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I think reading Mark's book a few weeks back rekindled my fascination with Klout as an online influence measurement tool.
K Scores, Achievements and Reach all have value in terms of benchmarking your influence against the global playing field, but consider the old marketing idea that as marketers, we should brand from the inside out. That approach has always made a ton of sense to me. To be effective, we must first clearly "know thyself" before we can ever expect external audiences to do the same.
Enter Klout.
I'm starting to see even more value in how social media users can conduct self-assessment using the insights that Klout provides to optimize online influence to align with professional goals and objectives.
To show you examples of what I'm doing, I'll start by comparing myself to my friend and industry mover and shaker -- Gini Dietrich. While she leans more towards the PR side of agency work and I to the digital practice, from a career standpoint, we have lots in common. She also carries a heavy amount of online influence.
I have a ton of respect for Gini as a social business professional. She's everywhere these days.
According to Klout, Gini is more influential than I am online, logging a K-Score of 68 against my 61.
According to Klout's online influence measurement, Gini and I share influence over topics like Blogging, Facebook and Social Media. We differ in a few other topics as well. Where I'm known online for branding and community management, Gini is known among her networks for business, writing and wine. That makes sense, since she is indeed a business owner, and book writing has obviously been on her mind the last few months.
So what are the usable insights from this data?
The blue bar you see below is related to True Reach, the Klout measurement for understanding just how many human social media users you actually influence online. While both Amplification and your Network Score are also important, True Reach is what drives the audience interactions that determine influence and the ultimate conversion.
Frankly, my friend in Chicago is kicking my ass on True Reach.
She has collected more 23,000 followers on Twitter, where as I have collected about 28,000 total followers. By Klout's online influence measurement, Gini influences over 18,000 of out of her 23,000 followers whereas I only influence about 8,000 of my 28,000 followers per the same metric.
So what are the usable insights from the Klout data?
Gini's online influence is highly optimized and in turn, much more effective in helping her to reach her professional objectives. As an action item for my own online influence, I will be working to scrub out spam bots from my following, as well as more concerted efforts to not only reciprocate follows to humans who have followed me, but also to make a point to reach out in a one-to-one fashion to as many of them as possible, as soon as a connection is made.
This comparison is one of the best features Klout offers in self-assessment.
At a high level, Networks of Influence in Klout factors in your engagement on the various social networks that you connect to your profile, and then reports on how each of your profiles affects your overall influence score.
So how can this help in planning engagement for your personal profiles or even business accounts? Here's a few insights I've gathered on my own network influence:
So, that said, here are a few things I am considering changing based on these insights:
How long has it been since you looked at your online influence from the inside out? What is Klout telling you about how you might better optimize engagement on social networks?