Klout Puts Metrics Into Social Media Management

I really like klout.com for three good reasons: 1.) it’s about measuring online influence and I’m big on metrics as a key element of business planning; 2.) it’s a great example of a strong startup based on need — entrepreneur Joe Fernandez building something he wanted to use, and getting VC funding; and 3.) they released a new 2.0 version today (VentureBeat covered it … and there’s more detail on the Klout blog).

Metrics are the best possible drivers of good business planning processes and collaboration, because metrics can make feedback, the toughest part of management, almost automatic. Klout offers metrics on social media influence, so you can go beyond just counting followers or friends or whatever. True, I also like Klout because my daughter is marketing manager there. But I’ve been advocating this kind of social media metrics for a long time. Here for example is what I wrote about metrics just two days ago on Small Business Trends, which led  to a discussion of metrics and measurement and better ways to evaluate performance:

I’ve seen objective metrics, like sales, costs, expenses, calls, subscriptions, downloads, visits, page views, minutes per call, or unique visitors work pretty well, especially when they’re part of a regular planning process. I still remember how well the metrics worked in my first job, as an editor for United Press International, when they gave us scores for how many  newspapers used our stories instead of Associated Press.

So, with that in mind, here’s a (relatively) new facility to put numbers behind your social media efforts. Think about this as a tool for managing Twitter performance.

YouTube video

So the magic here is that Klout gives you a numeric score for your Twitter presence. I’m pleased. I’m a 45, which is 90th percentile. Sure Guy Kawasaki’s at 100, but my 45 beats a lot of people I know and respect. (What? Me competitive?).

So if you’re dealing with social media performance for a team, in business, maybe you can set goals for Klout scores and then follow up. Include the Klout score in plan review sessions.

What’s your score? What’s going to be your score goal for your management metrics?

Comments

  • Measuring influence – Klout Puts Metrics Into Social Media Management [21May10] | The Book says:

    […] Measuring influence – Klout Puts Metrics Into Social Media Management [21May10] Posted on June 28, 2010 by admin Clipped from timberry.bplans.com […]

  • Martin Seibert says:

    We are creating a social media metrics application at http://www.twentyfeet.com that will centralize all your web stats in one place. We only have twitter, facebook and bit.ly so far. But I would love to get feedback from you guys about it, as soon as it gets live in the next weeks.

    We did not implement Klout, yet. But it is definitely planned for the future. 🙂

  • Joe Fernandez says:

    Hey Shari,

    This is Joe, one of the founders here at Klout. Thank you for letting us know about the stale data on your account. You have been added to the queue to be reprocessed.

    As you can imagine keeping up with the stats for the 100’s of millions of users on Twitter is a challenge. It doesn’t help that Twitter itself goes down regularly which can impact our cycles. We continue to work to increase our coverage and the recency of updates.

    If you are a registered user for Klout you are able to login every few days and click the “Refresh Score” button if you ever feel that your data is stale.

    Thanks again for letting us know that we missed your account.

    Joe

  • Shari Weiss says:

    I just checked my Klout score and it is WAY BEHIND, i.e. number of followers to start with . . . only has 60% of the number of Followers I have PLUS shortfalls in every category, i.e., # of RT-ers, etc.

    How is Old Data valuable?

Leave a Reply to Martin Seibert Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *