Klout. Why It’s not a Metric for Influence.

Dezember 20th, 2011 • 2 comments CRM, Tools
Tags: Analytics, Influence, Klout, Metrics, Social Infliuence Marketing, Social Networks, Tech, Tools, Truth

My colleague Heather – Strategy Director at StrawberryFrog here in Amsterdam – has posted quite an interesting article on her personal Quest for Klout.

This is the story:

A little over a week ago, a comment was made by a client responsible for social media that they would expect someone offering advice on social media to have a higher Klout score than themselves. I wasn’t in the meeting, but one of our art directors made the comment “Wait until you meet our head of planning. She’ll give you a run for your money.”

When my colleagues return and tell me about the meeting we go online and compare Klout scores. Mine is 40. The client’s is 51. I’ve never paid any attention to Klout before this but they insisted I try to do so and get mine up. So I connect my Facebook account. Then Foursquare, Instagram, Google+ that I never use, and LinkedIn (that ought to take care of this competition). And then I simply put attention into all of these networks. After 24 hours my score had gone up 6 points. By the end of the week I was at 53 and it seems to have leveled off there. But that’s still 2 points higher than the client’s.

We had a bit of a conversation about Heather’s challenge with her client. Of course it was just a game but an interesting one as the client really defined Klout as a crucial metric that really describes Influence.

The problem? If you are all up for lifting your Klout score all you have to do is to basically connect every social profile you have and get retweeted constantly. In the end you get something like this (which basically says nothing but…wait…MY KLOUT SCORE IS HIGHER HEATHER!!!! ):

Klout does not get tired to pretend it is the standard when it comes to influence metrics in the social web. It’s true: if it comes to asking how to measure influence somebody will mention Klout pretty quickly. Or in other words, I think Klout did a great job in making people believe they can measure influence. I think they can’t. My reason? Klout does not measure influence. It measures blah blah.

Angela Merkel’s Klout Score is only one point higher than my own. British Prime Minister David Cameron is even less influential than I am. And do you think this comparison makes sense? No, I don’t think so either. Because we all know Klout does not work that way.

My problem with Klout is simple: Klout defines itself as the ‘Standard for Influence‘. Sometimes – in more humble moments – as the “standard for Online and Internet Influence”. As a Strategist interacting with marketing clients (such as Heather does) this is just fine print when it comes to explaining if we are able to measure success.

“It’s simple, isn’t it?”, Klout is the metric for influence. And even though we all know that real influence cannot be split into an online influence and a real world influence…and even though we all know that unless I become German Chancelor or British Prime Minister I will never be as influential as two Politicians mentioned above…and even though I know that if I go on vacations tomorrow without tweeting for two weeks my Klout score will half: we still seem to accept it as a metric for influence.

Klout is not a metric for influence. It is something like a counter that tells the world how many e-mails I sent or how many telephone calls I answered yesterday. Oh…of course it turns that into a nice info visual and awards me a ridiculous set of badges (I am a “Klout OG”).

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Facebook. The 100 Most Engaged Brand Pages.

März 17th, 2011 • 3 comments Brands, Social
Tags: Analytics, Engagement, Facebook, Measurement, Metrics, Report, Social, Social Influence Marketing, Social Networks, Study

One of the tougher elements of my job is to benchmark client metrics against competing digital ecosystems. This is because it’s not very easy to keep track of competitor data beyond pure community size (such as engagement metrics). Allfacebook along with Wired and NYC based monitoring company FanGager have just published a very interesting overview over the 15 most engaging pages on Facebook, based on Feb 2011 activity. Well, thanks to @mitsuo it is actually the 100 most engaged brands. You can find the full list here.

Engagement is defined here as ‘fans’ (likers sounds too stupid) who either post, comment or like over the course of a month. Or in other words, the people who actually do something in your community. The brand pages mentioned here are huge players on Facebook. But as you can also see there is more than just a gap between their community size and the top of the pyramid which actually is actively posting or responding. It is not very surprising – but it shows once more that aggregating likes simply doesn’t make the world go round alone.

What do you think? Are you surprised by this quota as well? Did you expect that? Leave a comment!

Social Monitoring. Sorry, we do only speak English.

Juli 26th, 2010 • 9 comments Social, Tools
Tags: Analytics, Business, Monitoring, Radian 6, Semantic, Social Influence Marketing, Tools, Truth, World

The other week I attended a presentation by a major social analytics vendor from the U.S. If you have ever attended a telephone presentation of one of the many social-related tools you know how shiny and well applicable these tools seem to be when they get presented to you.

During the presentation the sales representative highlighted how easy and simple it is for his tool to identify and validate social leads according to the brand’s needs. I asked how the tool does it. He pointed at the tool’s sophisticated semantical algorithms. I answered ‘Fine, so it’s only applicable in the U.S., right?’ I am German, working in a Canadian agency in the Netherlands. This tool does only speak English. It is neither prepared to cluster German, Dutch, Italian, Polish nor French conversations. He replied ‘Well, that’s the problem with any analytics tool’.

I think that’s kind of funny. Among the hundreds of social media monitoring solutions there is almost none which is polylingual. Rather simple solutions such as Viralheat or Radian 6 are able to add transparency based on keywords. But mostly every ‘semantic’ tool does fail once we are talking about all non-English places on earth. And there are countries which are not the U.S. – I am quite convinced of that.

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Connections Planning. What is it actually?

Oktober 20th, 2009 • 13 comments Allgemein
Tags: Agencies, Analytics, Connections Planning, CRM, Definition, Ideas, Media, Planning, Presentation, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy, Tools, Trends

Since the beginning of 2009 my employer Neue Digitale / Razorfish has integrated all strategic disciplines in one Connections Planning team. As Social Influence Strategist I am part of it together with with different strategic backgrounds. I admit, I did not always feel comfortable in properly defining the different Planning Concepts. And the rather ‘new’ Connections Planning idea adds just one more label to the different strategic disciplines which can exist in an agency.

Our concept of Connections Planning integrates the work of Account and Brand Planners as well as Media and Analytics, and Social Media. Its core idea is to engage customers where they are and not by putting the customer’s media use into the center of attention. Its goal is to use the strength of data-driven marketing activities and integrate all other disciplines to strategically interact with the user and maximize value for all stakeholders.

Connections Planning is a young term. And there are some definitions around and some agencies might find different approaches for the same term. The reason for this post is, I found two interesting decks lately which revolve around the term ‘Connections Planning’. And both are pretty insightful and definitely worth to take a look at.

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Social Media Intelligence. We sell or else.

September 22nd, 2009 • 6 comments Intelligence
Tags: Analytics, Business, Diagram, Intelligence, Monitoring, Prediction, Strategy, Trends, World

Something’s happening out there in the outer social space. And while me, my coworkers and many, many others still try to explain Social Media Monitoring to  clients, a couple of interesting questions were recently raised by a couple of intelligent people. One of them was Bud Caddell who criticized the idea of sentiment analysis. His criticism revolves around the fact that monitoring tools which are based on semantic analysis do most often offer quick overview diagrams which say something like “62% of all users in the social web like your product” (or similar).

Bud argues:

Here is what I think: sentiment analysis won’t ever be enough, and not because of sarcasm or industry specific slang, but because we are measuring the WRONG thing. It’s about the effect, not the content of the message.

I basically agree. We are making the same mistakes again. The same mistakes that were made by the marketing industry for ages by setting up big surveys which anticipate answers we have to give in case we fail. No doubt, only few human beings want to fail. But there is a difference between a survey and the right action afterwards. According to ABC News/Washington Post polls 75% of all Americans approved Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq when the war started in 2003. According to this sentiment analysis Bush’s decision was completely justified.

Do you understand what I mean? There is a deeper problem.

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