Klout, Kred and your Social Media IQ

Posted by Maryann

By social media IQ we mean your Influence Quotient as measured by social media analytics tools such as Klout and its rival, Kred. Both have their secret sauce of algorithms that crunch away each time you tweet, get RT-ed, mentioned, +1-ed, liked and shared. From there they spit out a popularity coefficient, if you like. Unless you’ve kept your tweets protected, everyone in the twittersphere will have a Klout or Kred score.

Under the Klout methodology, you earn badges like you would in 4Square depending on your score and presumably, type of tweeting. Averaging in the 20s? You’re could be an Explorer; constantly trying out new ways to interact and network. Higher up in the 50s bracket with very targeted messages? You’re a Specialist, focused on a specific topic with a highly engaged audience. Anyway, you get the picture – the higher your score the greater your online influence and, the more likely you’ll bait brands for perks since the wisdom follows that you’re more likely to affect the purchase decisions of those in your circle.

Kred is, at the moment, still a service available by invitation only. Today I had a client’s application for a Kred account approved – three months after I submitted a request on his behalf –  allowing me to be acquainted with it. A Kred score is a dual component score that measures influence on a scale of 1 to 1000 and outreach score of between 1 and 10. You accumulate points based on the sort of activity and interaction that takes place. A simple tweet gives you 10 points while a retweet from someone with over 10,000 followers gives many more points. These are added up and then normalised to make a score relative to the highest influence score of 1,000. It gets progressively more difficult to achieve higher influence score as you move along the scale and as more people join the twitter universe. The outreach score is a measure of the degree of effort you’ve made in sharing and spreading content.

What says more? Your Kred or Klout?

To begin with it seems an absurd proposition to quantify the level of influence and individual wields. As some have observed, purchase decisions are influenced by several sources. Besides not being able to accurately attribute the purchase to the influencer that acted as the trigger, we also can’t link and online influence directly to an offline purchase.

Yet, I don’t imagine such social analytics calculators disappearing from the scene since brands crave real insight backed by data to justify their investments in social media. So whether we like it or not, I won’t be surprise Kred, Klout or whatever holy grail social analytics index down the road, becomes one of the many markers by which we are judged. That is a rather discomforting thought, to be denied promotions or giveaways because of your limited social circle!

As with any sort of data we need to know if we can trust it. Looking over my Klout and Kred  scores and others in my network, my vote of trust goes to Kred.

Before I registered for a Klout account on Dec 1, I received a score of 38. I then linked my Google+ and Facebook accounts with Klout and on Dec 3, my score spiked to 42, presumably because it would’ve factored in the wider Facebook network. Still, unlike Kred which is detailed and transparent with the scoring system, Klout doesn’t say how I made the leap from the 30s to the 40s. I hadn’t made any siginificant changes to my tweeting or facebook behaviour. So I was pretty puzzled.

Doubt your Klout

I compared my Klout with that of Ying, Commas & Industry’s founder, who tweets twice as much, gets retweeted frequently, and has a larger following than I do. Surprisingly, Klout placed her in the 20s bracket. Strange. Maybe it’s because I have my Facebook and Google+ linked to Klout, so I severed them. To my amusement, Klout “rewarded” me with a boost to 43. For a brief moment my sense of self-importance ballooned. But like souffle just out of the oven, the heat inevitably dies down, leaving an empty vessel. There’s no way I’m buying those scores.

On the Kred scorecard, things seem to better reflect the real world. I get 213 for influence and 1 for outreach. Ying, as what I’d expected, was way beyond my league at 531/4. The thing I like about Kred is it not only shows you by the tweet how many points you earned, it breaks down your influence by communities as well. This is based on the principle that everyone has credibility somewhere even if it’s not universal. So in the online community of reporters, Ying Nee scores 45 while I scored 30 in the online community of astronomers after having my tweet about the discovery of an Earth-like planet RT-ed and clicked on a few times. Ok not that there isn’t anything absurd about this (I barely know about the solar system from the Pluto downgrade), but at least Kred keeps the scoring transparent. They recognised the shortcoming of not being able to measure offline influence and have included the option for users to upload credentials to boost Kred, opportunities for fraud notwithstanding.

 

 

At this point you’ve probably already pointed out potential flaws to such scoring systems. Clearly,  social media analytics hasn’t caught up with web analytics and well, it’ll take time to perfect. Just like how any savvy marketer never relies on a definitive metric in decision making, Klout and Kred scores need to be considered with other offline, real-world and qualitative indicators. In the end, when it comes to human connections we just can’t drop intuition.