Klout is a social media tool that measures your online influence by evaluating your activity on a variety of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, and others. It doesn’t just take into account your actions but also how your fans/followers/friends react to what you share.
According to Klout’s website: “The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or
engage you influence others.” The Klout Score uses data from social networks in order to measure:
- How many people you influence (after filtering out spam and bots — how many people are you really connected to).
- How much you influence them (what action do they take based on what you share).
- How influential they are (the reach and influence of the people that you inspire to take action — the ripple effect).
All of that data is crunched together and you’re issued a score from 0-100, with 100 being the most influential. To give you some sense of scope — the average score is about 20. The score becomes harder to increase as you move up the scale. David Armano has a score of 82. Joe Pulizzi has a 71, Arianna Huffington is a 75, and Chris Brogan has a 77. All four would be considered mega stars in the world of Klout.
I can hear you now…it’s just about ego and popularity contests. And if it was just about a magic number — I might agree. But the real value of Klout isn’t really the score. It’s the label.
Klout has divided and defined influence into a 16 grid scale. (see visual above) So it doesn’t just measure volume and reach — but it measures HOW you influence. Based on your behaviors and what people do with what you share — you are given a label. Looking at our examples again — David Armano’s behaviors and interactions make him a tastemaker. Joe Pulizzi is a pundit, Arianna is a celebrity, and Chris Brogan is a curator.
I think it’s the grid that makes Klout worthy of our attention. 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.
You may see yourself as a thought leader but discover that the world sees you as a dabbler or activist. Your Klout score refreshes every day – so you can experiment with different blends of content on the various social media tools to see how your new behaviors are perceived. This allows you to learn and change.
Based on your own marketing and social media goals — you can keep tweaking until your label (and to a lesser extent — your score) matches your intentions. Being able to see how you are perceived and then being able to make adjustments to that perception are what makes Klout a very unique and valuable tool worthy of your attention.
Guest Author:
Drew McLellan is Top Dog at McLellan Marketing Group and the author of AdAge’s Top 150 blog, Drew’s Marketing Minute. Wall Street Journal called it “one of the ten blogs all entrepreneurs should read.” Drew wrote 99.3 Random Acts of Marketing and is co-creator/editor of the ground-breaking Age of Conversation book series. He is also a Marketing Profs Daily Fix blogger and can be followed at @drewmclellan on Twitter.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Oct 4th, 2011. 
At TechCrunch Disrupt last month, social television platform called YouNow launched as the first online reality game show. According to Adi Sideman, the CEO and Founder of the service, the game show gives anyone the chance to broadcast from anywhere in real time in front of a live audience.
As he explained, YouNow is a platform that is similar to The Gong Show but for the Web. Although anyone can participate in the show, it operates on a crowdsourcing model. In other words, the more votes the contestant gets, the more airtime and status he or she obtains. However, if the contestant gets voted down, he or she will get pushed off the show.
Sideman told us that YouNow provides an alternative for people who never make the reality shows on mainstream television.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Oct 4th, 2011.
Last week I shared with you a series of CEO quotes that came from the most recent CEO Connection Boot Camp in New York City. At these day-long events, CEOs of companies with more than $ 100 million in revenues gather to discuss their most pressing challenges, and to share experiences and advice.
From these discussions I was able to share with you 19 revealing CEO leadership quotes and 10 insightful CEO social media quotes that provide a peek into the world of today’s CEO, and some insight into what’s currently on their minds.
I noticed there were a few quotes in each blog post that were consistently resonating with people, and I realized there was a reason for this…:
Leadership Quotes:
- “When we wrote a mission statement at the corporate level the words didn’t resonate with our employees. So we asked the employees to rewrite it in a way that made sense for all of us.”
- “We created a new brand promise and our sales force resisted it. I asked them to take ownership and rewrite it, and was actually very touched by what they wrote.”
- “How many of your employees woke up this morning with the express intention of doing a crappy job? Probably very few. But if they feel left out, or have a fear of failure or uncertainty, they are less able to succeed.”
- “I want people to say they work with me and not for me.”
Social Media Quotes:
- “I recently started tweeting and my employees love it; they can’t get enough of it. I tweet about the meetings I’m in and general observations, which seems basic, but they better understand what I do.”
- “Our employees’ wives love our Facebook page and are our most active group on it. They’re our advocates.”
- “I recently started blogging and every time I meet with employees they implore me not to stop. They really love it.”
- “We advise our employees that when they’re using social media they should use social grace – and we trust them to do so.”
Have you already guessed what these quotes have in common? They come from the very same, small group of CEOs.
These CEOs understand engagement at its deepest level; it springs from a genuine feeling of trust and a sense of responsibility. They are actively interested in engaging their employees and their quotes show that they trust them and want them to succeed. This interest and trust naturally translate into a willingness to actively engage them via social media.
And these are the CEOs that are encouraging their teams to embrace active social media engagement with their customers.
The CEO Becomes the Rock Star
I was genuinely encouraged to discover this among these CEOs and it reminded me of the premise Mack Collier has been advocating; think like rock stars do by embracing your fans. As Mack says, “note what Rockstars do; They focus on the people that already love them… this group has a strong degree of loyalty for the rockstar. So much so, that they will go out and actively recruit people from the OTHER groups to the left to come join them. And yes, we have stats to back that up as well.”
Now, let’s put CEOs in the Rock Stars shoes. CEOs that actively engage with their employees in the way rock stars do with their fans will reap the same benefits: they’ll cultivate loyal employee evangelists who will be trusted to tell the company’s story in social media and who will ultimately “recruit” customers to join them in their love for the company and its products.
But it all starts with a natural leadership proclivity to engage, to trust, and to want others to succeed that comes from the top.
That’s my theory, at least. What do you think?
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Oct 5th, 2011.
The Acute Action Figure Addiction Disorder Council of Australia released the following public service announcement about two years ago, but it is as relevant today as it was then. Please watch and learn how you can fulfill your life to avoid the serious addiction that adults sometimes develop.
The takeaway is clear.
If addictions can be developed from Boba Fett fascinations, then surely you can be afflicted from being on the internet too much.
Twitter and Google+ are not far behind.
You owe it to yourself and your family to spend time away from your computer and cellphone and inhale the outdoor air.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Oct 5th, 2011.
Ever since I first heard about Triberr, I felt in my gut that I just wouldn’t like it. A lot of that was because mostly what people talk about when they talk about Triberr is the automation aspect. I don’t really see the point in automating your social media presence. It has always seemed to me like the concept of sending a robot to go on a date for you. Why bother?
However, enough people I really like and really respect invited me in and told me that Triberr was great that I finally had to cave and give it a try. I am not so bull-headed that I am unwilling to change my mind, especially in scenarios where I haven’t actually gathered information my own self. So, a couple of weeks ago, I signed into Triberr for the first time.
I came into Triberr. I saw Triberr. And now I’ve left Triberr
There is one overriding factor that turned me off immediately upon entering into the world of Triberr, and that is that in order to unlock the full and most fun functionality of the site, you need to bring in six new people. I found that extremely uncomfortable. While you can invite people in because you think Triberr might help them out, the reality is that you’re inviting them in so that you can do cool stuff. Your ability to do cool stuff does not transition down, per se, to the people you invite in. It reminded me of Facebook games like Farmville where you can only do the next level of stuff if you get 17 more neighbors. Apart from the fact that I was waking up early to harvest fake grapes, that was one of the reasons I quit all of those Facebook games cold turkey. If I only want to ask people to do a certain number of things, inviting them into a sort of gaming situation is not what I want to use that “ask” for.
What I liked about Triberr is that it was my first taste of using something akin to Google Reader. I was lucky enough to get invited into an existing tribe, and I was exposed to a lot of peoples’ blogs that I do not tend to visit. I would have loved to expand that capacity, but again, I did not bring in enough people to be able to “inbreed” or add people already on Triberr into my tribe. I turned all automation off, and instead of using the site’s structure to tweet out posts I liked, I tweeted them out the way I always have – a brief comment on what I liked about the post, then the link to the post itself.
Did that make me a bad tribe member? Probably.
The real reason I have gotten out of Triberr, though, is the automation that so many people have talked about. It’s not a question of automating what I tweet out – I can control that till the cows come home. What you can’t control is whether other people automate their tweets or not. And this is where I differ from a lot of people in the online world. I am not after a high klout score, which is primarily what Triberr helps you with. If my posts get promoted on other platforms, I want to know that I am deserving of that credit. I know from my traffic numbers that most of the people who have been tweeting out my posts over the last few days have not been to my site at all. They have their Triberr accounts set to tweet all posts from the tribe x number of times a day, regardless, perhaps, of what those posts might be.
That makes me itchy. If I’m going to get promoted or credited or anything else, I want to know it’s because of me and what I’m doing.
One could argue that if people are willing to tweet out every post you write, you must be doing something right. One can also argue that if people are tweeting out your posts, you’re going to get exposed to other people, perhaps outside of the Triberr realm, who may not have seen your content otherwise. And those are fair points. However, the same is true on a daily basis. If you are new here and you tweet out this post to other people I don’t know, the same end result has occurred. Right?
Not saying it’s wrong. It’s just not right for me.
I have no problem with the fact that so many people are using Triberr and love it. I don’t think there is a right or wrong in this scenario. But for me and what I want to accomplish, it is not a good match. Maybe you are thinking you want to give it a try after this review for all of the reasons I just left. To each his or her own.
So what do you think? I’m interested in arguments for or against. I know there is a diversity of opinions, many of them passionate. Let’s talk about it!
Image by Aleksandra P. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/GiniMiniGi
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Oct 6th, 2011.
