KLOUT: The 7th Discipline of Social Media, Know Your Authority

The 7th Discipline of Social Media; KLOUT, the New Measure of Influence

There are a number of competitors on the market now, but Klout seems to have dialed in the right mix of technology (the Chrome plugin is amazingly helpful), reporting (they’ve added several services since this initial report), and reduction in their earlier spammy marketing techniques (Killing Klout).

Klout Alternatives Include:

Newcomer: TrustCloud
Kred
Peer Index
Technorati Authority
Google Page Rank (page rank checker site)
Alexa Score
Grader.com (hubspot tools)

Quick tip: Know your Klout score. Love it. Influence it by being a real participant. Respect the Klout.

There is no question, managing and improving your social media reputation (sometimes called authority) is a hard piece of social media puzzle. You can post like hell. You can LIKE everything and every company in sight. You can Tweet your ass off. And still your “authority” is only as good as your current job, or publication, or speaking engagement. Some of this is about to change, IMHO, with the next generation of “influence” measurement and reporting. KLOUT.

Here is what my initial Klout dashboard looks like.

In two years I’ve refined my mix and Klout has updated their dashboard, here is my current Klout profile.

I’ve risen in the ranks, while Klout has added Instagram and Bing. They also offer

Extracting a few of my top connections from Twitter, Klout has assigned me a few key topics, social media (check), austin (check), blogging (check).

Here’s an interesting part of Klout’s scoring, the Network Influence graph:

There are some deeper analytics of your Tweeting influence deeper inside Klout. But the chart above gives some examples of things that factor in on your score. Unique mentions, Unique Retweeters, Unique Commenters, are all quite interesting to me.

And then Klout puts your influence style in a matrix along with some of your associates.

And finally, the piece that brings Klout above the noise of “me too” influence apps: the browser plug-in. Once added to my Chrome browser (there’s a Firefox version too) the Tweeters Klout scores are reported next to their image.

In the process of Twitter discovery (finding new people to follow) I believe the K-score is going to be a huge help. The spammers and pornsters on Twitter won’t be able to build up a K-score at all. And those of us working within the boundaries should see our influence and the influence of our influencers increase.

Let’s hope Klout keeps the gaming opportunities to a minimum. What we do need now is another clean social media measuring stick that can guide us toward the gold and away from the chafe.

So while KLOUT is not perfect, it’s the best that we have at this moment to take a quick scan of someone’s entire social media footprint and make an educated assessment. It will be interesting to see if anyone can turn these Rep-Building apps into a referral service that could actually build business relationships and referral dollars. I still think LinkedIn is best poised to add this “commerce layer” to their existing site, but so far they have shown little initiative beyond charging for advertising and recruiting.

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)
permalink: http://uber.la/2013/07/klout/

Check out my Klout disaster: When Facebook Killed My Klout Score

You can download the eBook here: The Disciplines of Social Media

The Disciplines of Social Media:

Check out your Klout score.