Please note: we are currently updating this post to provide you the latest Salesforce Marketing Cloud capabilities (May 2013)
At Social 2011 we had the opportunity to chat with Matt Thompson, VP of Product with Klout on the idea of influence. We found his basic definition of influence hit home: “Someone is influencial if they can drive people to action across multiple platforms”. Today we’ll dive a little deeper into the insights that Klout can bring to your reporting and analysis in the Radian6 platform.
Who is influencing your Twitter data?
Klout attempts to answer this question by providing insights such as “Influence By” and “Influencer Of” around your Topic Profile. You can quickly see the top influencers who are influencing or being influenced by your data. In the images below, the left hand side is a list of Twitter handles that are influencing the conversations around our brand consisting of our influencers and our executives. On the right is a list of folks that are being influenced by our brand, which is mostly members of our community and staff.
You can also determine the “Topics” that your influencers influence the most which is great for analyzing leading trends around your brand. This can help in creating content topics for your Community team.
No surprises here, we’d expect to see social media, marketing and social CRM at the top of our list when looking at topics discussed.
Klout also attempts to classify influencers by providing a “Klout Classification” insight. They have a list of sixteen different classifications of Klout Class that is like a personality test for your influence style. Some classifications include Celebrity, Thought Leader, Pundit and even Dabbler. For a complete list and definitions dig in here http://klout.com/blog/2010/08/better-know-the-klout-classes/
How does Klout measure influence?
Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to provide four different scores. Each score produces measurements of influence for an influencer. The “Klout Score” is the measurement of overall online influence (I got a score of 40). “True Reach” is the size of your engaged audience while “Amplification Score” provides you with the likelihood that your content will be acted upon. Lastly, “Network Influence” is the influence level of your engaged audience. You’ll be able to see the score for your top influencers in the Summary Dashboard.
For a more detailed explanation feel free to visit http://klout.com/kscore. And to get a Klout score of your own follow http://klout.com/.
What does this mean for your data?
Klout as a standalone insight provider will help locate brand advocates and which topics around your brand get discussed the most, but when combined with web-analytics or other insights like basic demographics, entity extraction from Open-Calais or looking for meaning in conversations from your influencers through Open-Amplify the value becomes magnified. The results can easily point you in the right direction when you’re ready to dip your toes in the sometimes choppy waters of engagement. Keep an eye out for more best practices and use cases in the coming days.
As always we look forward to hearing your comments and how you think Klout can add value to your data analysis.
