Blogging for Klout

wiredset: The Entertainment Industry Gets Its Own Twitter...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 01:06:03 -0500

The Entertainment Industry Gets Its Own Twitter Dashboard

Love seeing what our partners are doing with Klout data. Trendrr is awesome.

KloutUp 1: What a Blast

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:25:00 -0500

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!

The most influential Twitter users in the world

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:44:58 -0500

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

- United Kingdom

Are you waiting for your account to update?

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 21:08:31 -0500

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.

Need a hot stock tip? Check out the StockTwits 50

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:24:32 -0500

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.

Check out what's new with Klout!

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:38:00 -0500

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!

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 12:04:36 -0400

This was really exciting!

Klout Scoring Algorithm Changes

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 11:57:00 -0400

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!

Twitter's Real Golden Ratio and How to Improve Yours

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:54:00 -0400

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.

Putting Twitter into Perspective with Mike McDonald and Brett...

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:00:00 -0400

Putting Twitter into Perspective with Mike McDonald and Brett Tabke.

Great interview touching on SEO, Twitter, Social Media and Klout!

Does Twitter Follower Count Matter?

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:01:00 -0400

I won’t even try to act cool, I get excited every time I get that email from Twitter letting me know that I have a new follower. I have even bragged to my friends about my massive (ha!) 400+ follower count. The notion that random strangers find my musings interesting enough to subscribe to my updates can be intoxicating.

The dirty little secret of Twitter though is once a person follows more than several hundred people their tweet stream turns into a waterfall. Not that I don’t appreciate every follower that I have but when I click through and see that they are following more than 1,000 users I know that it is unlikely that my tweets are even seen let alone have any impact on them. Should these people count as followers? What if they have no intention of reading your tweets and are following you for the simple purpose of getting return follows? Everyone on Twitter has experienced the spam follower and the abandoned accounts, should these people count as followers? An industry has even popped up around buying Twitter followers.

We believe you have to go far deeper than simply looking at follower count to understand how influential a person is on Twitter. Follower count is valuable in giving you a starting point to understand a person’s possible reach but doesn’t give you a sense of how shallow or deep their influence is with that audience. When I step back and look at my own 400 followers I can only truthful say my tweets impact 75-100 of them. So if you only had 150 followers but all 150 where actually engaged in your updates wouldn’t you actually be more influential than I am even though I have more followers?

Like I said before, I would take more followers any day (you can find me at @joefernandez) but measuring influence is about more than just tickling the ego. Follower count is only a very small piece of the puzzle and we predict it will actually become less important as more people join Twitter and everyone’s social graph rides the boom. If you want to be influential, build deep connections and don’t worry about your follower count.

Aung and Rich presenting Klout at the Unconference in Singapore.

Sun, 17 May 2009 21:14:31 -0400

Aung and Rich presenting Klout at the Unconference in Singapore.

Klout tags - Is there meaning behind those 140 characters?

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:28:56 -0400

At Klout we’ve always felt that measuring a person’s influence was only meaningful if you could understand what specifically a person was influential about. To achieve this we run every tweet and every link shared in those tweets through our semantic analysis to abstract out what people are talking about. The by-product of this analysis are tags we associate to your account and save in our database. If you look at your content page you can see the ten tags that you have used the most according to our engine. We feel that this is much more powerful than just tracking keywords that are often used because it allows us to build a taxonomy of authority.

In the coming months we will begin introducing our topic based K-Scores that utilize the semantic tags we are generating from tweets. You can begin to get a preview of what user has been assigned any specific tag the most by clicking the tag name. This tag rank page is a new feature that allows you to explore who tweets the most about any specific topic. This is a great way to discover new people to follow who share similar interest with you!

Measuring influence is about more than boosting your ego

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:16:00 -0400

If you’ve found your way to this blog post then I probably don’t have to sell you on the idea that social media is fundamentally changing the way businesses market themselves and connect with customers. Here’s the thing: they aren’t doing this just because it’s the cool new thing. One of the biggest reasons companies are adopting social media is because they’ve learned that people trust their friends more than “A-list” bloggers or other forms of advertising. These companies are looking to leverage your influence to help spread the word about their company or product.

Consulting firms like Razorfish even say influence “is a driving force that affects everything we do as an agency, and, as we’re impressing upon our clients, it matters more than ever in this economic downturn as consumers across the country are losing faith in large institutions and experts and instead are turning to each other for advice”.

Even Harvard Business Review says that “online connections might be strategically targeted so as to take advantage of their influence on one another”. Think about this for a second, your ability to influence others through social media is becoming a core marketing strategy for many businesses.

Influence has become the currency of social media. While companies might not cut a check in exchange for your influence (you would probably instantly become less influential if they did), in this world of “user-generated marketing” there is real value in being influential. Companies will often establish focus groups around influencers where their opinions directly shapes what products are created and how they are sold. Influencers often are invited to special events, given product samples and can (and should) be treated like royalty by companies.

Some people use influence measurement tools like Klout for the simple gratification that they are using Twitter correctly. Others are just looking to have their ego stroked (we all need it sometimes). The truth though is that the individual is now a broadcaster and is being monetized by businesses. There is power in understanding how you are viewed by companies and the public at large. The best part about being an influencer isn’t being hooked up by companies because you helped spread the word for them, it’s being able to spread your own ideas and knowing that with a simple tweet you can have almost any question answered or door opened. If you dig into the data provided by Klout you can maximize your ability to do that.

4 ways to use Klout to find amazing new people to follow

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:46:00 -0400

Before we officially launched Klout I thought I had curated the most amazing group of Twitter users to follow the world had ever seen. Using Klout for the last couple of months I’ve realized that the Twitterverse is way bigger and more interesting than I could have ever imagined. Though Klout was not designed specifically for finding new people to follow, here are a four ways I have used Klout to make the list of people I follow infinitely more amazing.

1. Check out who influences the people who influence you.

Charlie O’Donnell (@ceonyc) is one of the people Klout names as an influencer of me. By clicking on his profile image from my Klout profile summary page I am able to then see who influences Charlie. From here I discovered great people like @kmaverick and @jdrive. It kind of feels like working my way up the tree of knowledge.

* Note - You may have to tweet out who influences you to unlock the ability to see other people’s profile by clicking on them.

2. Who else influences the people you influence?

Klout says that I am influencer of my co-founder @binhtran. By clicking through to his profile I can see who else influences him. From here I have found some great people to follow and have learned more about @binhtran. Seeing what other influencers you are grouped with in the mind of your follower is a unique way to find cool new people.

3. Retweeters of your favorite tweets

When clicking across people’s profiles one of my favorite things to check out is the content tab to see which of their tweets where retweeted the furthest across Twitter. Often I’ll see a retweet that strikes me as something I surely would have retweeted. By looking at the other users who retweeted that message I’ve been able to find users that share my very specific interests to follow.

4. Discover who tweets the most about any term

This is brand new functionality we just rolled out last week and is probably the coolest way to discover people to follow. When you are on anyone’s “content” page you’ll notice a list of tags. These tags are generated by running all the links shared and tweets created by the people Klout monitors through our semantic analysis. The semantic analysis allows us to abstract out whether or not there is any meaning behind those 140 characters. You can click on the tags you see on anyone’s content page to see who has used that tag the most. I was able to use this functionality to find other people tweeting about Downtown Los Angeles, where our office is.

My hope is that Klout is as helpful in your search for finding the perfect people to follow as it has been for me. We would love to hear about any other ways you’ve used Klout as a discover tool!

Hot new Klout features - Part I

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 01:57:00 -0400

For most of the past three months the Klout team has been hard at work behind the scenes. We’ve been building a platform that monitors millions of Twitter users and evaluates each person’s overall influence. We go beyond overall influence though and look at the strength of influence between every connection on the social graph. We want to understand whether a person’s influence is wide and shallow or runs deep with a core group of people. We then look at every tweet and every link shared and run it through our semantic analysis to see if we can abstract out any meaning behind those 140 charecters to begin understanding what topics someone is influential about.

Most of this work has happened behind the scenes and while we’ve been making great strides in our ability to process more data in less time with increased accuracy, our site is looking pretty stale. It is with great pride that we release our first big change to the Klout website.

The first thing you’ll probably notice is that instead of two main navigation tabs (summary and detail) you now have four. Summary is still the same, but we decided to break the detail tab into “stats” and “content” and add a new “network” tab.

The stats tab now displays the six categories used to calculate a person’s K-score. Each category contains a number of variables that are measured versus the entire Klout population. For each variable we provide analysis about how you rank versus everyone else. If you are interested in trying to raise your influence this is a good way to gain insight into how you are using Twitter.

The content tab shows the tags that are generated by our semantic analysis of the users tweets and links. Click on the tags to find out who uses that tag the most. From the content tab you can also see which of the users tweets were retweeted the most and what links they have shared.

The network tab is a geography based visualization of the users influence. By measuring the influence between each connection on the social graph we can tell you what cities you are most influential in. This map is just a starting point but if you were going to visit a new city and wanted to know which one of your friends had a lot of “Klout” there and could hook you up, it could be very helpful!

As the title of the post indicates, this is just part I. Over the next couple weeks we will be releasing a series of new features that will help serve as your personal publishing analytics tool box. Knowing that there are more exciting features you could build with this data then we could ever possibly get to we are thrilled to also be releasing our public API!

Developers can now visit api.klout.net and start adding influence to their apps. Most the data used on the site is available through the API. The rate limit is relatively low but just shoot us an email and we would be happy to work with you to raise it.

Enjoy!

How do you get the word out about your company or product?

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 22:32:25 -0400

One of the inspirations that led us to build Klout was the frustration of having sat in dozens of marketing meetings talking about how “we just need to make this go viral”. Often the next line I would hear as I was slamming my head towards the desk was “we’ll just get it on Techcrunch”.

Almost every marketing department has a list of key influencers in their segment. In the startup technology world people like Michael Arrington or Robert Scoble come to mind. The challenge though is going beyond those obvious influencers to find the hidden gems that can champion your cause.

With rise of user generated content and social media it is easier than ever for individuals to share their opinion about your company or spread your message. I can instantly tweet out a message about a cool new site I found and the people who listen and trust me the most, the ones I influence, are going to consume that message and start forming an opinion or generating interest.

We’ve actually been able to verify this cycle during the launch of Klout. One of the most popular features on the site is our list of people who either influence you or are influenced by you. We’ve kept careful records of who mentions Klout in any tweet. After each tweet about Klout we look at who signs up for an account. Almost without fail the people we say are influenced by the person who just tweeted about Klout will sign up for an account.

We are excited about the data we are generating here at Klout and how it might help companies find the army of influencers that are right for them. The world is starting to wake up and realize that you can’t just “take the product viral”. If you have the analytics to tell you were to plant the seeds you can at least give your message the proper chance to grow and spread. Node optimization is the name of the game.

How do you currently get the word out about your company or product? Would this process change if you could specifically target key influencers at the topic or vertical level?

Is ExecTweets a Slap in the Face to Twitter App Developers?

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:04:47 -0400

Today Federated Media launched ExecTweets, a place where tweets from top executives across several industries are aggregated with hopes of highlighting the top content. It’s pretty clear this isn’t just another twitter app however. First there is the fact that Twitter apparently is in a partnership with Federated Media. ExecTweets has been given prime advertising real estate on the twitter landing page under the profile information. I know a lot of app developers (including us) who would kill for this opportunity. I am also guessing that Federated Media is not subject to the strict rate limiting rules that Twitter imposes on the rest of their developers.

I love Twitter as an app and as a development platform but it’s interesting to notice that they have not recieved near the backlash that Facebook did when they played favorites at the expensive of their developers. Is this because the rest of the Twitter development community and media at large as even more in love with Twitter than I am? I like to think that much the same way that Twitter seems to be a totally different company than Facebook that their developers platform would evolve differently but now I am worried.

Looking at Twitters blog they do a nice job at highlighting intersting apps that are built on top of their API. The new Twitter oath roll out is exciting for developers and the information from this should allow Twitter to create a catalogue of Apps. As a company aggressively developing on the Twitter platform though I just hope they do their best to keep an even playing field.

Do You Want to Be a Klout "Super" User?

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:18:52 -0400

Over the last couple weeks we have slowly been rolling out some new Klout functionality. Many of you may have noticed that you now have the ability to “compare” users. You can do this by clicking the “compare” tab in the top left corner next to search.

Another feature we have added is we now allow users to search across the nearly 1 million indexed profiles in Klout. Previously users were only able to see their own profile but now you can click on your influencers and finally see their K-Score and who influences them. This is a great way to discover new people to follow!

If you have a Klout account but do not see this “super” user functionality it is really easy to get. Just tweet out your score or who influences you by using the “Tweet This” button and your account will automatically be upgraded.

We would love to hear what you think about these new features.

The Startup Pitch Contest - Lessons Learned

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:17:38 -0400

This past Monday Klout was one of 16 finalist chosen to present their company as finalist in the SXSW Acclerator Showcase. The format was simple, companies were broken into 4 categories and given 2 minutes to present and then 10 minutes of questions. One company from each category would be chosen as the winner.

Two minutes to present your company is not a lot of time. It’s like asking a parent to tell you everything amazing about their baby and then cutting them off once they are just getting started. After a bunch of practicing we finally got a presentation together that highlighted our top features in less than two minutes. This is where we screwed up.

It’s not about features. It wasn’t just us who fell into this trap. Company after company got on stage and talked about all the cool stuff you could do on their website. Half through the day one of the judges, Guy Kawasaki, said “maybe this format is wrong” expecting him to say we should have more time to talk I got excited. “Two minutes is too long,” Guy continued, “I want to know what this product does in 10 seconds”.

All that really matters is that your software is solving a real pain point for some person (or better yet, a huge market). Get this point across first and make sure you drive it home. If they connect to that they will ask questions and you will get all the time in the world to talk about your amazing features.