Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Klout has its users in a frenzy: Could Peer Index and Empire Ave gain ground?


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A More Accurate, Transparent Klout Score

October 26th, 2011 by Ash Rust
Today we’re releasing a new scoring model with insights to help you understand changes in your influence. This project represents the biggest step forward in accuracy, transparency and our technology in Klout’s history. Joe shared the full vision behind these changes in his post last week.
Influence is the ability to drive action and is based on quality, not quantity. When someone engages with your content, we assess that action in the context of the person’s own activity. These principles form the basis of our PeopleRank algorithm which determines your Score based on:
  • how many people you influence,
  • how much you influence them and
  • how influential they are.
We analyze 2.7 billion pieces of content and connections daily. Reaching this scale, we’ve introduced significant upgrades to our platform, allowing us to handle this explosive growth. Now, we can add more networks and other sources of your influence much, much faster.
Insights help you understand why your Score changed. Each day, you can see which subscore and people in your network caused that change. You can also view insights on your friends’ profiles.
These changes are a significant milestone in the Klout Score’s evolution and you can continue to expect more improvements in the future. As always, your opinion is very important to us and we’d love to hear your feedback.
How will this affect my Score?
A majority of users will see their Scores stay the same or go up but some users will see a drop. In fact, some of our Scores here at the Klout HQ will drop — our goal is accuracy above all else. We believe our users will be pleased with the improvements we’ve made. Below is a distribution of the Score changes. You’ll note large decreases in Score are rare.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 26th, 2011 at 8:45 am and is filed under announcements, engineering,measuring influence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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  • Very unhappy with this change. My score went from 73 down to 53. 20 point drop. I've been working for months to increase my Klout score. Please fix this.
  • Look, if you're working on increasing your score you're focusing on the wrong thing. Focus on actually BEING influential and you'll weather any algorithm change that happens now and in the future.
  • "BEING influential" is an ethereal concept.

    Some of us have been using Klout  to help us measure when we are and when we are not influential. Having recently decided to try to use Klout to understand my influence and having recently taken action to change my online behavior based on that Klout is very disheartening to learn that the activities that I was being told by Klout were making me more influential now rate as activities that made me (in Klout's eyes) less influential.
    What this tells me is I can no longer trust Klout to be an aid in helping me become more influential so I think I'm just going to ignore it from now on.
  • Here's where I see it differently - I think what you were using it for was EXACTLY what Klout is supposed to be used for, in that you were comparing relative scores based on what you've done to help see what is actually working. That's a super effective way to use a made up score like Klout to positively influence your overall influence. However, today's score and yesterdays score are NOT relative to each other and therefore should not be compared. You can still use this tomorrow and the day after to do exactly what you've been doing.
  • Kyle Wegner You reply without all the context.

    I'm specifically referring to my graphs of activities which all show a continuous decline over the past 30 days, which means that whatever I've been doing has been "harmful."

    Before the change everything I was doing was making the score go up over the past month. So, what bothers me is Klout has guided me to take action to improve my score yet now they show others that my past actions mean I am steadily loosing "influence." Had Klout changed the algorithm without recalculating all the past data and had changes only effected the future scores where everyone's score had a big correction today it would be one thing, but now I want to make sure none of my clients see my Klout page because taken out of context it's embarrassing.

    And worse, I have no idea what Klout thinks I should be doing. The upshot?  I'm going to stop visiting Klout and put my attentions elsewhere.
  • Mike is completely right. Moreover, it seems like if Klout changed our scores retroactively, something I could hardly call a sign of 'transparency'.
  • Hey Mike, you can think of it as similar to when Google makes improvement to it's PageRank algorithm. Their goal is always to surface the best content for your search. Our goal is always to measure influence as accurately as possible. Reaching this goal will involve a constant evolution and each step makes us a more accurate gauge. Thanks for taking the time to comment!
  • Not only have I used Klout to measure my score, but I've instructed my social media beginner consulting clients to use it too- as an easy way to market their progress as they begin Tweeting and using Facebook.  Thank you for making my job harder- now I have to explain why, with all of their hard work, some their scores went DOWN.  Remember, they are beginners.  Klout is not Google (who is, by the way, a client of mine).  Mind you, I am the last one to complain about changes with Twitter, Facebook, etc. but a matrix tool?  Bad move.  I sure hope you have not Netflixed yourselves.
  • True, they blended graph over 30 days with old data, it appears, remving incremental gain losses for the month, I didn't notice that until I read your post.. yghh
  • Me too. My graph turned upside down. I'm dazed and confused. Again I'll wait a week or two for the dust to settle
  • me three... from 66 to 48. hmmm.... from 10K true reach to 2k true reach... In one day... somethings not right here, I probably won't be using Klout any more, its clearly not reliable.
  • Same here, but 67 to 49
  • Just that Klout can no longer be trusted because if the scores can change so drastically from yesterday to today no one knows what is accurate or not, either the current model or the previous model is clearly wildly inaccurate, or maybe both are totally off the mark.
  • I actually agree with this,  relative analysis can still be done... the only thing Klout and everything else will have to work through, is a very bad marketing move. If this has been a public stock it would have plummeted... In SME terms, lost a bit of good will
  • Sure and you just made my post irrelevant and wasting my time :http://wp.me/ptOFQ-Nk
  • HI Mike, You are absolutely RIGHT: I don't TRUST #KLOUT anymore they have been lying to me and misguided me. My score went from 59 to 46 overnight ! They should
    have found a smarter way to make everybody happy and enthusiastic about New Klout with a boost by increasing the base line to 20 for everybody. Then the realtive influence would have been the same
  • Anne, how is changing the scoring "lying?" Klout changed what it did, and that changes the score, but on any given day, Klout has been TRUTHFUL to you related to how the score is calculated on that day. Please don't throw words like trust and lying around so flippantly and inaccurately.
    Google changes its search ranking algorithm, and nobody accuses it of lying. Klout does the same thing and now you're up in arms? Give me a break.
  • Hey Anne, our goal is always measuring influence as accurately as possible. Your Score of 46 is still very high, representing a much larger sphere of influence than average (average is around 20) and we think as you dig into the change you'll appreciate the changes.
  • but when you can actually go back and SEE the numerous RTs you have, the dialogue u hv - it's clearly obvious their new scoring system is flawed when u see your score drop...14 points in an hour. Either way should be VERY interesting to see how brands will react to Klout's new scoring model when most scores...dropped!http://ow.ly/79NCa OH And There's a new Twitter Hashtag - #KloutOptOut as Klout automatically ranks you w/out your consent - I LOVE this idea!!

    UPDATE: Now I know Klout is jacked Woman in my office who's tweeted 19Xs times over 1 yr & NEVER been RT Score is 47 And mine is only 51 now?
  • After looking at a lot of the details, it seems to me that Klout is putting a lot more stock in Facebook influence and far less in Twitter. This is going to radically change the way people were scored if they were using Twitter as their primary vehicle for impacting Klout score.
  • If Facebook is the key now, then Klout is useless for those of us who are trying to keep private and personal separate. Facebook is personal.. it's how I keep up with extended family and old high school friends. My blog, LinkedIn, Twitter.. that's where I market myself professionally.
  • exactly!
  • exactly
  • You should set up a separate Facebook account for your business. I manage several for different businesses that I'm involved with. Use a different e-mail account to set it up and then simply link that Facebook account to your Klout account. Then each account will have its own Klout score, but then they are separated. If you are using LinkedIn, FB, Twitter, etc for business then use that as your primary Klout score.
  • I totally agree with Kyle in this. Klout seems to have nearly neglected Twitter and assigned a greater importance to Facebook. Besides having my Klout score plunged by 11 points in an hour, the people I influence has changed dramatically, going from all Twitter users to all Facebook ones.
    I think the new score is really flawed, not because of my nose dive, but because my newly measured score's evolution shows a persistent decline since October 4th while my Twitter mentions and RTs have grown.
    I use Twitter as a professional tool and Facebook for my personal social connections. Klout is a standard and recognized measure of social influence so people like me make efforts to improve our score based on how it calculates it. They can't change it radically from one day to the other because you have to flush all your hard work.
    Maybe Kred finally is a better option and people will start giving it a try.
    Klout guys, please solve this problem you have created.
Posted by Robby Ball at 12:36 PM