Hi, folks. I've been quiet here for a few days, since I've been spending time creating content with Team Cbus over at our blog, as we compete for the win in the Chevy SXSW Road Trip Challenge. If you want to see what we're up to - and have a few laughs - please stop on by.

For now, here's something I was thinking about yesterday...

3 Influence Metrics That Klout Forgot

Klout is still one of those metrics that seems to draw constant debate from the social media types. There’s very little middle ground in the camps. You either love it or think it’s complete shenanigans.

You guys know where I stand. I’m a fan of Klout as a measure of online influence, at least in terms of Twitter. It’s not perfect, but then again, neither is Twitter or Facebook or any of the other social media playgrounds we love to hang out at.

What’s missing for me? I think Klout (similar to the approach Tweetstats initially took) should pay more attention to how individual users leverage the system.

Here are three metrics I’d like to see:

Ratio of Scheduled to Real-Time Tweets

Third-party tools like HootSuite and TweetDeck have built-in features to allow users to schedule out their tweets. HootSuite even has a bulk schedule feature for pro accounts.

This is both a blessing and a curse. On one side, the ability to schedule makes it much more practical to share others' content and build your presence (or reputation) for curating stories and information that your followers find valuable. On the other side, scheduling features easily give birth to a more robotic use of Twitter. What good is it to share an article that draws a retweet (RT) or comment if you aren’t there to jump in the conversation?

One metric I would find extremely helpful would be to score the ratio of scheduled tweets to actual real-time tweets, in order to better gauge a user's organic participation on Twitter throughout the day.

Average Promptness/Tweet Response Time

Going along with the idea above, part of good human use of Twitter is being prompt with your responses to others’ tweets. In the world of real time, what was once an acceptable response of days and weeks has now shifted to minutes and hours.

It would be nice to see Klout develop a scoring mechanism that would indicate just how prompt a user is (on average) when responding to tweets from others in the network.

Depth of Conversation

How good are you at getting your followers to engage with you in a dialog? How long do you talk with them? Do they always respond when you tweet at them?

While this is more of a qualitative metric, I feel like it would be valuable to measure an individual Twitter user's skills in two-way communication. A Twitter user's effectiveness in building longer conversations with multiple back-and-forth responses would seem (to me) to lend itself to a stronger level of influence.

What would you add? What do you think helps define influence?