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Archive for December, 2011

Building Klout: A Cultural Retrospective of 2011

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

Whether we’re building scores, building bonds, or building territories, Klout has been hard at work this year. As 2011 draws to a close, we remind ourselves to take a beat and reflect on our wild, most rewarding year yet. We’ve spent our days building our product and building our team and we couldn’t be more pleased. Share with us a journey through our last few months!

New Bohemia Signs at Klout HQ from Klout on Vimeo.

Looking back on 2011, it’s hard not to feel immense gratitude for the time we’ve had together at Klout this year. Work is easy when you love what you do. And at Klout, it’s much more than a job for us. We’re a family. We’re a family with a really, really big challenge ahead of us. Our team is solid, our outlook is positive. We look forward to what 2012 will bring!

Photo credits: Mark Likosky, Matt Silvey, and Klout employees

(P.S. Follow the Klout team antics in the new year on Pinterest!)

Posted in other | 16 Comments »

A Year of Klout

Wednesday, December 28th, 2011

Moving fast, making friends, breaking things and trying to change the world. I would say that 2011 had all the ingredients of an amazing year for the Klout team.

With all that has happened, it feels impossible that January was only one year ago. I remember being excited but nervous heading into 2011. We had just closed a round of financing with Kleiner Perkins and Greycroft. The pressure was on to evolve Klout from interesting novelty to meaningful business. We were also at a crossroads in terms of how we wanted to think of our business. The obvious path was to be a data-centric company focused on helping businesses target influencers. This didn’t feel right though and we made the call to continue our consumer focus. We felt that by empowering people to understand and leverage their influence we could have the biggest impact. We wanted to unlock the world’s influence.

Our goals coming into 2011 were to be “the standard” and to make the Klout score matter. To be the standard, we wanted to be recognized for having the highest quality data and to have the Klout score distributed everywhere. From using Klout to quantify a politician’s traction, to credit cards integrating Klout to reward customers with loyalty points, the Klout score became the industry standard. In fact, distribution of the Klout score grew from about 1000 developers in January 2011 to over 5000 partners now. Even more exciting is the amount of API calls, which grew from about 100 million per month last January to over 7.5 billion per month now!

The bigger challenge for Klout in 2011 was to make the Klout score meaningful and relevant to everyone. In May, we relaunched Klout.com and saw a huge surge in engagement and user registrations. Soon after, we released +K which allows users to explicitly recognize their friends’ influence. +K has been a huge success with over 50,000 +K’s generated daily. We reintroduced our much improved topic pages and also added LinkedIn, Foursquare and Google+ to the algorithm while beginning to analyze YouTube, Tumblr, WordPress, Instagram, Flickr and other networks to provide a complete picture of an individual’s influence.

Klout Perks also made a huge impact in 2011. Over 250,000 people were rewarded for their influence with amazing Perks from brands like Spotify, Red Bull, Hewlett-Packard, Turner, American Express, Chevy and Microsoft. I am particularly proud of the Klout Perks program. To have top brands recognize the impact not only of social media but also the power and voice of the individual was exciting to see. These brands followed our Klout Perks Code of Ethics and simply let influencers experience their products without knowing what the influencers would say and getting no private information about the participants. This past year we also redesigned our Klout Perks packaging, so be on the look out for the orange Klout Perks box because we are looking to take Klout Perks to the next level in 2012!

With all of our successes, 2011 wasn’t without some major challenges and screw-ups. Measuring influence is a monumental challenge and as the social media landscape continues to evolve, our algorithms need to evolve with it. In October, we launched the biggest algorithm change in the nearly four-year history of the company. In planning for this change we thought we had our bases covered in terms of transparency and communication. But it’s clear we didn’t do enough. The reaction was a great kick in the pants for the team and we appreciate everyone who cared enough about their Klout scores to #occupy us.

Privacy is another area where we learned some tough lessons in 2011. The nature of social networks and the data Klout analyzes makes privacy a consideration in every decision we make. In an effort to be more transparent about the data Klout analyzes, we launched the “Understanding Klout” portal. Our goal for 2012 is to be seen as a leader with respect to privacy.

Through the ups and downs of building a startup, my favorite part was getting to work with so many amazing people. From our investors to customers and partners we were lucky to have so many brilliant minds helping us. The Klout team grew from 15 people to more than 50 and I have never met a more humble and passionate group. I also want to thank our users for inspiring us to push harder and do better. We appreciate your support and patience and we look forward to helping you unlock your influence in 2012!

Posted in measuring influence | 21 Comments »

The Most Influential Topics of 2011

Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

In 2011, the world’s major events unfolded on social media. This is true across the board, from the Occupy Movement to the Netflix scandal to product launches. We took a look at the most influential companies, locations, people, music genres and tech products of 2011.

Instead of just looking at the volume of mentions, we focused on how much response and engagement these subjects get. When influencers shared content about these topics, the world listened and responded.

Companies: For some companies, making the top list reflects their beloved product and people (see: Apple and Steve Jobs), for others, it reflects scandal (see: Netflix). We’d also like to call out SoundCloud for making the list; we suspect their star investor, Ashton, might be one of the reasons people were talking about them.

Locations: Contrary to the idea that “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” influencers loved sharing about Las Vegas and it took the top spot for location of the year. This likely has has to do with the amount of top conferences and events held there every year and, let’s be honest, probably with some serious partying there as well.

People: The top people list reveals how much music is an essential and engaging part of the social media landscape, the top four spots are music artists, even beating out Barack Obama for the most engaging topics of the year.

Music Genres: Turntable.fm, SoundCloud, and Spotify all contributed to Dubstep gaining the number two spot in music genres, coming out ahead of everything but Hip Hop.

Tech Products: When we turn to tech gadgets, it’ll come as no surprise that Apple owns this list, taking over the top four spots. The iPhone won the coveted top smartphone spot, with Android (we grouped the individual models together), Palm Pre, and then Blackberry (they would have been number 12 so they’re not on the graphic below) following behind.

What were your favorite companies, locations, people, music genres, tech products of 2011?

Posted in measuring influence | 52 Comments »

The 10 Most Influential Retailers

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

‘Tis the season to be spending! There’s no easier way to spread the holiday cheer than to make it rain gadgets, gift cards, and galore. Still haven’t found the perfect gift for your loved ones? Check out one of these ten major retailers on your next trip to the mall or on the next browser window you open. From big-box stores to online shopping sites, our list of the most influential retailers has it all.

Amazon claims the top spot followed by JCPenney and Sports Authority in close third. Nearly all the retailers highlight products, announce sales or giveaways, and engage their customers with topical posts such as, “Who do you have left to buy for this holiday?” ThinkGeek is particularly great at quirky and personal interactions. Check out this tweet for example :

@debbierhyme Be proud! Let your geek flag fly!

— thinkgeek (@thinkgeek) December 20, 2011

It’s also interesting to note the diverse approach to customer service. Some retailers like Macy’s respond to nearly all of their users individually. Other retailers answer support questions sparingly or separate customer service completely from their main social media channels. For example, BestBuy created an entirely new Twitter called Twelpforce to answer tech-related questions.

With consumers spending an increasing amount of time online, no doubt these brands will continue to expand their digital presence as well. With that, here are the top ten retailers.

Do any of these surprise you? Where is your favorite place to shop?

Posted in influencers | 55 Comments »

A Word from the Klout Perks Team!

Monday, December 19th, 2011

We would like to formally introduce our small team of three to our wonderful influencers! Please meet the account management Klout Perks team..

We are the elves behind Santa’s Klout Perk workshop!

When Klout partners with a company to run a Perk, we are the ones who create the user experience, monitor responses across social networks, coordinate Perk arrival, ensure your satisfaction, answer questions you may have and deliver updates to our clients. As our Perks program grows, so does our influencer base. We love our users and want you to have the best possible experience with Klout Perks. So here are a few quick Perk tips:

1. You have the power!

All Perks are optional. If you participate in a Perk, we do not require that you share or tweet about the experience. You can say you love it, hate it, or say nothing at all. You earned the reward for having influence – the rest is up to you.

We NEVER give away any of your private information to the companies we partner with. For more information check out our Klout and Your Data. Perks are not about giving outside companies our users’ data; they are about our users leveraging their influence to receive unique experiences or products.

2. Receiving Klout Perks

Perks are given out based on score, location and topical influence. As for our international users, Klout only has employees in NY and SF so it is currently hard for us to execute campaigns in other countries but we hope to grow our team out and implement many more international Perks in the near future! Just be sure to update your Klout profile, including your postal code and email address so that you can be eligible for Perks in your area.

You can now add your own topics to your Klout account. If you are missing out on a Perk you really feel is relevant to what you talk about most, you can add the topic to your page, earn enough +K’s from your friends, and then you can redeem the Perk!

We don’t measure your real life influence. For example, we applaud the fact that you volunteer at an animal shelter and have a rescued dog at home, but we have no way of knowing that. If we have a Perk offering a free puppy to pet influencers (which would be totally sweet, but impossible) we will only know your love of animals by what your audience is reacting to online. That is how topics are decided.

We hope these tips help give you a better idea about what Perks are all about. The Account Management team has the best job of all at Klout – sharing great products with amazing influencers! Thank you for your continued support as we make our Perks program even better. We are here to help, so if you ever have any questions or feedback about Perks please let us know by tweeting to us @KloutPerks or email help@klout.com. Now get out there and start influencing!

Posted in Perks | 15 Comments »

75 days of the Occupy Movement

Friday, December 16th, 2011

Social media allows people to voice their opinions and spread their ideas to an audience on a scale that was unimaginable a few years ago. An idea propagated on social media by multiple sources can gain momentum, reach critical mass, and culminate in real world change.

The Egyptian Revolution is a recent example of this phenomenon. Today, we are in a similar situation. The Occupy movement in social media has become so closely intertwined with events in the real world that the two are hardly distinguishable. Here, we take a closer look at how the Occupy movement advanced through actions on Twitter.

Adbusters, the anti-consumerist magazine, initiated the “Occupy” idea in June just on the heels on the Egyptian Revolution. However, it only gained traction on Twitter in the later half of September. The agitation in the social media space helped solidify plans for the Occupy Wall Street protest that occurred on September 17th, 2011. This day is considered widely as the start of the Occupy movement.

We analyzed retweet data from Twitter between September 15th, 2011 and November 29th, 2011. We looked for all retweets that mentioned “occupy” and related terms (even #occupyklout). The chart below shows the number of retweets per day over the 75-day period. The peaks in activity correspond, unsurprisingly, to important events in the timeline of the movement.

The table below shows the number of retweets on days that Occupy events occurred. It is interesting to note that in some cases, the rise of Twitter retweets follows a real-world event, while in other cases it precedes real-world events.

Date	# of Retweets	Event
9/17/2011	70,307	The first day of the Occupy Wall Street gathering that an estimated 1,000 people attended.
9/24/2011	59,084	At least 80 arrests are made by the NYPD after protesters begin marching uptown, forcing the closure of several streets. Soon after the arrests, videos begin to appear around the web.
9/25/2011	68,103
10/01/2011	118,290	Protesters set out to march across the Brooklyn Bridge. The New York Times reported that more than 700 arrests were made.
10/02/2011	133,726
10/04/2011	86,686
10/05/2011	116,305	Joined by union members, students, and the unemployed, the demonstrations swelled to the largest yet with an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 demonstrators marching from lower Manhattan’s Foley Square to Zuccotti Park.
10/06/2011	167,345
10/14/2011	186,391
10/15/2011	257,894	Tens of thousands of demonstrators staged rallies in 900 cities around the world.
10/16/2011	203,050
10/25/2011	103,462	Police cleared and closed an Occupy Oakland encampment. An Iraq War veteran from the U.S. Marines is in critical condition after “being hit in the head by a police projectile.”
10/26/2011	244,228	Hundreds of OWS protesters marched near Union Square in support of Iraq War veteran and Occupy Oakland protester Scott Olsen.
10/27/2011	193,265
11/15/2011	394,463	NYPD began to clear Zuccotti Park.
11/17/2011	261,392
11/18/2011	144,007	Occupy movement protesters on the UC Davis campus are pepper sprayed.

We also looked at the top content based on retweet count. The average Klout score of these users is about 65.

Content	# of Retweets	User	Klout Score
0 Bankers Were Arrested After Purposely Crashing Our Economy. Nearly 1,000 Have Been Arrested for Speaking Up About it. #OccupyWallStreet	5874	TheNewDeal	67
NYC authorities clearly feel #OWS eviction is just and reasonable. That’s why they are doing it at 2am and barring all press.	4427	gzornick	58
█████ ████ everything ███ █████ is█████ ████ fine ████ ███ ██████ love █████ █ your █ ████ government http://t.co/cFIdfbcW #ows	4235	wikileaks	73
#occupyoakland attacked by 500 cops in suprise assault. tear gas, rubber bullets, shotguns, flash bang grenades. Many injured.	4126	occupyoakland	72
If Fred Phelps has the right to verbally abuse people going to their son’s funerals, then #OWS has the right to sit in the middle of a park	3797	MarthaPlimpton	69
The world needs to know that Oakland PD is tear gassing the elderly, the disabled, children, and the press. #PoliceState #OccupyOakland #OWS	3370	AnonymousWiki	51
After cops raided #occupysf and tossed their stuff in the dump, garbage workers returned it to the protesters, saying “we r 99 % too”	3336	NaomiAKlein	66
#OWS and #OccupyWallStreet are blocked from Trending topics. But its great to know that twitter lets #MyDickIn3WordsOrLess take first place	3098	SweetOnPeacexx	53
#OWS Fact: More people have now been arrested for protesting financial crimes than the # of bankers arrested for committing those crimes.	3008	xeni	72

So who were the catalysts of this massive movement? We discovered the top influencers by looking at Twitter users whose Occupy-related content was retweeted the most. The table below shows the top users and the number of times their content was retweeted. Incidentally, the average Klout score of these users is about 73.

Many of the top influencers are groups of people, such as the hacktivist group Anonymous (@AnonyOps, @AnonOps, and @YourAnonNews). We also find prominent figures driving the movement such as filmmaker Michael Moore and Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont. But the true power of social media is that you don’t have to be a famous director or a U.S. senator to be heard. Lesser-known individuals such as Liza Sabater and Allison Kilkenney were instrumental in driving action not only in social media but in the real world as well.

The Occupy movement demonstrates that with social media, a small group of influencers can generate and spread an idea that reaches thousands of people, who in turn amplify the idea to millions of others. Klout aims to be a tool for measuring influence. But beyond that, Klout enables people to find the right channels to make themselves heard and to find the right people who will take their ideas further.

So go ahead, spread an idea. Start a movement!

Posted in influencers, social media | 33 Comments »

CapitalOne Offers Bonus Rewards Based on Klout

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

At Klout, our goal is to empower everyone by unlocking their influence. This means measurement. But it also means engaging innovative businesses like Capital One to partner on programs that recognize and reward influence.

Capital One just launched a holiday promotion with Klout to reward cardholders, offering bonus rewards based on individual Klout scores. This means that everyone who participates – with a Klout score of 10 to a Klout score of 100 – gets some form of bonus rewards based on their influence. Not too shabby.

We always urge companies to think about rewarding customers for more than just their ability to spend, and to think about ways to reward customers for their influence and reputation. Certainly, our Klout Perks program was designed to reward social currency. There are big opportunities for companies to take a hard look at their loyalty programs and begin to incorporate social influence into the design of those programs. Innovators like Capital One are seizing them.

Posted in announcements | 6 Comments »

Support The Arts with Klout

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

We are happy to support our first non-profit art organization through the Perks program. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra is the fifth oldest orchestra in the country. The CSO is dedicated to enriching culture in the community and delighting audiences with high quality musical performances from world-renown artists. Influencers in the Cincinnati area will have the chance to experience the Live Wire concert featuring a Grammy-award winning ensemble for free! The CSO will also take influencers “behind the curtain” to learn more about the orchestra and meet the musicians afterwards.

We’re amazed at how quickly this program filled up. This lets us know that Klout users are interested in experiencing the arts and we hope to bring more opportunities to do so in the future.

For more information about the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, visit their website or follow them on Twitter at @CincySymphony.

How do you use your Klout to support the arts? What other programs would you like to see in the arts?

Posted in Perks | 5 Comments »

Klout Star: Alison Hillman

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Our Klout Stars series highlights top influencers and how they got to where they are today.

About Alison: Have you ever been picked up on in a bar by a stranger who has seen you before and rightfully accused you of being that girl who “reads TechCrunch on her phone every single day–without lifting her head”?

Yeah, I am guilty of being that girl.

My name is Ali and I am the Community Manager at BranchOut. When I am not busy nerding out on the bus and making awkward first impressions, I love going to concerts, spending time outside and indulging in far too much Mexican food. I am a self-proclaimed “Nor Cal convert”. Having grown up in Los Angeles, I am proud to call San Francisco my home. I enjoy learning about why people make the social and spending decisions that they do, how trends evolve and why technology influences these choices. You can learn more about me here: alisonhillman.com and connect with me here: http://www.twitter.com/alihillman

2. How did you get started in social media?

If you consider yourself “normal” you are already boring me. Let’s face it; I probably wouldn’t follow you on Twitter. So in the spirit of being attracted to oddballs and progressive thinkers, I picked a major that most people have never heard of, I graduated UC Davis with a B.A. in American Studies. You can pretty much do anything with that major; I interpreted it as being the sociology of American culture and studied mass marketing and technocultural studies. After graduation, I landed a sweet gig at Yelp where I happily stayed for several years. I developed a huge crush on web 2.0 trends. From Yelp, I spent some time doing Digital PR for Levi’s. Now I work for BranchOut, the largest professional network on Facebook. I am responsible for BranchOut’s social media, voice and brand…not to mention the consumption of all the M&M’s out of the trail mix in the kitchen.

3. What’s your strategy for the content you produce and share on social media?

I care about what you are saying why? Being a Community Manager means having a pulse on the goals and needs of your users at all times. Before producing any content, I think to myself, why does anyone care? How am I making a user’s experience not only easier, but also more valuable? BranchOut is only sixteen-ish months old, so I am literally paving a brand new path. My content strategy ranges from being very basic and instructional to innovative contests and brand-centric posts.

Share everything! Okay fine, user digression is advised. People love to see the inside scoop at your company and get a glimpse of the people who build cool products. Make sure that your tweets, posts, and pictures stand “on brand” and engage both your users and the experts in your field by providing fresh and relevant content! I have found that our users and community really dig metrics, so I try and incorporate some stats in my messaging.

For my own personal brand, I like to include a bit of my work life because I spend more time at work than I do doing anything else and frankly, I love my job and company and take pride in helping to build my company’s success.

I am very active on most social media platforms and leverage my presence by commenting and sharing when I find something particularly awesome or unique that I think my network will also enjoy leaning about. I am hyper-aware of how over-saturated the space is, and oftentimes find myself putting a Hillman-esque spin on an idea.

4. What advice do you have for someone who wants to take their social media influence and presence to the next level?

Get active! Get curious! Get creative! Try new things and see what works for you and your own personal style. Practice building a brand on your own personal accounts rather than experimenting on a corporate account.

Find people and brands that you think are interesting and see what they are all about by observing how they share, interact and brand themselves. What works? What doesn’t? I enjoy engaging in Twitter chats, documenting my life via pictures and learning about new music. My interests are genuine and consistent, so my insights reflect my own understanding of the world around me.

See Alison in action by following @AliHillman on Twitter!

Posted in klout stars | 12 Comments »

Find Your Klout

Friday, December 9th, 2011

At Klout, we love data and as Dave Mariani, Klout’s VP of Engineering, stated in his latest blog post, we’ve got lots of it! Klout currently uses Hadoop to crunch large volumes of data but what do we do with that data? You already know about the Klout score, but I want to talk about a new feature I’m extremely excited about — search!

Problem at Hand
I just want to start off by saying, search is hard! Yet, the requirements were pretty simple: we needed to create a robust solution that would allow us to search across all scored Klout users. Did I mention it had to be fast? Everyone likes to go fast! The problem is that 100 Million People have Klout (and that was this past September—an eternity in Social Media time) which means our search solution had to scale, scale horizontally.

So how did we accomplish that?

Share Nothing and Don’t Block
We use Node.js in our front end to help scale to thousands of concurrent users. We follow the same philosophy in our backend for search. Given the size of our dataset and its substantial growth rate, we needed to choose a search solution which would allow us to scale horizontally; On the application side we wanted to have a stateless Web layer, not only for performance, but also for manageability. So share nothing and block as little as possible!

Let’s Play! and be “cool, bonsai cool”
The technology stack chosen to address the problem was ElasticSearch and the Play! Framework. Why did we choose that stack? At Klout, we like to choose the right tool for the job, regardless of the platform it runs under or the company that’s behind it. We chose ElasticSearch and Play! because both of these were designed to use fast, non-blocking IO, both of these provide powerful infrastructure, and both of these were designed to be easy to extend. These tools help us build powerful search now, and continue improving search to give you more relevant results.

ElasticSearch is a powerful, scalable and distributed search solution built on strong foundations like JBoss Netty and Apache Lucene. ElasticSearch builds off of Apache Lucene, a personal favorite of mine, created by Doug Cutting. Doug Cutting has had a huge impact on many tools we use at Klout; He is also the creator of Hadoop (and Nutch for that matter!). Lucene is a search library—more than 10 years old—that provides powerful search capabilities such as relevancy ranking, fuzzy matching, wildcard, proximity operators, fielded searching, spell-checking, multi-lingual and all that jazz—all while still being completely portable since it’s a JVM-based solution; most important, it’s blazing fast!

ElasticSearch uses JBoss Netty as its network library for async/non-blocking IO. In a traditional blocking IO model, performing a search across multiple shards would be extremely expensive. We could retrieve results serially, meaning that our search would become slower as our data size increased, or execute results in parallel threads, which would require ever increasing processing resources. Netty allows ElasticSearch to retrieve results from multiple search nodes in parallel; there are no blocking threads waiting for it to finish.

We used Play! Framework for the Web layer, which also uses JBoss Netty as its network library. Why? To find out more about this great framework, watch my Dreamforce presentation from this past September here in San Francisco, CA: “Introducing Play! Framework: Painless Java and Scala Web Applications”. Just recently, Play! has joined Typesafe, the creators of Scala, as an official part of its Scala-based technology stack and providers of the Web solution for Scala.

Akka is also part of Typesafe’s stack and provides an event-driven and self-healing concurrency platform based on an Erlang-style, actor-based concurrency model for the JVM. In summary, Akka helps Klout’s search go fast! We have actors for the different searches we support, messages are dispatched to their mailboxes as Play’s controller actions are invoked. Akka actors, which are pretty similar to Scala actors, allow us to effortlessly execute parallel searches to minimize overall response time to provide our users the best experience possible.

If you are down to Play! come join us and follow us on Twitter as @_felipera and @dwollen.

Happy Searching!

Posted in engineering | 13 Comments »