Tag Archives: klout

Klout Puzzles: Are undergrads more influential than Gruen panelists?

 mUmBRELLA published Sarah Ballard and my article on the puzzles of Klout, specifically why Klout seems to think that typical Australian undergraduates have as much online social influence as Gruen Transfer panelists.

 

The research “Are undergrads really more influential than Gruen panelists? Klout thinks so” reports the results of some simple tracking studies that Sarah conducted on the online social influence service Klout.

Online social influence is one of the hottest new marketing metrics, and new companies are springing up claiming to measure combinations of platforms, followers, and sharing. Klout claims that scores of 20 are average, so scores above that should indicate some stronger sense of influence. Sarah wanted to know whether that score of 20 was a true average. She found that Klout scores really start at 10 and that a typical Australian undergraduate on Facebook averages a score in the 40s, well above Klout’s claimed average.

Amusingly, the undergraduates tracked in the study had as much or more apparent social influence than the panelists on the popular ABC marketing and public relations program The Gruen Transfer. The article provides some explanations for these puzzling facts.

Sarah’s achievement in being published was also featured on the School of Journalism and Communication’s website.

This kind of work is part of my ongoing program of establishing highly visible engagement and impact through research-based news stories published and advertised through social media. Students who are professionally-focused gain exposure in their industry and a killer portfolio object/resume line. Students who are research-focused see themselves as knowledge creators and their research has having a life outside academia and encouragement to continue.

Read the full article @

Ballard, S. & Rintel, S. (2012, June 28). Are undergrads really more influential than Gruen panelists? Klout thinks so. mUmBRELLA (Online).

Klout: Influence worth its weight in web gold

I commented in The Courier Mail about Klout, the social media influence metric service.

 

SOCIAL media-savvy Australians are turning to online services to calculate their influence on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

US-based website Klout now has more than 100 million registered members, who use the service to determine how much influence they have over their friends, colleagues and strangers.

“Increasing numbers of people are finding their voices online and, as a result, we are now adding millions of influencers to our index every few days,” Klout’s administrators write.

Users are awarded a “Klout Score”, which is derived from a complex mathematical process based on how they create and share content online.

University of Queensland social networking expert Dr Sean Rintel said social media users were increasingly wanting to know their worth in terms of  “social capital”. 

“Apart from counting your friends on Facebook, there hasn’t been a way to know this sort of thing,” he said.

“It hasn’t been something that ordinary people could indeed quantify and talk about in any kind of way.”

Dr Rintel said he wouldn’t be surprised to find people were including their Klout Scores on their resumes, adding that narcissism was also partly to blame for the growing interest.

“People have always been interested in themselves”, he said.

“We know that as soon as search engines became good at it, people stared searching for themselves and trying to find out how far and wide their presence was spread.”

The Courier Mail | The Sunday Mail

Tin, J. (2011, September 17). Influence worth its weight in web gold. The Courier Mail.

Kloutwin: I’m influential about pirates!

Sean Rintel: #kloutwin Pirates

Sean Rintel: #kloutwin Pirates

#kloutwin! I have risen from having klout about parking to klout about pirates! Turns out that you need to reach about 45 klout points to be influential about pirates. Of course it’s a total black box as to how klout decides influence about either… (but I’ll still take the #kloutwin, thanks very much).

Sean Rintel: #kloutfail Parking

Sean Rintel: #kloutfail Parking