Posts tagged social scoring
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
Kred tries to one-up Klout by taking influence to the masses
Aug 21st
Kred, a platform to measure social influence similar to Klout, just introduced a new interface called “Story” with several very interesting new features. It is so graphically-intensive that I wanted to provide a video (below) so you can experience the changes first-hand. In my view the overhaul provides some valuable new tools for marketers interested in influencer marketing (and you should be).
Click here if you can’t see the video of Kred Story.
So what does this mean to you? I see at least two interesting business applications of the new “Story” format.
First, this puts some useful, free tools into the hands of small businesses and brands. So far Klout has really been the domain of big brands fortunate enough to be able to experiment with Klout Perks. One of the questions I am often asked is, “OK we understand this marketing trend, but we’re a small business. How do we find these influencers?”
Kred has come up with some very nice free or inexpensive features so that many businesses can find topical influencers by geographic location.
A second benefit I see (which may not be even be apparent to Kred) is the usefulness of seeing the most shared content by category and the influencers behind the sharing. This could be an extraordinary tool for curating top content.
When I previewed the new Kred offering, there were still a few pretty strange bugs in the system, but honestly that doesn’t bother me as much as other people. We are watching an entirely new marketing channel unfold and iterate in public — a pretty extraordinary business model. So I am more focused on the trend and the opportunities than short-term things that look might appear silly.
I had an opportunity to ask a few questions of Kred CEO Andrew Grill about this latest round of social influence innovation:
Andrew Grill
Mark: I imagine that it is difficult creating sustainable points of differentiation in a field where there really is no intellectual property protection. In other words, you are probably in a cycle where competitors simply continually copy each other. How do you compete in an industry like that?
Andrew Grill: When we gained access to the Twitter firehose back in 2008, we developed our architecture to be able to handle the masses of data that come from sources like Twitter, Facebook, and the ever-growing social networks. We’ve developed IP (Intellectual Property) and know-how around receiving and ingesting big data.
We are the only influence provider that is generating scores in real time. We also took the decision to be open and transparent from day one, by not only publishing exactly how we derive the Kred scores, but also showing on every one of the 120 million Kred profiles the effect of interactions on the scores in real time. No-one else has decided to be this transparent – something that sets Kred apart from other platforms.
Mark: What is Kred’s R&D cycle? How often can we expect to see major updates like this?
Andrew Grill: We iterate fast. Kred was built in just three months, and the build time for Kred Story was even faster. Small enhancements to the site based on our valuable community feedback are added into the development cycle on a weekly basis. Customers also benefit from our quick R&D cycle as we can build custom versions of Kred elements extremely quickly.
Mark: One of the things many people don’t understand is that you have no choice but to iterate in public. There is no way to test enough ahead of time to be able to predict everything that might happen when you flip the switch and a million people hit your servers. From a business standpoint, how do you gear up for the inevitable fire-fighting when you make a major change like this?
Andrew Grill: Having an amazing technical team who work around the world in multiple time zones means that we’re ready for anything. You are right that we have to iterate in public, and we are always listening to what people are saying about us and the product – feeding things back to the development team as we receive it. We love being in such an agile environment and industry – it makes us work harder to build the best possible platform we can.
We also utilize our network of Kred Leaders to seek feedback on new deployments. In addition, we have a round the clock community management team looking out for any issues and feeding them back to the team. As social media is real time, if something is not working, we hear about it pretty quickly through Twitter.
Mark: How do you project the Twitter API change will affect Kred and its new format?
Andrew Grill: We don’t expect any material changes to the Kred Story format to be compliant with the new API. We have been working with Twitter for four years now since we gained access to the full Twitter firehose and we have a great partnership.
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Take a look at the demonstration video and let the {grow} community know what you think about it. Other than the features I’ve named here, what else do you like about this new interface?
Disclosure: Kred has named me a “Kred Leader” but I have not been active and maintain a neutral position in the industry. Andrew Grill bought me dinner earlier this year during a business trip.
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?
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