and nurture these powerful word of mouth influencers without being annoying? We need to recognize that even passionate advocates may not know how to best support your cause. How do we teach them to ignite our content? And how do we define influencers, advocates and friends and how do we relate to them differently?
4) Connecting online conversations to offline buying behavior
Many critics contend that online influence does not necessarily translate to offline buying behavior — but these dots are being connected very quickly. In fact, it’s already happening.
Smart phones are going to auto-publish content to your Facebook timeline and other platforms — where we are shopping, what we are listening to, what we are viewing. So it’s a simple matter of connecting your conversations with influencers to these actions.
For example, let’s say you love to post about your favorite music. These algorithms will be able to pick up when your friends add music purchases to their timeline that correspond to your recommendations. More and more search results are including recommendations from your friends, which will also support connections between online and offline behaviors. Over time, an actual dollar value will be assigned to your “influence power.”
5) Influence in context
Social scoring is rapidly moving beyond the Twitter-centric days of just a year ago. For example, Appinions, is leveraging 10 years of Cornell University research to plow through 4.5 million content sources for influencer clues. Instead of just tallying “mentions,” Appinions is using unique semantic software to put the influence data in the context of positive and negative sentiment. This is a sign of the future of social influence marketing — broad capabilities, powerful data-mining, specific market insight.
6) Internal uses of social influence measures
Nearly every social media pundit at sometime or another has pontificated about “the social business” that unleashes employee power in a way that creates many individual beacons shining for the company or brand. If they’re serious about this, why not use these social scoring measures to benchmark the efforts?
I recently wrote about a global consulting company using Kred scores to determine which employees are most effectively representing the company on the web. The results were surprising! Salesforce.com is also identifying and rewarding their “Chatterati” — employees who are the most helpful online influencers, regardless of their title or job role. This is really an enlightened and promising view of the emerging importance and recognition of online influence.
Those are a few tends on my radar screen. What are you seeing out there? Are you exploring practical applications of social influence and influencer outreach?
The evolution of social media power and influence
Aug 14th
I was recently interviewed about Klout and social influence by Vinícius Cherobino of Galileu, a scientific magazine in Brazil. I thought his questions were especially good and wanted to share this content with you:
Galileu: How do you view the rankings and people’s influence score published on the Internet (such as Klout or Peer Index)? What are the main consequences of this process?
Schaefer: There are two quite interesting implications of this development. First, many people are upset over the fact that they are being publicly rated, evaluated and compared. The debates on this topic can be quite emotional! On the other hand, this is a historically important development for marketers. It’s certainly not a perfect system, but we are taking the first steps toward quantifying influence, or at least a small slice of it. Companies like Klout are in the silent movie stage. Let’s give them time to see how it works out.
We are currently seeing many companies creating their own influence rankings with their own methodology. How do you think this will evolve? Will it be a market with many players or only a few?
I think it will develop in several ways. Although in most industries there are frequently 2-3 strong competitors, on the Internet, typically just one company dominates a niche. We like to have companies compete for our money, but we don’t like it when they compete for our attention. Humans have limited time and attention and usually we focus on one platform over time. So I think a leading company will emerge. However, I think several niches could emerge too. The entry barriers are relatively low. So why wouldn’t we have applications rating teens, people in geographic regions, or single people?
After the evolution of influence scores, do you think it is possible to imagine every Internet user being judged by their position in the influence score (from possible employers to retail chains)?
There are limitless opportunities to use these scores. I heard of an interesting use where a company is looking at how connecting to people with high influence scores can affect the sentiment toward a company. It’s mashing up two fields. Learning who true influencers are is an incredibly useful tool for many companies in almost any industry.
You mentioned the beginnings of a caste system in the Internet through the scores. How deep can this system can be? Do you think that a regular user will be able to defend him/herself of that?
This is a development that I think will drive some crazy, and unfortunate, behavior. People who have high influence scores will get lots of valuable gifts, even trips and vacations. People with low scores will get nothing. What do you think will happen? The people who get nothing will try any crazy scheme possible to get something or they will become resentful of those who are getting the gifts. I recommend that people stay centered and just be themselves. However, I don’t think many people will follow that advice!
Some critics claimed that this kind of “influence ranking” tends to foster even more inequality on the web (VIPs have everything, regular users have nothing). How do you see this kind of critique?
Life is unequal. So it’s no surprise that the web is unequal. But here is another way to look at it. Today, only the famous celebrities get free vacations, cars and endorsement deals. But now lots of normal people who just happen to be an expert and influential in something can experience a little celebrity too. It’s a way for hard working people to get noticed and rewarded for their work too! Not everybody can be a movie star, but everybody can be influential in something and work hard to show it.
On the other hand, some defend the idea of democratization of influence. Not only politicians and actors, for instance, but regular users can fight for influence. What is your opinion?
I think this is definitely true. We are in the era of the citizen influencer. Everybody can have a voice. There are many common working people who can now be recognized for their authority. I think even I am an example of that. I’m not a pro athlete or celebrity. But I do work hard on my blog {grow} and it is making a difference in people’s lives. So, yes, I am a common person but I have influence too.
Apparently, there is a gap between online influence and offline influence. Will the technology be able to bridge this? Or do you think this will remain in separate arenas?
This is really the core of the online influence debate. As far as I can see into the future, I think there will always be some disconnect between offline and online behavior. However, with geo-location applications it is becoming more possible to tie online behaviors with say, going to a store or eating at a restaurant. This is being recorded and connected to conversations. Augmented reality will take us even further in that direction. So there will be a bigger online-offline connection than people can imagine, I think. The technology is moving us toward that connection, not away from it.
How can the users’ influence be combined with other types of data mining from social network sites? Could this mean more privacy concerns?
For the most part, the scores are being determined through public information like tweets and status updates. So it is aggregating and sorting information you are volunteering any way. In that respect I don’t think there will be additional privacy concerns but I do think the profiling that will occur is going to startle people. But that is occurring everywhere. If I type an email in Google, moments later ads related to the subject of my email appear. That sort of profiling is at the heart of these advertising models and it will just get much more detailed and granular.
This could be another step of celebrity culture developing into the internet?
I think people make celebrities into celebrities, not the Internet! We are already in a celebrity culture. The Internet simply amplifies it.
What do you think? How is power and influence being re-defined on the Internet? Are you more influential online or offline?
The making of a social media slut
Jul 20th
I crossed the line. I think I have become a social media slut.
Before I tell my tale, let me relate a few of my experiences this week …
- A very talented friend told me he was rejected for a job at a major ad agency because his Klout score was too low.
- A B2B marketing agency Managing Director told me he chose between two qualified candidates based on their Klout score.
- A friend in D.C is creating a Klout 50 Club exclusive to people with high Klout scores. Why? He wants to find good hires for social media marketing.
- A woman told me her boyfriend was accepted to a prestigious conference based on his Klout score alone.
These experiences occurred in the span of 72 hours.
This morning I had coffee with a family friend who just graduated from college and is seeking her first job as a writer/content creator. She was eager to seek my advice on what she should do to get ahead and land a job.
My leg began to twitch. My hands became cold and clammy. My lips quivered.
And then the terrible words came out of my mouth. “You need to take a hard look at your Klout score. It could make a difference if you’re seeking an entry level social media job.”
Oh my God. What did I just say?? What have I done? I recommended that this young lady game a score to get a job? That she needed to focus on an internet RATING of her worthiness?
I felt sick and … dirty. Filthy. Slutty.
I still do. This isn’t what I want social media to be about. This is not what I want people to aspire to. And yet, I can’t ignore what’s happening out there. Facts are facts. I would have been remiss to NOT mention it to her.
An algorithmic measure of influence can never tell the whole story, but it seems that it is starting to become a quick and easy indicator of … something. Something that people are grabbing on to. In a world where people are auto-responding their relationships and making business decisions based on 140-character sound bites, this thing seems to be going mainstream.
I’ll turn this over to you and your comments. I need to scrub down.
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-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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