There is a huge push on the web to identify influencers around various topics.
While I don’t want to debate the merit of influencer identification and outreach, or influencer marketing, I do think it’s worth opening the discussion around the public scoring of influence.
Scoring Influence
Part of the problem with a service like Klout, is the seemingly arbitrary scoring system.
Bring in other services like PeerIndex, Kred, and Empire Avenue, and it becomes even more confusing.
No one has much of an idea how scores are computed. But from what we do know, we can safely assume they use social signals such as likes, comments, retweets, and shares to determine who and what is popular. From there they try to extrapolate topics and give additional weight to your score based on who is interacting with you. The size of your network is assumed to be factored in, but again, we don’t REALLY know.
With each of these services, the best you can hope for is some sort of general rank compared to others, without any regard for each individuals goals and strategies.
Each of these services miss a key component in being able to accurately assess the true nature of influence, which is the ability to create specific action. In order to measure that, you would need to know the individual’s goals and strategies.
When the only measurements being taken are public social signals such as likes, comments, and shares, we miss out on being able to accurately assess influence. Influence doesn’t always happen out in the open and on Twitter.
The wrong kind of competition.
When we score people publicly, and assign a name such as “influence” to that score and rank, we will observe people competing with one another for the top spot.
Almost all people want to be acknowledged, popular, influential…important.
However, when we have arbitrary scoring systems, with unclear rules, and questionable real world value, we take people off track from doing good work that they honestly enjoy, and instead encourage them to boost their scores and compete with one another.
This does no one any good.
Moving the scores to the background
Quite frankly, whether someone is a 35 influencer or a 70 influencer on Klout, no one has any real idea about whether they can inspire action that drives value for companies.
The real answer lies less in the scoring system for social media influence, and more in the following:
- Accurate identification of what topics people are knowledgeable and trusted about
- Explicit knowledge of which influential individuals want to be contacted to leverage their influence, and what sorts of arrangements they are open to
- A trackable method for analyzing the ability of an individual to drive results (such as sales and leads)
The process should be simple and transparent.
Better Influence Scoring
Rather than turning to Klout and searching for someone who simply reposts 100’s of scraped and curated articles per day and got their score above 60, we need a service with a database of individuals that can answer the question “how can I work with an influencer to drive results?”
If you manufacture sports equipment, you want to know: “who knows and talks a lot about sports and sporting equipment, that is open to an arrangement (and what kind: affiliate, barter/trade, free stuff, etc) where the goal is driving website traffic to a landing page, and what is the best method to contact them?”
You’ll also want to easily see where they are online, and if possible a demographic breakdown of their audience.
Qualitative reviews would also be nice.
It wouldn’t hurt to know what percentage of their audience pays attention. Interestingly enough most influence scoring systems track shares, comments and likes, but not clickthroughs, which is funny since the largest social technographics profile of any demographic tends to be spectators (meaning that they passively consume content). We can’t be sure about this though, because no one knows how the scores are actually calculated.
In any event, all you really need to know is who they are, what they talk about, and if they are open to an arrangement.
You don’t really need to know their arbitrary score and neither do they.