There’s a small galaxy of things being left behind as we traverse the social Web these days: likes, friends, follows, sentiment, click paths, plays, mentions, comments, check-ins, uploads, swipes, opens, installs, and so very much more. Today’s badge of corporate social savvy is the dedicated social command center for watching the analytics build, the social graphs sprawl, and the content flow on monitor banks in real time. For marketers, the delicious promise of all of the data that now fully one out of five of the humans on the planet Hansel-and-Gretel around the Web1 is that with so much of our interaction with each other, and increasingly with things, being quantifiable, the act of delivering advertising messages will finally become effective - Amazon Recommendation Effective. But it’s not.
Why is it not? The reasons are many, of course. Here’s one: no one has even come close to cracking the big measure - the only one that actually matters - Influence.
Every brand, every charity, every content creator, every person - you and me - want exactly the same thing out of the social Web. We want the ability to affect change. Pepsico wants you to buy their Aquafina brand water; The ALS Association wants you to dump it over your head; Patrick Stewart wants you to watch the video of him not doing so; and most of your friend network just wants to convince everyone to stop it already. We all want the same thing in the end - the power to affect change in everybody else on the Web. And the measure of success for us is in figuring out how to do so without working so damn hard - Influence.If the academic definition of influence is the power to affect a person, thing, or course of events, then the social media key measure, Influence, is the likelihood of affecting perceptual or behavioral change. How likely is it that when Target tweets that Beats headphones sound amazing, your perception is changed? How likely is it when I tweet that? The difference is one of Influence. An organization that knows where social media Influence lives and how it works is a powerful thing indeed, because it can focus on just working those factors. To find the conversations, the content, the people, the networks that presage the viral spread of an idea allows them to bet a dollar and win millions.
Every brand, every charity, every content creator, every person - you and me - want exactly the same thing out of the social Web. We want the ability to affect change. Pepsico wants you to buy their Aquafina brand water; The ALS Association wants you to dump it over your head; Patrick Stewart wants you to watch the video of him not doing so; and most of your friend network just wants to convince everyone to stop it already. We all want the same thing in the end - the power to affect change in everybody else on the Web. And the measure of success for us is in figuring out how to do so without working so damn hard - Influence.If the academic definition of influence is the power to affect a person, thing, or course of events, then the social media key measure, Influence, is the likelihood of affecting perceptual or behavioral change. How likely is it that when Target tweets that Beats headphones sound amazing, your perception is changed? How likely is it when I tweet that? The difference is one of Influence. An organization that knows where social media Influence lives and how it works is a powerful thing indeed, because it can focus on just working those factors. To find the conversations, the content, the people, the networks that presage the viral spread of an idea allows them to bet a dollar and win millions.
The idea of influencing the influencers is far from new. Brands spiff celebrities with free product in the hopes that a paparazzo will snap a photo of one caught in tacit endorsement. Grass-roots marketers attempt to identify the coolest kids in key high schools - another form of celebrity - with similar motive. Social care and response centers prioritize their queues based on the Klout scores of those who complain in social networks.
Since late 2008, Klout has been the de facto index of social influence. Chances are that you’ve heard of Klout. Chances are you’ve never heard of those who would unseat it: PeerIndex, Postrank, KRED, How Sociable ... Really, in the influencer ranking game, it’s just Klout.
Klout ranks all social media users (albeit with a definite Western, specifically North American, bias,) on a 100-point scale, where the middle of the bell curve - the average Klout score - sits at 20. Fifty percent of Klout users live below an index score of 50, and exactly one person has a perfect Klout score of 100 -
Justin Bieber.
Klout factors social reach and activity on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare/Swarm, and Google+ with the same from one’s immediate network to generate its index.4,5 Or, said simply, most of your Klout score is generated by how many friends you have, multiplied by how busy you’ve been posting content to them.