3 posts tagged influence

Klout announced a major redesign recently. There were many improvements that were long awaited, but not all the promised changes went live at that time. Klout “Moments” was announced to the world two weeks ago but was not live at that time, but now it is in preview. So now we have our first glance at Klout “Moments”.

The Klout Profile Page - Redesigned.

There profile bio page has been redesigned, and is public and can be viewed by other Klout users. The dashboard is not public, so only you can view your dashboard.

The profile page shows your bio on the left, your influencers, andyour influential topics just underneath. On the right is the new moments section.

(New Klout profile page)

No Compare functionality.

Interesting to note is that the compare function is gone, and you cannot view the dashboard of other people. I previously used the compare function to find out which social network others were influential in. I described how in this post. Now that the compare function is gone, we have to view the public moments to make this assessment.

The NEW Klout moments

Finally, we can now see examples of post that have contributed to our influence score. “Moments are your most influential posts, which we showcase for your network to see. They represent your best and most talked–about content” - Klout

We now also know what klout really measures, thanks to Klout recently giving us a view into the actions that contribute to our Klout scores.

(New Klout moments)

The moments view opens with the most recent public moments from the last 90 days. You can visit other profiles and view their recent public posts that contributed to their scores. Now we can learn a lot from others with higher scores. There is more to learn about these moments, but we shall come back to that later in the dashboard, and that information is not public. There is a settings button that can be used to see all recent moments, and also moments from your contributing social networks.

(choices available for viewing your moments)

Only you can see your own settings button. You will not be able to view other peoples profile page settings button. You are only able to see their recent public moments.

Here are some of my moments!

(Example Twitter moment)

(Example Google + moment)

(Klout moments)

Klout Dashboard and Interactions

The dashboard is where you can view your social interactions and influence statistics from the past 90 days. Only you can view your dashboard. The dashboard button is in the top right corner.

Interactions are actions taken by people on social media to engage with you and the content you create. Klout collects these from the original network, typically within 72 hours, displays them on your dashboard, and posts the time they were collected.

The moments that you can view on your profile page are included again in the dashboard as interactions, with one major addition. There are 5 small dots in the top right corner of each interaction. At least one of those dots will be bright green. This is the indicator that shows how much each contributed to your score in a relative way.

From your dashboard, you can also select the “Show my score summary” button to view your 90-day Klout score history, and metrics from each social network that contributes to that score.

(Klout score summary)

Nice to see Foursquare and Klout also included. Just select the slider buttons to view all your metric scores.

(Klout score breakdown by social network)

Conclusion

The Klout redesign from two weeks ago was a major improvement to understanding the Klout score, and making the score itself much more stable. Now we have the preview of Klout moments, so we also have clarification about which posts contributed to our scores, and can view public moments from others.

Great work from the team at Klout, but what should be addressed next?

- Quora
- Blog commenting systems
- More than 1 Twitter account
- Blogs to be properly included (WordPress self hosted and other issues)
- More ways to align offline influence
- Personal vs. Business influence
- Including more networks that contribute to the Klout score

I guess you could add to this list, so we eagerly await the future!

____________________________________________________________

About The Author:
Clive Roach is the social media strategist for Philips Healthcare. He is active with strategy development, activation, governance, projects and educational training activities for all aspects of social media within Philips Healthcare. Clive has been working in the eMarketing area since 1997, and previously held roles in engineering, design and sales. Clive is also practical in addition to his current strategic role. In addition to this blog, he tweets daily on three Twitter accounts, has two Facebook fan pages, Google+, Pinterest, So.cl, Instagram, and participates in many other social networks.
Connect with the author via: Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn | So.cl

Buffer

Every Klout user will see the updated Klout Score from August 14th 2012

Klout have announced some major changes, some of which have been a long time coming. You might have seen a “heads up” message on your Klout profile over the past few days or read blog posts like this one from JD Rucker.

August 14th 2012 is the day we started to see the changes slowly being applied. This roll-out will take some weeks to complete so do not worry if you do not see all the new changes yet. Here is a video which features the Klout CEO Joe Fernandez, talking about the changes, including an updated Klout Score, and a revamped website redesign.

The mobile apps have updated too.

The two Klout mobile apps that I currently have installed now show the new Klout score without any issues. The last major Klout change happened in October 2011, and the apps that I used at that time could not handle those major changes. One of them was rendered useless and was treated to the delete action, never to return. One of the apps I now use is the official Klout app that was recently launched. It allows users to swipe against various topics to give +K to others. You can tilt your mobile/tablet to view the 30-day score history of the new Klout score. Note that you cannot view your back history of the previous scores prior to August 14th. Klout will release more functionality to the mobile app, which is great news. My other app shows the new scores as well, for multiple Klout accounts. I use that to keep an eye on work competitors and other interesting accounts.

Moments.

“Moments” from the new Klout (source: Klout blog)

Moments is a new addition to Klout. A “moment” is a social media post that has generated action from the people in your networks. Now we can look at our posts and see the ones that contributed the most to our Klout score.

Many tried to work out what klout really measured!

Previously we could guess or analyze our posts over time to develop clues as to what actions or types of posts contributed to the Klout score changing. I laughed when I read a blog post by Steven Hughes which was published on May 16, 2012, titled
“4 Surefire Ways to Influence Your Klout Score”. Its conclusions were similar to those that I had worked out for myself. I compared other peoples scores to my own in Klout, which exposed the networks that they were influential in. I analyzed the type of posts that contributed to their score. I was impressed on many occasions and also shocked a few times.

I liked Tom Webster’s June 2012 blog post “What Klout Really Measures - Ethos, Pathos, and Logos”. It makes good reading! I shared it on many of my accounts at that time. Yet another attempt at finding out what Klout really measured.

Now we know what klout really measures!

Here are some of the top signals that Klout measures, as listed by Klout, so no more guessing!

• Facebook:
• Mentions: A mention of your name in a post indicates an effort to engage with you directly.
• Likes: The simplest action that shows engagement with the content you create.
• Comments: As a reaction to content you share, comments also reflect direct engagement by your network.
• Subscribers: Subscriber count is a more persistent measure of influence that grows over time.
• Wall Posts: Posts to your wall indicate both influence and engagement.
• Friends: Friend count measures the reach of your network but is less important than how your network engages with your content.
• Twitter
• Retweets: Retweets increase your influence by exposing your content to extended follower networks.
• Mentions: People seeking your attention by mentioning you is a strong signal of influence. We also take into account the differences in types of mentions, including “via” and “cc”.
• List Memberships: Being included on lists curated by other users demonstrates your areas of influence.
• Followers: Follower count is one factor in your Score, but we heavily favor engagement over size of audience.
• Replies: Replies show that you are consistently engaging your network with quality content.
• Google+
• Comments: As a reaction to content you share, comments also reflect direct engagement by your network.
• +1’s: The simplest action that shows engagement with the content you create.
• Reshares: Reshares increase your influence by exposing your content to extended networks on Google+.
• LinkedIn
• Title: Your reported title on LinkedIn is a signal of your real-world influence and is persistent.
• Connections: Your connection graph helps validate your real-world influence.
• Recommenders: The recommenders in your network add additional signals to the contribution LinkedIn makes to your Score.
• Comments: As a reaction to content you share, comments also reflect direct engagement by your network.
• foursquare
• Tips Done: The number of suggestions you’ve left that have been completed indicate your ability to influence others on foursquare.
• Klout
• +K received: Receiving +K increases your Klout Score by an amount that is capped in every 90-day measurement cycle to protect the integrity of the Score.
• Wikipedia
• Page Importance: Measured by applying a PageRank algorithm against the Wikipedia page graph.
• Inlinks to Outlinks Ratio: Compares the number of inbound links to a page to the number of outbound links.
• Number of Inlinks: Measures the total number of inbound links to a page.

Now we know! Read more here!

Offline influence vs. Online influence

I am a firm believer of judging the value of someone to your business by looking at how influential the person is relative to the online network or offline area where you want the person to be influential to your prospects. I used the compare Klout trick that I mentioned earlier to break down a person’s Klout score to see exactly where they were influential online. Offline influence could be tested by watching the person in action, or gaining qualified recommendations etc. I have seen people with a high Klout score proposed as an influencer for a high tech scenario when their score was high due to popular or funny pictures posted to their friends on Facebook.

Another view of the new Klout (source: Klout blog)

For further reading, one of my favorite posts on this topic is “The 7 Levels of Influence in the Attention Economy” by Douglas Idugboe. I just had to comment on that blog post!

Klout has its place, so we all must make sure we know what that place is. It has become much much better since August 14th, and I love that.
Klout is trying to address the balance. It now users 400 distinct data inputs to determine the score, compared to 100 with the old score. It now includes new data points from LinkedIn and Wikipedia entries as well, to help with measuring “Real-World Influence”. Douglas Idugboe’s post gives some clues about “Real-World Influence” and he does not mention Wikipedia entries at all ;-)

Image source: “The six influence flows” by Philip Sheldrake

I recommend reading “The six influence flows” by Philip Sheldrake. A breath of fresh air on the topic of real world influence for companies. However, I like where Klout is moving to.

The impact of the score change so far.

I have spent a few hours looking at new scores vs. old ones for friends, colleagues, businesses etc. I noticed about 15% that had dropped, including YouTube which came down from 100 to 91. The rest went up by a few points and some by many. I saw one Klout user with just a question mark, no score at all. This person is an ultra high output user so maybe his output needed some serious Klout computing power to work out the new score ;-)

What we need is stability in the scores, and moving to a 90-day period compared to the previous 30-day might help. My biggest complaint with the previous scores was the tendency to a “downward trend” that almost everyone had whether they were on vacation or not. I will not mention all the other issues. You can look at the comment streams of many of Klout’s Facebook posts over the last 10 months to see them mentioned there. I read those posts and stopped commenting. Surely they heard us by now, and it looks like they did! Lets see if they will get around to solving the other issues as well.

Have you seen any notable changes to your score? Do you like the new layout and the promised changes? Its looking good..  right? #Kudos Klout

____________________________________________________________

About The Author:
Clive Roach is the social media strategist for Philips Healthcare. He is active with strategy development, activation, governance, projects and educational training activities for all aspects of social media within Philips Healthcare. Clive has been working in the eMarketing area since 1997, and previously held roles in engineering, design and sales. Clive is also practical in addition to his current strategic role. In addition to this blog, he tweets daily on three Twitter accounts, has two Facebook fan pages, Google+, Pinterest, So.cl, Instagram, and participates in many other social networks.
Connect with the author via: Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn | So.cl

Buffer

Klout believes that influence is the ability to drive action! I really like that statement. In many ways the Klout score is maybe the best that we currently have as one metric to measure social media influence.

The Klout score looks at how many people you influence, and by how much, and how influential they are, and it now does that in 12 social networks, and the list is growing. Klout measures not what you talk about most, but the content that gets the most engagement.

There are 3 parts to the Klout scoring system;

True Reach

Your True Reach is the number of people you influence. They filter out spam and bots and focus on the people who are acting on your content. When you post a message, these people tend to respond or share it.

Amplification

Your Amplification is how much you influence people. When you post a message, how many people respond to it or spread it further? If people often act upon your content you have a high Amplification score.

Your Network

Your Network indicates the influence of the people in your True Reach. How often do top Influencers share and respond to your content? When they do so, they are increasing your Network score.

Klout score vs. PeerIndex score

Klout has become one of the most used metrics for any Social media dashboard. I certainly have listed it in many of the dashboards I created following a strategic overview. I also like using the PeerIndex score as well, as that breaks influence down into three main parts, audience, authority and activity. PeerIndex describes itself as enabling us to have an understanding of our social capital. I really like PeerIndex as it also provides a way to compare yourself with your competitors. I will create a post about using PeerIndex later on, but for now, back to Klout!

How to increase your Klout score

There are many theories about how to increase your Klout score. Blocking spam accounts is a great clean up action but does not directly affect the score. The path to success really lies in how you influence others and how they react to your activity. Now that is not so easy to do… or is it?

Klout lists the people that you are influenced by. These are people that are very likely to respond to and share your content. It is all about their reaction to the content that you create. Simply posting more tweets, more blog posts, and more Facebook updates will not increase your Klout score unless people respond and engage with your content.

What are the other new areas of Klout?

Now let me explain some of the other areas that Klout has introduced.

Klout perks

Klout Perks are exclusive products or experiences you earn based on your Klout score. Klout lists the requirements below the Perk. These perks can eventually get used up, and then they become “full”.

Klout topic pages

Topic pages allow you to see the top influencers, top +K recipients and top content for any of the topics currently listed on Klout.com. This is new and I have been exploring these topics for my company and also for me as a Social Media strategist, and a Lighting professional. You can give a +k recommendation to your peers, influencers etc. We all have a daily limit of five +K a day, so be careful who you +K ;-)
It is a great feeling when you get a +K from one of your peers so login today and give someone a +K today! Giving someone +K highlights that topic in their profile, so this shows that you feel that those people that you give a +K to are influential for that topic.

Klout Achievements

These are badges that you earn based on your activity. The former ones are described as legacy achievements, and you now see some new funky badges like “The summer of Klout”.

Lists

Great to be added to a list and you can create one as well. It is also possible to import an existing Twitter list into Klout.

I did this, but it seemed that I found a bug as the list was repeated 172 times! This was not nice for the people listed in that list, so I reported this to Klout as a bug. To their credit, it was quickly fixed. I was even contacted by Megan Berry, the Marketing Manager of Klout, based in San Francisco.

Does Klout have any drawbacks?

Please bear in mind that Klout can have some drawbacks, based on the use of one number as a summary of influence. I refer to Jeremiah Owyang’s web-strategist blog post of Feb 21st 2011, where he talks about the Klout score being a “useful metric, but an Incomplete View of Your Customer”. He lists six significant insufficiencies, and I list them here for you, but visit Jeremiah Owyang’s blog link to get the full explanation;

    Alienating your mainstream customers in desire to serve influentials.

    Consumers will game the system –reducing validity of metric.

    Klout is not representative of a customer’s real influence.

    Without sentiment of the influencer –the gauge is incomplete.

    Relying on this single metric alone is dangerous.

    Influence is not a gauge of true buying potential.

In summary..

Defining a complex topic like influence with just one number is a tall order, but Klout does a very good job at this. To create balance, I normally almost always track the Peer Index as well. I normally track these scores for competitors as well for benchmarking purposes.

It is not about the quantity, it is about the engagement and interaction with your peers to the content you create. Pay close attention to the three parts of the Klout scoring system, Network Influence, Amplification Probability and True Reach.

If you want to know more, why not attend the #kloutchat on the first Wednesday of every month.

This is one of my favourite quotes about Influence, and is a nice summary to keep in mind…

“My simple answer is to surround yourself with industry relevant and influential people; contribute relevant and great comments to their blogs and updates and provide relevant and remarkable content”.

- Terry Crosby, Social Media Strategist and Trainer - Jan 19, 2011 

Do you have your own views about the Klout score and did you have success with actions that  increased your score?