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How does Klout scoring work?
I just read Chris Selland's excellent brief on Klout's funding @ http://focus.com/c/EdZ/. I'd like to see if anyone understands how Klout's scoring works and how reliable the scoring is? Also, I want to know how I should go about looking at the information provided?
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7 Answers
Hey Roger,
I'm the Marketing Manager here at Klout and would be happy to give you more info. First of all, want to thank Michael for pointing out http://klout.com/kscore as that's a great place to dig into what we're doing.
On a higher level, we believe influence is the ability to drive action. Therefore, we measure not metrics like follower count which can be deceiving but social actions such as @messages, retweets, comments, and likes. The focus is on engagement and on who is doing that engagement -- i.e. are you being retweeted by industry leaders or your mom who only follows you.
Let me know if you have any other questions or if I can help in another way.
Thanks,
Megan Berry
Marketing Manager, Klout
@meganberry / @klout
megan@klout.com
Roger, here is pretty good scoring background from Klout themselves - http://klout.com/kscore. My guess is they're not going to give away the true algorithm for competitive reasons. BTW, I love the idea (Chris' point) that total number of followers won't be the real "klout" in the future. It will be the quality of those followers and your interaction with them.
Roger,
Based on my knowledge of space (with Klout and Fliptop), these providers have built their own algorithms for measuring influence and they do keep evolving and tweaking them. While the value given to different parameters is tough to guess, it is a combination of the followers, quality of the followers, tweeks, RTs, replies and such. I think "social influence" will evolve to be similar to "SEO" - there will be a lot of complex logic but the basic will count, including how well followed you are, how RTed you are and so on.
What are you considering doing with the Klout data? (just out of curiosity)
Best,
-Vaibhav
Roger - thanks for the question & comment - appreciate it.
Since I wrote the brief I'll basically just agree with Michael and Vaibhav - and restate that while we might want to know exactly how Klout works, if we did it would quickly become irrelevant.
I expect many other entrants into this space - and you will see domain- and vertical-specific variants as well - i.e. a 'Klout' for B2B manufacturers, etc...
Thanks for all your answers! I appreciate all your responses. Vaibhav, I am just interested in ways of weighing a person's influence through their social media popularity and connections/interactions- exactly what Klout is claiming to do.
I've thought about ways to categorize and evaluate influence through social media on my spare time because I feel there is a need for that. And it's like what Chris said in his brief, social media is dominated by the "silly reciprocal ‘follow-you-follow-me’ and ‘I’ll build your ‘influence’ if you build mine’ schemes." Sometimes I just want a quick and easy way (like a score) to know if what I'm reading from a certain person or blog is actually expertise or just bs. So nothing really exciting, just for my own knowledge.
Here is another company and approach I'd suggest you look at to measure influence and directional insight. GeeYee.com has been around for about 3 years and has has great success with not only what traffic looks like and where you think you may be talked about, but extends through all forms of social media, inclusive of those that you might know even know your name.
Worth a visit to their website.
I tried to see how my actions affect my score. I sent out a whole lot of stuff on linked in, Facebook and twitter, responded to others etc.... My score went down by 4 points :( It seems they measure the % of responses you get based on everything you put out as one measure at least...
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