What is influence?
There are many different schools of thought on the topic, but the best definition I’ve seen pertaining to social media influence is by Brian Solis:
Influence is the ability to cause desirable and measurable actions and outcomes.
What is Klout?
Klout is an online tool that claims to measure social influence by defining it in the form of an influence score. They use a host of algorithms and it’s a recent change to those algorithms that has caused many to see a drop in Klout scores. The result is a lot of disgruntled Klout users.
Are you really less influential?
The short answer is no. But the better question is ‘were you really that influential to begin with?’
There is no single tool that will tell you who holds influence within a certain community – so even if you had a high score to begin with you might not have been that influential after all. Influence is social behaviour and can’t be defined by algorithms. Tools like Klout can measure data like the size of your social graph, the number of RTs you get, who RTs you, etc. But they can’t understand the intent behind these actions: how others feel about you and what motivated them to share your content.
Rather than focus on a score, think CREST:
- CREDIBILITY – How credible are you within the community.
- REACH – What is the size of your direct & indirect social graph: 1) The number of connections you have + 2) The number of connections your connections have + 3) The number of connections your connection’s connections have.
- EXPERTISE – Have you demonstrated subject matter expertise.
- STRENGTH – What is the strength of your connections. Remember, there are plenty of people with large social graphs that don’t invest on building relationships. These people are popular, but may not be influential.
- TRUST – How trusted are you within the community.
My friend, Jessica Levin, challenged her readers to think about better ways to measure success in social media and I echo her sentiment. Spend less time worrying about how a flawed system scores your influence and more time thinking about how you want to be known and how you’ll measure success.
What do you think?
(Photo via Gipsy Art)
I don’t think Klout really has a grasp of how influential a person is. I’ve seen it swing back and forth.
I think all it’s really doing is trying to grasp as much data as it can so it can match people up in groups. For example, if you talk about politics on Twitter, and you “Like” a lot of political pages on Facebook it will throw you into the “likes political” group – and whatever else you do is added to that trait. Once you have millions of subscribers you can parse this data and define a group. For example – the “political” group also likes “Flag pins”, now they can sell that data to a marketing group.
Now they probably won’t’ sell personal data, so marketers won’t see data as “Diana Long”, but this is their strategy and the way they get people to sign up is feed people’s narcissistic behavior (hey, I’m guilty of this too), but I don’t think their algorithm is worth crying about. If you want to know how influential you really are – just judge yourself by the amount of replies, and likes, and comments you get. If no one is interacting with you then you are Tweeting & Facebooking into a vacuum. That’s the only thing I’d go buy.
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@DianaLong Thanks for reading and commenting. You’re absolutely right that Klout has built a model that they hope they can monitize 2 key ways: 1) by matching ‘influencers’ with brands by way of deals/coupons and 2) by collecting data on social media users for use by marketers. So, not only is it important for individuals to understand influence (and the issues with tracking tools), but it’s equally as important for the businesses seeking influencers to understand it.
One point that I’d add to your last couple of sentences on measuring your influence is that # of replies, likes and comments might not give you an accurate gauge on your influence. There are many audiences who don’t reply, like and/or comment on content because that’s not how they use social media. They might bookmark content, just read it and/or go out a buy that thing you mention in your post. This definitely reinforces the challenges with measuring influence.
@LaraMcCulloch You are right. Many users don’t comment they simply consume, but I think if you are never getting replies, retweets, likes, etc… then perhaps it’s because the posts are not as relevant to what your followers really want to hear about. In my opinion simply having followers isn’t great if they are not reading your content. So, how do you know if they are reading your content if you are not interacting? I would say that there is probably some formula that could devised that would reference the amount of followers you have, the amount of interactions you have and come up with a better “score”. I understand that this is what Klout is trying to do, but because they don’t really explain their algorithm I take their numbers with a grain of salt.
I love the concept of CREST. I’m a big fan of social media because it levels the playing field and allows people to compete where they couldn’t have in the past. I use Klout as one tool, but as we have seen with so many other online tools, they change and we adapt. The things that don’t change are basic business concepts. Trust is trust. Credibility is credibility. Great post and thank you for the mention.
@jlevin7 Thanks, Jessica – CREST is a great foundation for finding and qualifying influencers. Klout can give you some of the information, but not all. Yes, I agree, the fundamentals of human behaviour don’t change because of the medium of communication 🙂
@JakePrescott That’s a great question! Perhaps, there’s a lot of truth to that. #NewhouseSM4
@JakePrescott I wonder if the klout conspiracy has anything to do w/ saying influential about Microsoft when I’m #teamapple #newhousesm4
Great post, thanks! I Always wondered about Klout ever since it told me (on my personal account, not Pogby) that I was influential about the most RANDOM things. I’m definitely into the CREST concept too!
@Pogby Yes, I’ve had similar experiences with Klout. At one point I was influential about photography?!? I’m glad you found CREST helpful. Thanks for commenting!