Love seeing what our partners are doing with Klout data. Trendrr is awesome.
On Friday, February 5th, we had our first inaugural KloutUp here in our new offices. This was a great ending to an exciting week here at Klout HQ.
Putting a cap on Social Media Week SF, we thought it would be great to meet some of our users in person - from the newcomers to the Twitterverse on through to the seasoned pros. We’re beyond excited that so many friends took the time to stop by and we hope to have these events more regularly as the months come.
A Cast of Characters
We were surprised at just how many great folks turned up for our last-minute event. quick shoutouts to: @thekenyeung, @themaria, @gingerw, @andykaufman, @gravity7, @chrissaad, @brett, @doverbey, @iamkyle, @gotwalt, @sandramp, @dotben, @violetblue and many, many more!
Open Sourcing Klout
As a fun experiment, we put our whiteboard to use as a staging ground for the Klout secret sauce - our special blend for understanding influence. In allowing everyone the opportunity to contribute a little bit to the algorithm, it was interesting to see how many different ways people thought you could think of influence. Now, we know it was largely done in jest, but pretty hilarious nonetheless.
Scoring at Klout
To wrap to the evening, we took the opportunity to grab some photos of our friends with their Klout scores. We’ll be launching a new feature here at Klout.com very soon and we’ll fill in the details as soon as they’re ready.
In the meantime, of course, we welcome you to stop by and have yourself scored - our doors are always open at 795 Folsom!
Special thanks to @thekenyeung for taking some great, fun photos for us.
Keep an eye out for our next KloutUp!
After more than a year of analyzing the Twitter universe Klout is excited to announce that each week we will be releasing a list of the most influential Twitter users from each country.
How does a person get on Klout’s official list of most influential people? We believe that influence is about driving actions. Anyone can get thousands of followers (there are hundreds of services where you can literally buy followers) but only a select few can build extremely engaged audience that acts on nearly every tweet.
Klout measures influence by measuring nearly 30 different variables. With our True Reach algorithm we are able to calculate how many people actually pay attention to the user rather than how many followers they have. This lets us see beyond the spammers, inactive accounts and people who follow everyone they can. Our Amplification Score indicates how likely any tweet from the user is to be acted upon via replies, retweets or clicking on links. The Klout Network Score then measures how influential the people are who engage with the user. These numbers are all analyzed and a 1-100 Klout Score is generated that represents a person’s overall influence.
We are proud to give the influencers the recognition they deserve for making Twitter such an amazing place to connect and share experiences and knowledge.
Each week we will release a new list of influencers for a country. Here are the countries we have released lists for:
- Brazil
Registered users for Klout are able to login and go to the stats page and update their scores every 48 hours. We’ve gotten many reports over the last few days of people clicking to update their account and being told it was “still processing” for hours (and even days). We want to apologize to everyone who has ran into this issue.
Last Thursday night Twitter was hit with a denial of service attack. This is about the same time our issues started. When their system went down our processing queue started to back up. We also experienced a sharp increase an API transactions by Klout partners which further impacted our processing queue. Then on Monday, CoTweet went live with Klout in their system and the load increased further. Some where along the way Klout users who had manually updated their score got stuck in the queue’s and the updates either took a long time or didn’t happen.
We believe that we have resolved the issue and Klout users should expect the speedy updates and great service they are used to. If your account still says “processing” or you experience more than a 15 minute delay in updating your account please let us know at support (at) Klout.com or @klout.
Sorry about the inconvenience.
Here at Klout we love the Twitter ecosystem. One of our favorite companies who just happens to have incredibly vibrant community is StockTwits. To celebrate this, Klout has calculated a special Stocktwits Klout score to identify and reward the individuals most responsible for great conversations about stocks. You can find the people with the 50 highest StockTwit Klout scores here.
The Stocktwits Klout score does not take into account the performance of stock trades people tweet about. The Stocktwits Klout score is based on the conversations people are having about the stock market. When you tweet about a stock or use the “$$” signifier for Stocktwits, Klout analyzes the tweet and any links shared with our semantic technology. We then track who replies or retweets you when talk about the stock market and how influential that person is. We normalize this data across all Stocktwits users and then our system generates a 1-100 score (higher being better) to represent your Stocktwits Klout. Each user will also have a standard Klout score which represent their influence across Twitter on all topics. The Stocktwits Klout score is based on a rolling 30 day time period and will be calculated weekly.
The StockTwits Klout score represents a giant step for Klout’s influence measurement technology. This is the first time we have calculated a individual score based on a community and set of data outside of the main Twitter feed. Understanding a person’s influence across the various social communities through out the web is one of the next frontiers for us.
With the recent addition of Twitter Lists, we’ve been cooking up some new tools in the Klout labs to help users take advantage of this new functionality. As you’ve probably already seen for yourself, Twitter Lists let you group and organize people on Twitter, creating categories by topic to help you track different content streams.
Even though the Twitter Lists have only been public for a few weeks, we’ve already seen some interesting use cases for them – namely, by news organizations – and they really demonstrated their capacity of becoming a valuable format for tracking developing news stories during the Ft. Hood shootings.
The Columbia Journalism Review wrote:
“The lists—which offer a running stream of information, updates, and commentary from the aggregated feeds—represent a vast improvement over the previous means of following breaking news in real time. In place of free-for-all Twitter hashtags—which, valuable as they are in creating an unfiltered channel for communication, are often cluttered with ephemera, re-tweets, and other noise—they give us editorial order. And in place of dubious sources—users who may or may not be who they say they are, and who may or may not be worthy of our trust—the lists instead return to one of the foundational aspects of traditional newsgathering: reliable sources.”
At Klout, we decided to explore ways of making Twitter Lists easier to create and customize. Since we’re tracking and measuring influence on all sorts of topics across the social web, we can help you identify the people who are most influential on the topics that you care about.
Here’s a list of 50 influencers on Google:
Once you create a list, you can easily save it to your Twitter and track what the most trusted sources of information are saying about this topic at any given time. You can also choose to customize your list by selecting which users you ultimately want to follow or adding the people who you think are influential:
This was really exciting!
Last night we released a major change to the Klout scoring algorithm. Previously some factors, like retweets, where calculated on a cumulative basis from the time Klout started tracking a person. We did this because initially most people did not have very many messages retweeted. Retweets have exploded in popularity and with the changes that Twitter is making to the retweet process we believe this trend will continue. When calculating a person’s Klout Score we now measure retweets and the associated statistics on a rolling basis.
What does this mean for your Klout Score? Initially everyone’s score is going to drop. How far your score drops is going to depend on how often you’ve been retweeted in the last 30 days compared to your overall retweet count. As the database normalizes over the next week or so the scores will begin to stabilize and then climb again. If your score hasn’t changed it is likely because you have not processed since the changes were put in place. If you are curious enough to see what happens to your score you are welcome to login and go to your stats page and click “Update my score”.
We believe the changes that we are making are going to greatly improve the accuracy of the Klout Score. Please feel free to share your thoughts, concerns, questions in the comments. Thanks!
There is a great article today on Techcrunch about Twitter’s “golden ratio”. The theory is that if you look at someone’s follower count vs. the number of people they follow you come up with a ratio that helps you decide whether or not a person is worth following. I love getting the email from Twitter telling me I have a new follower. Like most people I know, I automatically eyeball those follower and following counts to get a rough idea of what kind of person this might be. This is a good starting point but the problem is that just like follower count, it is easily gamed.
Remember back (about 20 years ago in Twitter time) when Ashton and CNN where racing to be the first to 1 million followers and Techcrunch was right there with them hyping the importance of a having a huge follower count? To their credit Techcrunch later did question whether Twitter should even publish follower count, but that message was lost on the millions of people trying to figure out how to be successful on Twitter. Take a second and do a search for “Twitter Followers” and mixed in with some relevant blog posts you’ll find links to dozens of services that will basically sell you followers. While for the most part I would call these tools garbage, the people who create them are smart when it comes to knowing how to make a buck. My guess is we are now going to see services that are willing to sell you a follow from each of their thousands of fake/spam accounts so you can have whatever “golden ratio” you need to be awesome at Twitter.
While I haven’t seen a service like that yet (please let us know if it’s out there), here at Klout we analyze Twitter data all day and we are constantly amazed by all the ways people attempt to manipulate their Twitter stats. One of the most common is the follow and dump. The goal here is to follow someone so they follow back specifically so they can be unfollowed to pad a person’s follower/following ratio. This isn’t just unfollowing someone who you realize isn’t as interesting (or is straight up annoying) but rather a systematic process with users doing it hundreds of times. We find that usually the people trying to do this will target corporate twitter accounts. These accounts will often always follow a person back and generally the people managing them don’t have time or don’t care to figure out what’s going on with all of their followers.
Techcrunch’s “golden ratio” for Twitter is helpful and has always been a part of the calculation of a person’s Klout Score (you can find the follower/following ratio on the stats page). We believe there is a lot more you need to look at to judge the quality of a person you might be considering following or a business you might be looking to engage with. At Klout we use nearly 30 different variables to generate a person’s Klout Score with careful attention given to the various ways people like to use Twitter, while having checks and balances to ensure the score is not easily gamed. Understanding the topics a person likes to tweet about is also critical when analyzing a Twitter account so we perform semantic analysis on the tweets and links shared by each account.
The only real “golden ratio” on Twitter is the amount of interesting content you are exposed to versus noise. Follower/Following ratio (and the Klout Score itself) are just some of the tools at your disposal for improving your number.
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