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Lithium announced Klout would be playing a major role in the "new Lithium," and debuted two new offerings: Klout Products and Klout Pop-Up Communities.
Klout Products will incorporate Klout scores into the online-shopping process. Individual products will be assigned a Klout score based on ratings, reviews and what people are saying on social media. People who write product reviews will also have their individual Klout score displayed, along with their review, so other users can judge how reliable their review is.In the case of reviews, individuals' Klout scores vary according to topics, so a user's score will change based on their reputation for reviewing certain topics....
Klout has attracted it share of critics but it is also an undoubtedly useful tool for businesses trying to achieve a culture of content creation.
Our team needed to establish metrics that would drive the right behaviors in the organization over the long-term. But how do you measure cultural change? How do you measure whether a team is moving from a comfort level with advertising and broadcasting to one of listening, creating, responding, and nurturing an audience of relevant healthcare influencers?
We looked at a variety of metrics but the more we thought about it, “Klout” seemed to fit the bill.I know I risk a torrent of critical responses by even mentioning the name of this company. But if you already on the brink of a rant, I would like to ask a favor. I am taking my time to create free, thought-provoking content for you. Before you rant about Klout in the comment section, please put pre-conceived notions aside for just one moment and don’t skim the article. Then, you can rant : )...
Social marketing can be wasteful. Depending on how often someone checks their Facebook News Feed or Twitter stream, they might rarely see a brand's message unless it was paid to be put front and center. Facebook analytics firm PageLever (recently acquired by social marketing company Unified) said last fall that most Facebook page posts fade off into the ether three to five hours after getting published. But the promise of social isn't one-to-many broadcast-style publishing; it’s creating a ripple effect. Get something in front of the right people and they’ll push it onward and outward. Not only does that serve as a sort of audience-quality filter, but a side benefit for brands is that it can be as inexpensive as it is efficient. Washington Post-owned social agency SocialCode rolled out an influencer targeting tool last year with exactly that intent, and now the most high-profile arbiter of social influence, Klout, has unveiled an analytics dashboard to help brands pinpoint their influencers. "This is really the first step—but a meaningful step—towards a set of tools that will enable brands to more effectively understand and engage with their influencers," said Klout CEO Joe Fernandez. He maintained that Klout remains a consumer company, but Klout for Business definitely levels up the brand side of the business with the potential to become an enterprise-level marketing platform. At launch, Klout for Business aims to tell businesses who the influencers are among their Twitter followers and Facebook fans, including age groups, gender, location and of course what topics they're influential on. Fernandez said Klout rewrote its topic analysis system to give companies a dynamic look at those influencers’ interests. "Imagine Pepsi wanting to know who in their audience is influential about snowboarding and invite those people to a Pepsi competition at Aspen," he said....
It seems to me that whenever I bring up the topic of Klout, I get three types of reactions. One type of reaction is confusion – “what is Klout?” or “I have heard of it but not sure what it really is”. Another type of emotional response is passionate hate and anger whenever anything about Klout is mentioned. Then the last form of response is understanding it and wanting to learn ways to work with Klout and use it to the individual’s best advantage....
Your Klout Score Does Matter Yes, it does. Especially if you are a business owner or are in fields that involve marketing, PR, coaching, music, writing, politics, or anything that involves social media – which has become more prevalent now and will continue to do so – you need to face the fact that your Klout score is looked at more than you realize....
Twitter cofounder and board member Ev Williams on Monday suggested that the microblogging site de-emphasize users’ follower counts in favor of some better algorithm for measuring their influence, according to Buzzfeed. "The thing I think would be more interesting than followers is... retweets," Williams said, adding that a simple follower count “doesn’t capture your distribution.” He went on: “The dream metric is how many people saw your tweet.” But why stop there? After all, people might see your tweet and ignore it. Or they might see one tweet but not the next, because they don’t follow you. Or they might be influenced when you tweet about one thing but ignore you when you tweet about something else. What Twitter is really after, as it tries to woo advertisers, is a way to objectively measure users’ true influence on the site. Unfortunately, that leads to a game of whack-a-mole. Every time you try to measure one thing, something else pops up that you’re not adequately measuring. Take the example of Klout, a startup that was already trying to do what Twitter might try to do now. After working for more than two years to try to get a bead on people’s online influence via Twitter, then Twitter and Facebook, then Twitter and Facebook and Google+, it remained dissatisfied that Justin Bieber outranked President Obama. So it began trying to incorporate offline influence into its ratings as well, drawing on sites like Wikipedia and LinkedIn as proxies for real-world stature.... [Trying to read the tea leaves of online influence - JD]
Can you use Klout to help the effectiveness of your sales and marketing teams? Here's a test case. One of the things I have been interested in is examining practical applications of Klout and social scoring to an internal enterprise. If you are unclear about social scoring systems and what they attempt to measure, it might be useful to start with this blog post about Why Klout Matters. Like a credit score, let’s assume that companies like Klout, Kred and Appinions are beginning to measure something that correlates to an individual’s social media effectiveness. I had an opporunity to test some of these ideas last week when I conducted a social influence workshop with a global services company in the UK.... It was nothing short af a revelation to these top executives. Here are a couple of observations. [Valuable read on influence and social measurement - JD]
Are you still one of those folks who thinks Koout is stupid? It's time to look at the facts and consider this as an important business development. If you hate Klout … and you probably do … try to take a deep breath and read ahead with an open mind. Nothing seems to get rational people in a frenzy as much as Klout and its attempt to measure “influence.” I have immersed myself in the world of online power and influence over the past six months and feel like at this point I have probably studied this topic more than any person on earth! And, unlike every other blogger on the planet it seems, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a very important development. In fact, a historically important development....
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Late last week Klout announced its intent to empower its users with the ability to view and share curated content that is custom-tailored according to the social graph of the user and the user’s audience. This is a throwback to early last year when LinkedIn actually did something similar — when its content was still useful. However, since curation is based on an individual user’s social graph and what actually resonates with their audience, this looks to be potentially better.
Klout describes it this way: “The ‘Create’ tab helps you find great articles and posts worth sharing with your audience. Unlike most apps that suggest content for your personal consumption, Klout intelligently recommends content that will strike a chord with your unique set of friends, fans and followers. Helpful tags highlight fresh content that is starting to trend as well as items that closely match the interests of your audience members and are likely to resonate with them.”
Klout really wants to make you care about your online influence.
That’s in part why the company has, with little fanfare, pushed out Cinch, an iOS application that pairs questions asked by users with other “experts” on certain topics, based on their amount of knowledge of the area in question.
The idea is basically leveraging the value of Klout’s flagship product, which purports to rank people in terms of their influence in certain areas. I, for instance, tweet a whole bunch about Facebook and Twitter as companies, so it would make sense for a product like Cinch to pair a person’s Facebook-related questions with my answers....
I’m often asked by companies who have hired us for Social media consulting “should we use something like Kred or Klout in our hiring process?” This question makes me cringe and my answer is always: absolutely not. But, and yes, there’s a but, you can use them to gain some insight as to what someone is about. It has always amazed me how quickly social media managers, HR managers and even CTO’s jump to adopt new measurement tools, analytics and data, just because someone comes out with it. A brief look at a couple of the most well-known social media influence measurement tools and my opinion....
Digital influence is one of the most fascinating and widely debated trends in social media today. Whether or not you agree with the idea of assigning a score to individuals based on their actions in popular social networks, the reality is that Pandora’s Box has already been open. People check the scores like investors check stock prices. Brands reward “influential” consumers with products and services. Employers consult scores to lure seemingly more qualified candidates. This is already happening and as a result, there’s much to learn.
So what is the future of digital and what does it mean to you and me? My guest on this episode of Revolution is Joe Fernandez, founder and CEO of Klout, one of the earliest and arguably largest player in the realm of digital influence. We talk about the rise of Klout, its challenges in measuring digital and real world influence, and what consumers and businesses need to think to make influence matter....
Last spring Sam Fiorella was recruited for a VP position at a large Toronto marketing agency. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft, Fiorella felt confident in his qualifications. But midway through the interview, he was caught off guard when his interviewer asked him for his Klout score. Fiorella hesitated awkwardly before confessing that he had no idea what a Klout score was.
The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”...
[Hmmm. Do you have clout or Klout? - JD]
An overview of the importance of your Klout score...why it matters and why you need to be paying attention to it now - AND what you need to do. ...There are a wealth of tools that count what you do. The number of tweets, how many comments your Facebook status update receives, and the quantity of thumbs up you get on your YouTube videos. But there are very few that allow us to see how the sum total of our interactions are perceived and what actions they inspire....
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Brand Klout anyone? Stay tuned for marketing innovations.