Google+ Now Impacting Klout Scores, Active Users See Scores Go Up. Love it or hate it, but Klout is one of the key players in today’s influence/reputation market. Even if the whole concept of ranking people based on popularity feels a little icky to you (I feel you), the startup has the potential to form the basis of something bigger, something less spammy, and something less easily gamed by “social media marketers.” Or so we hope. In the meantime, for those of you who care about this sort of thing: hooray, your score just went up today thanks to Google+! Although people have been able to add Google+ to their Klout profiles since September, the company announced today that Google+ is now directly impacting Klout scores.
The service has begun measuring the influence for users who have already connected their Google+ accounts to Klout and, of those, 62% are considered “active” users of the social network. For these active users, their Klout scores should have increased based on the popularity of their public Google+ posts. The Remarkable Story of How Klout Got Started. While recuperating after having his jaw wired shut, Joe Fernandez had to rely on Twitter and Facebook to communicate. Unable to speak to anyone, he noticed how online communication influenced his personal network and set out to create a website that could measure word of mouth and how it scaled. That website is what we know today as Klout, where Fernandez is CEO. In the video above, Fernandez shares his story with Venture Studio. Check out new episodes of Venture Studio every Tuesday and Thursday on Mashable.
Marc Benioff Is Convinced Klout Will Save Your Business. Salesforce live stream Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff will be in New York today to show off his company's new Klout-powered social media marketing tool that will save your business. Salesforce.com today released an updated version of its tracking software that includes ways to parse through all of your incoming social media traffic and respond quickly. With Salesforce's updated Radian6 software, you can automatically set conditions for incoming social media traffic. You can then apply blanket responses — like sending out coupons or special offers — to Tweets and other social media updates. Once you sort through the traffic you can quickly identify which incoming updates you have to reply to by checking each person's influence.
Radian6 does that through a mix of the message in the update, each person's reach and — unfortunately — his or her Klout score. Why I Deleted My Klout Profile. I am a geek at heart, a lover of data, analytics, measurement, and ability to provide and measure real return on investment. When Klout launched I was one of their first fans. It was exciting to see something that could possibly help us finally begin to start measuring and justifying the hours we spent on the social networks. Many had high hopes for Klout. We believed their agenda was pure and that their top goal was to build a credible and robust influence measurement system. We have several large clients in the travel and leisure niche that we were considering Klout as a potential source for connecting with influencers.
If you have been any part of the active social ecosystem the past few weeks it’s hard to miss the noise about the Klout algorithm changes and the backlash that followed. After much research, conversation and analysis I have decided to delete my Klout profile. Important Note: The purpose of this post is to provide the reasons I deleted my Klout profile. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Klout's New Topic Pages Reveal Content Influencers. Klout has released a new feature that lets users gain insights on top content influencers as well as users who have received the most +Ks for respective topics. Only 5% of users have access to the new Topic Pages for now, but Klout — which calculates users' social influence — will roll it out for all users within a few days. "This is a big step for us in turning Klout into more of a utility around search and discover instead of pure vanity of checking your score," Klout CEO Joe Fernandez tells Mashable.
"Our goal is just to understand what they are influential about and who they influence. " To populate a user's Topic Pages (see screenshots below), the San Francisco-based startup analyzes the user's content created across the 10 services it measures — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, Blogger, Flickr, Instagram, Last.fm and Tumblr. Klout will now also use +K data to rank the top +K recipients; Fernandez compares this component to a people's choice award. Is Klout losing its clout? Klout has built its reputation on being an application that can actually put your social networking to use.
Those countless and seemingly useless hours you spend connecting with people, building your profile, presenting yourself in whatever light you so choose—what is it all good for if not to use as leverage? The Web app does exactly that, integrating with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, G+, Instagram, and nearly every other network you can think of to measure just how effective your online presence is. On the surface, it all sounds innocent enough, but now Klout is coming under fire for some of its missteps as well as its mission statement. Privacy problems It’s been discovered that Klout has been making profiles for users that don’t yet have accounts—which isn’t all that surprising. Klout responded quickly, and in a blog post CEO Joe Fernandez says plainly “We messed up on this one and we are deeply sorry.” It gets worse: Algorithm update Questioning authority “Who made Klout the boss?”
Is Klout crossing the line when it comes to privacy? Updated: If getting beaten up by critics and targeted by angry users is a sign of success, then Klout must be doing pretty well. The San Francisco-based startup — which is trying to compile a kind of “reputation rank” for the social web based on user activity on Twitter, Facebook and other networks — has come under fire recently for changing its algorithms and making many of its users’ rankings fall. But a more serious allegation is not that Klout is invading the privacy of its existing users, but of many who haven’t even joined the service, by compiling “shadow profiles” of them, including children. Is that an infringement of our digital rights, or just the new reality of living our lives online? [F]ree-to-use, is highly addictive, uses you as bait to trap your friends, tracks you everywhere you go on the internet, sells your personal information to the highest bidder, and is impossible to opt out of.
Update: In his email response, Fernandez said that: Privacy is a top concern for us. Klout - Twitter Analytics - Measuring Influence Across The Socia. How Klout Got Klout.com. While everyone is making up their minds about whether Klout is an utterly meaningless service or the divine “standard for influence” the world has been clamoring for, I had an interesting chat with Klout co-founder and CEO Joe Fernandez the other day at the F.ounders conference in Dublin, Ireland. When I informed him that, if anything, I think that the name of the company was well chosen, he told me the story of how he obtained the domain name klout.com. Since I have a huge interest in that type of small behind-the-scenes story – and in domain names – I loved it and found it interesting enough to be worth sharing here.
When the company started out a few years ago in New York City, Fernandez’ first and top choice for a name was Klout, so he registered klout.net and tried to get in touch with the owner of klout.com, who was based in San Francisco. Klout was still a long way of getting funded or making money, so Fernandez offered the owner $1,000 of his own money for the domain name. 17 Alternatives to Klout.
As we wrote about earlier this week, Klout has reworked its algorithms, and your scores have changed. Some have gone up, some down. Despite claiming more transparency with their algorithms, they are still mostly opaque and mysterious. As one of our readers commented, "Klout just pulled a Netflix, taking trust off the table. " So while they tinker with their code, you might want to explore other alternatives that can help you measure your social media effectiveness.
We have come up with 17 different services, some free, some fairly expensive. I have tried most of them and will give you my impressions so you can have a head start with your own explorations. Before I run through the services, let's discuss eight different issues with social media metrics and how the ideal metric should be constructed.
There is no single number that can really be universally useful. Twitter-only metrics Twitter Score gives you a single score (I got a 2 out of 10, which seems somewhat low). Facebook-only metrics.