I logged into Klout this morning, and was greeted by this pop-up ‘warning’. It tells me that my Klout score is dropping, and that I can raise it by sharing more content, and engaging with my network.
Klout adds this explanation for what its score means: “The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence.”
So Klout tells me that it measures online influence, but that in order to increase my score, I should increase my social media activity? Then doesn’t that mean it’s measuring my activity instead of my influence?
Likewise, Empire Avenue also explains that your score there is dependent on your level of social media activity: “When you join Empire Avenue, you can connect your Social Networking accounts, and we’ll score activity and engagement in each account and give you a virtual share price.”
Essentially, Klout and Empire Avenue are measuring your level of social media activity, not your level of online influence.
Simply sharing more content and engaging with my network isn’t going to make me more influential over them. In fact if it’s not the type of content and engagement that they are looking for, my influence over them will fall, not rise as I become more active.
Also note that both Klout and Empire Avenue are encouraging you to participate with their site. EA includes activity on the site as part of your score, and Klout is already encouraging you to give +K to other members, and I’m betting they will come up with other ways to reward you for interacting more with other Klout members. Which is smart of both sites to do, but it doesn’t help either of them more effectively measure my perceived online influence.
What do you think? What role does social media activity play in online influence? Does one lead to the other?
I think quality social media activity is much more important than quantity. There are several people who I started following on Twitter because they had posted some relevant blogs and made points that resonated with me in 140 characters or less. Then once I started following them, my homepage was clogged with hundreds of tweets a day about what they were doing, irrelevant (to me) thoughts etc., so I Unfollowed them.
There’s no doubt that on a site like Twitter, where the most recent tweets are the first you see when you search, tweeting often is important, but without quality, you lose “klout” in my books.
Thanks for posting, @mackcollier
Mack
A flawed model definitely. I like the product. But what I am really hoping for is more innovation from Klout in that they develop ways to measure other aspects of influence that take into account blog posts, online relationships, networks etc.
They need to do a lot more work with the money received from the recent injection funding. In its current form this model will continue to fade and attract negative coverage. Lets face it. Klout is turning into a bit of a Joke.
No one really takes it seriously and people are excellent at gaming it. As a consumer. I want to see value and innovation on the social web.
I am sure other people do too.
Thanks for your insight and perspective Mack.
@pamelamaeross @MackCollier But is there one definition of what ‘quality’ interaction on Twitter is? To some of my followers, if I only share 10 great links a day, that’s quality. To others, it hacks them off because they only use Twitter to conversate.
And to your point about unfollowing people because they were just tweeting about their day, their thoughts. You’re right, some people hate that, but others love it. So again, there’s no one rule that works here either.
It’s tough and confusing, and I don’t think there IS one rule for what influence is, and I don’t think any model that attempts to work off that mindset, will be effective.
@Grit08 Bingo, that’s a real concern in that if your model places a large dependency on activity, then it can easily be gamed, as you pointed out. Which makes the model look even more suspect when you have people that have high Klout scores that have little perceived influence.
It’s early days, but we are still a LONG way off to effectively measuring online influence and I’m not sure there’s a one-size-fits-all model that will work.
There is a HUGE piece to influence based on activity.
I recently cleaned out the folks on YouTube that I was following. I deleted more than 100 people simply because they hadn’t posted any videos in past six months. So, they no longer have influence over me.
Yes, you are right, you also have to be putting RELEVANT content into the stream. But generally the folks who get more influential online post more often than others. It’s not a strict rule, but there is something to it.
Of course, what Klout isn’t saying is “post more stuff that gets more retweets” is really what it wants.
Not only is activity skewing the results, but the product isn’t very good yet at distinguishing “popularity” from “influence”. For instance, @BronxZoosCobra has a Klout score of 75 (http://beta.klout.com/#/bronxzooscobra). I don’t think anyone would make the case that this account is influential, but it was [temporarily] popular.
And that brings us to the greater issue: The primary element of the scoring is the number of times a person clicks a link or ReTweets a Tweet. Sometimes that’s an indication of influence, most often it’s not. E.G. @GuyKawasaki maintains his Klout score and “Influence” by spewing out hundreds of random, pre-tested “clickable” links per day because he knows that’s how you game the system.
One of my beefs with Klout is that it doesn’t differentiate those who generate and create content versus those who share it, as with the example of Guy Kawaski by @uniquevisitor
It also doesn’t address influence from the stand point of how frequently take ACTION on what you share either by clicking the link, responding or RTing combined. RT’ing is great, but don’t you sometimes get the idea that people are RT’ing without even reading what they are sharing? I do.
I’m super thrilled to see that Klout has identified categories as all influence is contextual and intrigued that they’ve jumped into the “endorsement” game, which just means my stream will now be cluttered again as it was two weeks ago with Connect.me and Namesake.
In short: I agree activity does not equal quality, it equals visibility.
Hi Mack,
This is my huge problem with Klout as well. I’ve been threatening to write a blog post titled, “Why I’m obsessed with my Klout score” — which isn’t about influence, or the score, but the fascination that it goes up and down depending on whether I’m on Twitter more or less. As though I am overnight more or less “influential.” It’s just too easy to game that. Similarly, I could develop a “Klout influence” strategy of spending a lot of time talking to people Klout considers influential. Hmm… guess that means I need to tweet with you more. 🙂
The problem with all this is that “influence” is a relative term. Klout may think me more influential than Joe Average — but what does that have to do with business results? I give Klout credit for trying to set some parameters, but we’re still a long way off from having a good tool of this type.
@scobleizer Robert I agree, activity can definitely have a big impact on influence, and often does. But just because you are measuring one, doesn’t mean you are measuring the other. I think both EA and Klout are doing a better job of measuring social media activity than they are online influence.
@uniquevisitor@guykawasaki Yes, the @BronxZoosCobra example is a good one in that it probably WAS a pretty ‘watched’ account, at least, while the cobra was on the loose. Now? Not so much.
And as for Guy, I think he has a system that works for him, and he’s sticking to it. It honks a lot of people off, but for a lot of people, he is very influential and his tweets are very valuable to them. I remember when he joined Plurk briefly 3 years ago, he started using Plurk as a broadcasting tool, and the community there asked him to please engage, that we didn’t want broadcasting. He said nope, he was going to keep doing what was working for him. I’m not always a fan of how he uses social media, but I do respect the fact that Guy has a method that works for him, and he sticks to it.
@taracoomans @uniquevisitor I think Klout does differentiate in that it says what type of influencer we are. Actually I just checked and it has down both Guy and myself as a ‘curator’, so maybe I agree with you after all 😉
I think a big limitation of Klout and similar sites is that it cannot value how influential someone is over us unless we interact with them or their content. For example with Guy, I bet a lot of people follow him and love his tweets, they probably click on a ton of his links. But unless they then RT him or reply to him, can Klout really view Guy as having any special degree of influence over that person? So the engagement with Guy and his content would be required to trigger Klout seeing Guy as having influence over that person. Right? This is like what we see with trying to measure engagement on our blogs, we are looking for comments or shares on social sites, but if someone simply reads our new post every single day, that IS a level of engagement.
A lot to sort out, and I think that’s why the idea of accurately measuring online influence will be a hot topic for a long time.
I get that from Klout too. I
I get the message from Klout too. Hi, Mack. I’m formerly PromoMarketer but now tweeting under and via a much livelier lifestyle blog. I am still trying to figure out the importance of a Klout score – it seems to me that it is solely Twitter base and IMHO, that isn’t enough to gauge ‘clout’. We interact a lot via Facebook as well. Their name is so close to ours (same gist) and they’re local to us. Hoping to find time in our busy sked to visit them for more in depth understanding of their metrics.
@MackCollier Agreed. In fact EA moved away from the position of putting itself out there as a measurement of ‘influence.’ Which, to me, just illustrated they realize themselves what you are getting at here.
@MackCollier @taracoomans It gets back to how we’re defining influence. And can we just be honest about what Guy does? He (or to be specific, his contracted workers) crank out random subject matter tweets with links at the rate of 1 every 5 minutes. If he’s curating anything, it’s merely stories that are likely to be clicked on regardless of subject matter. His objective is to put enough variety out there at high frequency to generate a critical mass of clicks and RT’s. There’s no other way to interpret the desired goal of that type of content distribution.
And I’m wondering how specifically “it works for him”? Yes, he’s got over 300,000 followers – but he built that user base largely via the old pre-emptive follow/followback trick.
We’re really early in this game of quantifying online influence, and I’m sure the various metrics will improve over time. But crediting people as influential for their ability to manufacture various types of derivative user behavior isn’t helping move us in the right direction.
@MackCollier @Grit08
@MackCollier @Grit08 If people schedule their tweets, that’s not really ‘interacting’..I don’t know if Klout takes that into consideration. You are right, though..engaging in convo should count – and for me, that’s done via discussions such as these (and not ALWAYS via Twitter)
@MackCollier Guy uses his Twitter account the way he does specifically because he knows it gives him a higher Klout score and more visibility than if the account were merely Tweets that were actually from him, talking and interacting with others. If that weren’t the case he’d use @GuyKawasaki as a real person and create something like @GuysFirehose for the stuff he currently distributes.
All due respect to him, but he’s a promoter – and he knows how to manipulate the various platforms to increase his exposure. Good for him. So yes, “Guy has a method that works for him, and he sticks to it.”
@MackCollier @scobleizer I loved Robert’s comment on Chris Penn’s post “Empire Avenue is an Awesome Social Pyramid Scheme Game”: http://www.christopherspenn.com/2011/05/empire-avenue-is-an-awesome-social-pyramid-scheme-game/
“It feeds on our narcissism and egotism. I’m egotistical. I love Empire Avenue. “
Hey Mack,
This aspect of social media is over my head. In a way it feels like we’re all back in school, playing on the school playground, king of the hill and other games. I think your questions are relevant. If we have to “do” something to “be” something isn’t there something wrong with that picture? It seems to me the BEING is the important factor and who can measure that? Is klout just popularity? Are we down to that? I know we like to measure things, know how we’re doing and how we rank, but if we’re playing to the numbers, haven’t we lost sight of the reason we started blogging (assuming we didn’t start blogging to play to the numbers, that is!)
I find my blog changes when I write for comments and tweets rather than write for the reasons I started the blog in the first place, among them to build community and create a place where people could gather to hash out this interesting topic; life. But as my number of comments grows, it’s easy to get off track and focus on writing articles which will stimulate comments rather than inspire thinking. It’s a subtle difference but I feel it when I’ve gotten off track, which as I’ve said is so easy to do.
I’m thinking that if I watched my Klout score the same thing would happen. I was watching Technorati and I was up to 420 but then suddenly it dropped nearly overnight to less than 100. We were over 100 with our first post in November. Something was wrong but I just let it go – it’s a distraction and not an accurate way to capture the spirit of what i’m doing.
I guess I’ve said a lot for someone who knows nothing about social media and Klout scores LOL
Lori
Influence has to be measured beyond activity. True influence, at any level, can not be a simple factor fundamentally based on breadth but depth when activity occurs. Anything less, is a measurement tool that could create lost opportunities for those placing too much weight on so-called grading systems like Klout and Empire Avenue. 🙂 Great thinking post Mack!
Excellent post Mack, and perfect timing as I am currently working on measurement / influence mapping at my agency and I’ll share your post.
How much you share, in my opinion, does not equal influence at all. Guy Kawasaki, despite sharing lots of useful content has very little influence on me because he overshares, and does not really engage with his followers, thus establishing himself as an ‘expert’ in a certain field.
Now, I see Jason Falls and yourself as social media influencers – you carefully select the content you share on Twitter and other network, and have established yourselves as thought leaders in your field, social media.
In a nutshell, I think that influence is about quality rather than quantity in a specific field. And I don’t think an algorithm is capable of measuring quality…
@MackCollier @pamelamaeross Great points Mack! Quality is definitely different to different people. And I do enjoy personal reflection and thoughts, especially when they force me to think differently – like your reply 🙂
It’s true that different people tweet for different reasons, so there isn’t one rule. We all have to make our own choice about what quality is to us.
I have limited time on twitter, since I work in a corporate office and can’t be online most of the time, so I need a quick down and dirty when I can get on in the morning and evening. I’m likely looking for something different from someone who is able to keep up with conversations through the day.
My reason for tweeting is to be inspired, share insights and learn from great leaders. And hopefully I can inspire others along the way…
I think many people look at what Klout is asking you to do rather than why they are asking you to do it. It’s not that Klout will determine your authority based only on your content volume (while it is indeed a variable), but simply that without content volume, you can not have authority. The more content you share, the better Klout is able to understand if you have people who are listening to you, and therefore determine your impact on your audience.
That all said, what other recommendations do you ( et al), think Klout could give in this type of notice that would also improve that which they are truly attempting to refer to (a level of authority and impact). Here are a couple of my recommendations:
– Try more personalized commentary when RT’ing someone or something
– Be complimentary towards someone or something new every day
I think social media activity does play a role in online influence, IF it’s quality activity. That is, if you’re engaging, sharing, and building relationships, in an authentic way. We all know (and despise) those social media accounts that rapid-fire useless information. If Klout or Empire Avenue are saying those “people” have influence, they’ve got it all wrong.
@dariasteigman Right Daria, as long as activity is such an apparently big portion of what dictates the score, the score can easily be gamed.
But Klout is smart because companies just want someone to tell them who the ‘influential’ people are, so they can blast messages at them 😉
@pamelamaeross Pamela I think a lot of professionals use Twitter as you do, and they mainly check it first thing in the morning, and late in the day. Most of them are probably looking for interesting links to read, and don’t have a lot of time for meaningful discussions. This is why I try to do the majority of my link-sharing from 8am-10am, because I know that’s when most smart people like you are looking for them 😉
@Lori Lori, Klout and other competitors know that assigning a number score will be big for driving interest, and it’s worked wonderfully well. Of course, that leads to people trying to figure out how the scores and numbers are calculated, which leads to people trying to GAME the system.
I’ve often wondered how many people would change the way they used Twitter, if their follower counts weren’t displayed. Numbers aren’t everything, but unfortunately that alone can dictate behavior for some people.
@blogtillyoudrop Lolly since you are saying I am an influencer, I obviously think your method of identifying influencers is correct 😉
But that’s a good distinction about Guy, just because he shares information that a lot of people find useful (and the same could be said for me), that doesn’t mean that anyone would consider him influential. But to Klout’s methodology, the fact that others RT him suggests that he must be influential.
And I don’t think that’s completely wrong, but I don’t think it’s completely accurate, either.
@KatieFassl I agree, Katie 😉 I think whatever activity you are engaged in needs to be motivated by something larger than a desire to see your Klout score increase.
@KatieFassl @MackCollier Yeah, I think activity is important at this stage of the game for one primary reason: The transference or recognition of offline influence in to the online influence scoring world. So, the equation might be: Thought Leadership x Frequent Online Presence x Consumption of Thought Leader Content = Online Recognition (Klout score) of Offline Influence (Reputation).
You’ll notice that I’ve included “Consumption” rather than “Engagement” or “Interaction” in the equation. Neither activity nor engagement in and of themselves build influence. There are scores of thought leaders who engage or interact very little with the people for whom they are highly influential. Engagement may help establish and maintain influence, but largely to the extent that the person(s) being influenced is (are) likely to create a greater network effect for the influencer, but it’s not a required element to achieve it.
@MackCollier @KatieFassl This makes me this of Guy Kawasaki. Super smart guy, but his tweets are always sent out rapid fire and lack personality. While he might have a rather high klout score, I unfollowed him specifically because his social activity was too much to bear.
@MackCollier @KatieFassl This makes me think of Guy Kawasaki. Super smart guy, but his tweets are always sent out rapid fire and lack personality. While he might have a rather high klout score, I unfollowed him specifically because his social activity was too much to bear.
Wow, there are some really great comments here. I’ve been observing the whole Klout phenomenon with interest. It seems to work into the human need for games and judging or scoring everything. We all want to know how well we’re doing, whether we admit it or not. Klout, followers, reviews… they are all ways for us to decide who/what is on top. For some Klout is motivation and others it’s pure frustration. We now have tools to determine if you are “worthy” of our business, our friendship or our attention, but we can’t forget to use our brains! I think it’s as blogtillyoudrop said, “I don’t think an algorithm is capable of measuring quality.”
@listen2you One person’s quality is another person’s garbage 🙂
@joebertino Funny, I stopped following him for that very reason!
@joebertino *too! :).
@UniqueVisitor You lost me at “equation.” Lol. Kidding….sorta ;-P.
@UniqueVisitor Unfortunately you are CORRECT! How sad is that. Back to step one. We use our brains 😉
@taracoomans @UniqueVisitor This is such an important distinction, between those who create it and those who share it! Good point.
@UniqueVisitor “We’re really early in this game of quantifying online influence, and I’m sure the various metrics will improve over time. But crediting people as influential for their ability to manufacture various types of derivative user behavior isn’t helping move us in the right direction.”
BRILLIANT!
@KatieFassl Point taken Katie 🙂 Just trying to make the point that true influence is rooted in thought leadership and reputation, not activity or engagement – though activity and/or engagement might help surface thought leadership and/or reputation.
I think the challenge we’re going through now is attempting to accurately recognize and quantify the traditional offline indicators of influence in a Klout score (or other). As we move through the process there’s going to be a lot of static and attempts to game the systems. Over time services like Klout will (hopefully) get better at filtering out the static/gaming tactics.
I think the best we can hope for over time is some relatively close reconciliation of offline and online “influence”.
@MackCollier @taracoomans @UniqueVisitor I agree that we are at the early stages of influence, and writing that code can’t be all that easy. But its important that we have these conversations so we understand the limitations of measuring influence. Measuring influence isn’t bad – but we just have to understand what it is and isn’t.
@CloutandAbout @MackCollier @Grit08 I do not understand. If I schedule a tweet, and a follower clicks on the link, reads the post, subscribes to blog, retweets link, then later when I see the RT I tweet thanks, and later still, follower replies, etc. how is this not interacting?
@UniqueVisitor @MackCollier You make some great points about the fact that many people don’t engage on social platforms, but are still influential. And I very much like your equation. That is exactly why, despite the Guy’s of the world, people taking action on the content you share should have a higher weight than simply activity. Your equation also speaks to offline influence which, may or may not mirror online influence.
However, I would argue that if you have online influence without engaging, your offline influence is probably pretty significant. Another interesting note about automated tweets, no matter what the Klout score says, as a marketer, tweeter and human, I KNOW that there isn’t a human behind those tweets and that engagement isn’t likely. This is why judgment still comes into play with social interactions, humans have the potential to understand the subtleties, where as an algorithm does not (yet?).
@Keenonquinoa @CloutandAbout @Grit08 I have to say, I agree with you here. I often schedule tweets, but when i do they are links to interesting articles and posts I have found. Sounds like you are thinking along the same lines.
You should do what you do and pay no attention to Klout, etc. Klout is for marketeers to find people that they don’t know. It is a service for the clueless that provides no insight into the nature of influence.
More here: http://t.co/KeDQiwO