Posts tagged klout
Klout innovation will power search engine results
May 8th
Earlier this week Klout announced a significant commercial partnership with American Airlines — everybody with a Klout score of 55 or over gets rewarded with free access to American’s network of airport club lounges, even if they are not flying on that airline. But it turns out, that was only the beginning of Klout’s surprises for the week.
In a radical turn for the company, Klout will enable targeted and specific “influencer” content creation though an initiative called “Klout Experts” that will begin showing up as the lead items in Bing search engine results. You read that correctly. Your activity through Klout can propel you to the top of organic search results.
Why this matters
Obviously any new factor that could affect search results — even in a small way — is going to receive a lot of attention. This agreement with Microsoft seems to have profound and broad implications for the emerging world of “social influence” and the high-stakes world of search engine marketing.
First, a little background on why this development is important.
If I do a web search for “best car under $20,000,” the first results are probably going to appear because somebody behind the scenes has been optimizing an automotive firm’s website The results may not necessarily provide a useful or accurate recommendation on the best car, the best value, or even a car that is available in my area.
That’s why search firms are desperate to supply “warm results” that consider, who, when, and where a person is searching … and perhaps most important — what are the recommendations from those you trust? Both Google and Bing have been open about including more results from your personal “social graph” in results.
Influencers and search
“We have been experimenting with an idea,” said Klout CEO Joe Fernandez. “What would happen if we asked topical influencers to share their expertise? Would they be interested? Would they repond?”
In 2012 Klout ran a beta test to try the idea, introducing questions to a small group of influencers.
“If you wanted to know the secrets of growing beautiful tulips, or the best make-up for your skin type, wouldn’t you love to have a response from a passionate expert?” Fernandez said. “We found that influencers love to share their knowledge and help, so we are helping them do that through this new program called Klout Experts.”
Example of how Klout Expert answers will show in search results
“Our users are already the best content creators,” he said. “We are helping people realize the full impact of their influence through new, original content they provide on Klout. Every passionate content creator now has a chance for massive exposure through search.”
This new content will be “pragmatic” according to Fernandez, and direct — responses are limited to 300 characters. The best answers will show up at the top of the organic search results on Bing. There will be no “exclusivity” on the content so there is a chance the responses will show up somewhere on Google too.
Gaming Klout and search results
Fernandez is aware that he is creating a giant target for spam and SEO gamesters and is putting counter measures in place to keep the responses targeted, limited and relevant.
“Reputation has to come first,” he said. “If you’re not an established subject matter expert with a high Klout score, you won’t be able to participate.”
However, the top content results will not necessarily be determined by an individual’s Klout score, Fernandez said. “We are developing methods to sort through the content. Answer quality is most important and we have created a novel voting system based on user feedback and input from other topical experts to help us do that. You can only rank if you have influence on that topic. But feedback from other influencers will help determine what gets to the top.”
Klout has developed a system that randomizes the feedback mechanism and limits the ability to get votes from “friends” that would game the search results. ”We will also have visibility on what people are clicking on through our partnership with Bing,” Fernandez said. “We are working closely with the Bing team to keep the product pure and successful.”
Industry momentum
The American deal, and the Klout Experts announcement represent the fourth major commercial roll-out for Klout in two months. The company also introduced “Klout for business” this year, which provides a simple dashboard to discover and connect with topical influencers. Klout reported that it has now attracted more than 200,000 business accounts for its service. In early April, the company announced a partnership with telecom company Orange to bring Klout to France.
Despite fierce and growing competition in the influence marketing space, Klout seems to be at least winning the war on the PR front. The company’s financials are also improving, with revenue expected to double in 2013 to more than $10 million, although the company would not reveal any data regarding profitability.
Reflections on social media power and influence
Mar 19th
I wrote my first blog post about Klout about two and a half years ago. At that point, it was little more than another obscure social media start-up fighting for attention. Over the ensuing months, I wrote follow-up posts that criticized Klout and its competitors for some of the embarrassing mistakes they made.
But I grew fascinated by this topic of social influence. How DOES a person become powerful and influential on the Internet — an alternate universe that HATES any form of authority, titles, or rules? The more I studied and thought about this, the more interesting it became. I eventually wrote a book about the subject called Return On Influence
I studied this topic of online influence intensely for a year. I read books, academic research, and white papers. I interviewed more than 70 people ranging from brand managers and mommy bloggers to Dr. Robert Cialdini, arguably the leading expert on influence in the world and the author of the seminal work Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. I got to peek inside Klout (at that point virtually the only game in town) and talk to its customers. And here are the three conclusions I made:
1) This is a historically important time where personal power has been enabled through our ability to publish on the web.
2) The nature of power and influence in the online world is vastly different than what we are accustomed to in the offline world. It’s important for businesses and individuals to understand this — your paradigm has to shift.
3) Klout is on to something.
A year later, I’m very proud of the acclaim the book has received from the press, reviewers, and thousands of readers from around the world. I haven’t written on the topic of social influence in awhile and I thought I would reflect on what has happened in the field since the book came out.
The good.
Moving the debate along — It has been great to see meaningful debate emerge from the book as people begin to understand the changing nature of influence. There have been some great blog posts examining the potential for corruption of these scores, the difference between advocates and influencers, and creative new ways these tools are being incorporated into traditional marketing. Almost every marketing conference now has some element of social influence discussion on the agenda. Some of the more interesting topics include:
- What are the differences and relationships between advocates, influencers and fans?
- How do we connect influencer outreach initiatives to measurable business gains?
- How can we integrate influencer data into traditional marketing initiatives?
- Now that we can find these legitimate influencers, what do we do with them?
New technical development — A group of new companies has emerged to challenge Klout, the acknowledged market leader. Some of them have been niche knock-offs, but others, like Appinions, offers breath-taking new opportunities for marketing insight and innovation. Appinions digs deep below the surface of mere social media input, leveraging patented Cornell University technology to cull insight from 5 million online sources. Now this is getting interesting!
Stabilization — Klout and its social influence comrades have the unenviable task of scaling fast and iterating in public. Being publicly scored and evaluated pushed a hot button with a lot of people and a rash of PR gaffes seriously hurt the credibility of the genre to the point that people could not get past the damage to rationally assess the potential of the technology. Thankfully a lot of that drama is in the past. Scores have slowly stabilized, scamming has been addressed, and the focus is on progress instead of PR spin. The debate is generally becoming less emotional and more intellectual, although many people are still rolling old tapes.
New commercial development — Nearly all the major social influence programs are finding footing with customers. Klout announced new partnerships with Microsoft and ESPN. Kred has introduced a dizzying array of features that slice and dice scores a dozen different ways. PeerIndex has evolved to become a UK-focused discount shopping site. Appinions is gaining ground with a subscription model. Almost every PR, advertising, and marketing firm is trying figure out how these useful new tools can be integrated into marketing campaigns, or even coming up with versions of their own. The idea of “social influence marketing” is moving into mainstream marketing budgets.
The bad.
The social influence feeding frenzy — In the past 12 months there has been a feeding frenzy of misguided PR and marketing people trying to hook up with “influencers,” in a desperate attempt to ride the wave. As somebody typically on the receiving end of this behavior, I can say that 99% of the activity is crap. I especially feel sorry for the most popular mommy bloggers who are deluged with offers and incentives. Everybody wants a piece of an influencer but most are clueless on how to do it well. It’s still about relationships, folks.
The Klout Addicts — There is an underground network of folks supporting each other’s Klout addictions. They are obsessed with elevating their scores and doing whatever it takes to grab more valuable loot. Swag-grabbing is harmless good fun, but I’m not sure what a connection with these folks really does for creating business results. I’m guessing the brands are starting to figure this out? This is one of the potential dangers I pointed out in the book and it seems to be coming true.
The Klout Echo Chamber – There are still a number of folks out there regurgitating the same tired, out-dated, and irrelevant criticisms of social scoring companies. As they repeat their rants among themselves, they have simply created their own Echo Chamber. The biggest problem is that these folks are stuck in an “offline” framework of power and influence or haven’t bothered to look beyond their emotions to understand the theory and psychology behind the scores. Some of the wearisome rants include:
- “Klout is just stupid and doesn’t measure anything.”
- “Justin Bieber has a higher score than Warren Buffet so that proves that Klout is meaningless.”
- “Klout says I’m influential about grapes so that proves that it is worthless.”
These were perhaps valid commentaries at one time but today it is simply running old tapes. Here is what a Klout/Kred/PeerIndex score provides: An indicator of a person’s relative ability to create content that elicits online sharing and reactions. A company like Appinions further applies these scores in the context of topics, themes, and sentiment.
No more, no less.
Like credit scores, social influence scores are imperfect and not necessarily an indicator of future behavior. And yet, both of these indicators are useful. How many careers today are dependent on a person’s ability to effectively move content on the web?
How am I influencing you right now?
It’s likely that you know little (or nothing) about me as a person. I’m not an “influencer” in a traditional sense in that I have any power over you through a title, an elected position, or an organizational chart. And although I can’t tell you what to do, you may actually take some action after reading this post. Will you tweet it? Forward it to a colleague? Save it for later? Will you spend your precious time to comment on it? Have I even changed your view or attitude? Made you angry? Made you interested enough in the subject to explore the book?
My source of power on the web comes from essentially one place: Having an ability to create or aggregate content that is shared and creates a reaction. Without having the ability to create and move content, most influential bloggers you admire today would probably be toiling in a cubicle someplace instead of speaking on a global stage.
In this limited context, does a social scoring number like a Klout score make sense? Can Brian Solis create and move content better than me? Yes. Can I do this better than many of my students? Yes. Social scoring is far from perfect, but over time, this is the valuation that is beginning to be refined – a relative ability to move content. And that is very limited, but also very useful to many companies and brands who want to find people who can create buzz on a topic or product.
In conclusion …
Thank you for supporting (or debating) these new ideas over the past year. I hope there are two main lessons you took away from the book:
First, this is an amazing time for everyone to find their own online power, their return on influence. It doesn’t matter what college you attended, the color of your skin, or how much money you have. You can publish on the web and you can find your own power. Now, what are you going to do about it?
Second, I encourage you to be a critical thinker and cut through the emotionality of a company that purports to measure your influence. Yes, that might seem distasteful. It’s icky to me too. But as a business professional, we must move beyond the noise of the debate and look for the signal. Take a clear-headed look at the real dynamics of online influence and the implications for you, your brand, and your business, and make an informed decision.
Disclosure on companies mentioned in this post: I have never received a gift or “Perk” from any social scoring company. I accepted a dinner from the president of Kred in 2012. Both Klout and PeerIndex provided Return On Influence as a premium to their customers in 2012 as part of a promotional deal with my publisher McGraw Hill. I have indirectly provided paid counsel to Appinions as an adviser to one of their outside marketing agencies. I provided unpaid marketing counsel to Dr. Cialdini’s company. Links to books are affiliate links.
The results are in: An experiment in social influence
Dec 9th
As many of you know, I recently asked fans of {grow} to support a charitable cause through a post entitled “The kid who wanted a door for Christmas.”
I’d like to examine the results of this appeal as an example of “social influence” in action. What happens when a blogger asks his audience to do something beyond clicking a “like button?” What happens when a social media audience actually has to commit to an action and open a wallet? What can you learn from this example that will help you ignite your own business or charity?
The results from this blog post provide a fascinating lesson and case study:
The business situation
Asking for money on the Internet is a notoriously difficult proposition. In short, it usually doesn’t work.
I document this extensively in my book Return On Influence
The reason for this failure is that most social media connections are very weak relational links. Sure, we might be willing to help somebody out by clicking a “like” button or sending a tweet … but opening our pocketbook? No. It doesn’t happen.
So, going into this project, I knew this was a very risky proposition. Based on my own research and knowledge of the subject, I knew that there was a good chance my appeal would fall flat. Perhaps I would even be publicly embarrassed. Still, this was a worthy charity in need, so I decided to take a risk and ask for help.
Let’s look at what happened.
The results
So far, my appeal to help the Amachi charity resulted in 92 individual donations totaling $4,352 (excluding the PayPal fees). I consider this an extraordinary result since this total is not inflated by “friends and family” donations. The total I am reporting represents the new value I created for Amachi by establishing an effective social media presence and creating new connections that did not exist prior to the time I started blogging in 2009.
But we need to take a much closer look at the results to really discover the true nature of social influence.
Here’s an indicator of what we’re up against. My blog post was tweeted 446 times but only 92 people actually made a donation. So the reality is, 354 people encouraged others to donate without donating anything themselves.
Let’s peel the data back a little more by dividing the donors, to the best of my ability, into “strong” connections (people who are known fans of {grow} and regular contributors to the community) and “weak” connections (people I do not recognize from the blog who possibly donated via a tweet about the article or a Facebook post).
Here is the breakdown of strong connection versus weak connection donors:
I am pleasantly surprised that as many as 30 people could have come across the blog via Twitter and donated to the cause. I think the number is actually much lower because I’m sure some of the donors in this category are actual readers of the blog who I don’t recognize. But nevertheless, about one-third of the donors were people who do not have a personal relationship with me, which is pretty cool.
Here’s a second indicator of how the weak connections represented by social media “friends and followers” is not a very actionable group of people.
A couple social media heavyweights with more than 100,000 followers (and even more than 500,000 followers!) heavily tweeted my post to try to help. I estimated they generated more than 3 million Twitter impressions. Here is how many donors this activity generated: ONE.
So the “celebrity influencer” conversion rate on Twitter was 1 out of 3 million possible impressions. Sad, but not surprising.
Digging even deeper, we see that the strong relational connections from the blog community had a powerful impact on both the number of donations and the average amount of the donation:
Conclusions
Content is power
One premise behind Return On Influence
Think of the incredible potential we all have here. From a standing start in 2009, I have been able to create a global community that responded to an appeal in one blog post and contributed $4,352 in 48 hours. It took hard work to get to that point, but you have that opportunity — that power — too.
The real power is in strong connections
Not all social media fans and followers are created equal. As this example suggests, the real power of online influence comes through the strong connections created over time through the personal interactions on a blog or other community. If you want to create personal power on the web, you need to build an engaged and loyal group of advocates, not just a big number of Twitter followers. The numbers don’t matter as much as the relationships.
The critical importance of reciprocity
Another tenet of Return On Influence is the power of reciprocity (re-paying favors). My friend Jay Baer states in the book that reciprocity is the engine that powers the economy of the social web. As I look at who gave the biggest donations — yes, I’ve done many of them favors along the way. I had built up a bank of “social capital” and my appeal for donations was an opportunity for those folks to return those favors.
This is not something I planned or manufactured. I help people every single day without an expectation of reciprocity because I enjoy doing that. I’m not sure you can have a reciprocity “strategy.” You just have to be kind to people.
Where Klout fails
Klout, Kred and the other social scoring platforms provide an indicator of a person’s relative ability to create content that moves on the web. That’s an extremely important “leading indicator” of power because without that consistent presence you will never influence anybody on the social web. In other words, you can’t be an online influencer if you can’t move content. That stream of content to your followers creates the consistent, small “provocations” that eventually lead to those critical strong relationships that will take real action.
However, Klout does not dig deep into blog communities and other forums where the strong links are born, and until they do, they cannot really grasp the “actionable connections” powering the web. This is changing, however. For example, the start-up Appinions has patented technology that analyzes data across an incredible 5 million online data sources – including blogs, forums and traditional media – to create a glimpse of content in context. This represents the real future of social influence measurement and offers mind-blowing opportunities for marketing insight.
Your action plan
If you are an individual, company, university, or non-profit, your ability to create measurable actions across the weak links of social media platforms are negligible. Remember … I had one conversion over 3 million impressions. In terms of igniting “weak links,” I could have probably had better results taking out a Facebook ad!
This is a glimpse of the limits of “influencer” outreach. The donations didn’t come from somebody else’s vast community. They came from the strong relationships in my own community, which were built by delivering a lot of helpful content, engagement, and authentic helpfulness over several years.
There is a lot of potential to build awareness, social proof and validation through influencer outreach. But don’t overlook the need to do the hard work and build a real community for your brand.
The role of social media in the marketing mix is to consistently provide provocations through content that lead to that type of genuine, actionable community. Over time, you then have an opportunity to turn that work and “social bank” into loyalty and even passion for your brand or cause. And only then will the wallets open.
I’ve covered a lot of ground today on a rather controversial topic. What do you think of this example of social influence and my conclusions?
And by the way, if you missed the article and would like to help me support a charity that is turning lives around, you can learn more in my original post. Thanks again to all who have been so supportive and generous!
Update: If you are just stumbling on to this post, the final total raised was $5,900. but if you care to donate, I will leave this Donation button “on” in the original post => Here.
Also, when I delivered our first check to Amachi, Elijah and I visited the Amachi Office with the surprise donation. You can watch the video here: Amachi video.
Illustration courtesy BigStock.com
Florida State University class using Klout to determine student grades
Aug 26th
By Todd Bacile, Florida State University
“Thirty-five” was the answer to the following question posed to a marketing agency’s hiring manager: “What is the minimum Klout score a college student can have and still be considered for an internship at your firm?”
I immediately went into a state of shock — Shock that Klout has gone mainstream so quickly, and shock because my digital marketing student’s Klout scores typically range from 15 to 25. As an instructor, I had to ask myself: “Am I doing everything I could to prepare my students for the real world workplace?”
Most people seem to either love or hate Klout, so the notion of assigning a portion of a student’s grade to their respective Klout score may cause some to react … what’s a good word to use here … fretfully. Yet, as an educator teaching electronic marketing at the collegiate level I owe it to my students to introduce them to every and any concept that will help them land an internship or fulltime job.
Klout matters to employers
And here is an inescapable fact. Many firms are sizing up college student’s Klout scores as a quantitative metric to use for job applicant screening. Therefore, I decided to create a class project in which the final grade earned is solely determined by a student’s Klout score.
This class project familiarizes students with Klout by having them engage with others via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs. Students within my e-marketing class were already familiar with the terminology and nuances associated with various social media sites. By creating an experiential Klout project, students would now be able to apply social media engagement concepts and strategies to raise their Klout score, and ultimately, raise their grade. By the way: this may also help them land an internship.
The results have been phenomenal over this past year. The average Klout score of 16.7 at the beginning of my fall class’s project dramatically improved to 39.1 by the end of this project. Similar improvement was seen in my spring class’s project, with the average Klout score beginning at 19.3 and ending at 43.1. In both sections several students achieved scores well into the 50s, with a high score of 58.
A plan to model social media engagement
How did the improvement in scores happen? I had them game the system! Just kidding – I had to say that to upset some of the anti-Klout people who may be reading this post. In all seriousness, I simply reviewed Klout’s explanation of key scoring criteria and applied basic concepts recorded in the book Return On Influence. The idea is not to just accumulate a large following, but also to get other people to share and respond to content created by the students.
I then lectured and illustrated how the students can engage others via social networks — creating content people will want to comment on, asking relevant questions to key opinion leaders, and other methods used to engage in social conversation with others. These engagement skills are what many firms are seeking in social media marketing interns and entry-level positions that my students are hoping to land, making this an ideal project within the classroom.
An experiential project like this proved to be enjoyable for the students and maintained their attention and enthusiasm throughout the semester. Many students would compare scores and discuss different techniques used to engage with powerful opinion leaders within the social world. Which students had higher scores became a friendly competition causing students to work even harder at engaging others. Imagine that: students wanting to work more to develop skills that current marketing employers are searching for!
Benefits of the project
There are three key benefits this project produces.
1) Improvement to Klout scores that will help students during job application screening,
2) Hands-on experience engaging with others via social media by using specific functionality within different social sites.
3) The project overcomes recent criticism that business schools within higher education often fail to develop relevant skills.
Social media jobs are increasing and this project was a fun, entertaining, and interesting way to get my students to learn social media engagement skills. What are your reactions to this project to immerse students in social engagement?
Note: This blog post created quite a dialogue on both blogs and traditional media. Author Todd Bacile responds to the attention in his own blog post.
Todd Bacile is a doctoral candidate in marketing and the instructor of Electronic Marketing in the College of Business at Florida State University. A ten page research paper describing his Klout project will be featured in Marketing Education Review’s spring 2013 issue on teaching innovations. You can follow or contact Todd on Twitter @toddbacile
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