The Official Klout Blog

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At Klout we’re super serious about our mission to help all users understand and be recognized for their influence. That means everyone – including brands and high-profile individuals.

The challenge in helping larger-than-life brands is the massive volume of data they evoke online. That’s why intelligent insights are quickly becoming a key tool for helping brands understand how influencers impact audiences. Luckily, there are a number of very solid platforms to choose from.

A standout in this area is Crimson Hexagon, and I’m more than thrilled to announce that starting today, they are integrating Klout influence data into their popular ForSight platform.

Crimson Hexagon has one of the most intelligent and comprehensive analytics platforms in the business, and now, their data is even more relevant with the integration of Klout. Starting today, Klout Scores are a standard component of the insights that Crimson Hexagon offers its customers, with the goal of helping them better understand the impact of marketing and business programs with key individuals.

What’s also interesting for us at Klout is the entertainment industry’s quick adoption of Crimson Hexagon’s technology to help place a value on the social presence of celebrities and would-be celebrities. The entertainment industry is increasingly looking at Klout as a social resume for their clientele, using it as a factor in making casting and hiring decisions. The industry will now have that critical influence data baked into one of their favorite monitoring tools.

Crimson Hexagon President, Curt Bloom, is bullish about what the integration will do to bolster his clients’ effectiveness online. “It’s a daunting task to make day-to-day decisions about the best way to identify, understand and reach your most important customers. I’m very excited about the work we’re doing with Klout, and I know that over time, influence data will become one of the most-watched pieces of information driving those decisions.”

Check out Crimson Hexagon’s site for more information about what they do and how it works, and I’m sure you’ll get more insight into why this partnership makes so much sense.

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Two weeks ago I wrote a blog post that ranked the NBA teams by Klout Score, and showed how several of the famous on-court rivalries were playing out in social media as well. Afterwards, we received quite a few requests for the Klout Score standings of NBA players, including a request from former NBA all-star and current ESPN analyst Jamal Mashburn. Well alrighty then.

In my fan experience, there are two groups of people everyone follows closer than others throughout the year: the stars and the rookies. I figured I’d compile Klout Score lists for both. You can see the top 20 NBA players by Klout Score on Klout Pulse, and below is a shorter list of the top rookies, which is led by Anthony Davis of the New Orleans Hornets.

Rookies represent hope. Struggling teams see them as a ladder out of a hole. Good teams see them as a wall against challengers. With these rookies, you might have both, but you certainly have strong team advocates for fans to interact with.

Klout Score ties were broken by using the unrounded Scores of each player.

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What if there were a magic number which could predict who you’ll fall in love with? What if there were a number which could forecast who you will not find appealing? What if that number is right in front of everyone’s eyes—-and nobody realizes it reveals the mystery of attraction?

We think we’ve found the magic number. It’s your Klout Score.

We’re Tawkify—-the first matchmaking company to use Klout Scores as a measurement of allure and as a prediction of falling in love.

In a series of blind experiments (the thirty couples we matched were not told we were using their Klout Scores), we’ve found that Klout Scores will predict the brilliance or dullness of match—-and how quickly people will click.

Amorous fireworks caused by throwing two people together with similar Klout Scores can’t be predicted with perfect accuracy, of course, and a Klout Score will never replace our match-making instincts——-and sometimes, yes, a lawyer with the Klout Score of 50 will get on the phone with a beautiful graphic designer and speak for seven straight stupid minutes about himself and the beautiful graphic designer will call us afterward and shout “Never match me with a moron like that again!”

But we’ve found that Klout Scores are an authentic measurement of sophistication, wit, cultural savvy, and appeal—-a much truer and more trustworthy measurement than the typical on-line dating site bull-hockey-factors of height, weight, and income. And we think we know why. On dating sites 81% people fib about their weight, height and how much money they make. (See Stephanie Rosenbloom’s New York Times article, “Love and Lies”). You can’t lie about your Klout Score. Any Score over 19 indicates that other people find you attractive, sophisticated, and beguiling enough to be influenced by you—-and we’re proving your Score can be used to predict if a person we match you with will fall for you.

On Tawkify.com, you answer 11 questions, upload your photo and Kenneth Shaw and I will personally match you and set you up on the phone. See this New York Times article about it. And when we put two people together with high Klout Scores——WATCH OUT! It’s like a meeting of the gods.

E. Jean Carroll
Elle Magazine Advice Columnist
Co-CEO with Kenneth Shaw of Tawkify.com

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Got a passion for apps? In the world of mobile, word-of-mouth promotion makes a huge difference in the success of an app. Enter Appbackr, which now integrates the Klout Score to recognize the best app “backers” and reward you for promoting an app. The more you promote apps, the more rewards you receive.

How? Well, Appbackr allows you to buy apps at wholesale price and profit as the apps are sold in retail stores. Incorporating Klout means that Appbackr can gauge your ability to amplify content and leverage your social network. Based on your Score, Appbackr will give you discounts on the wholesale purchase of apps, which means more profit for you!

The first campaign to enable Klout integration is The Untouchables, a partnership with Paramount. People with a Klout score of 40 or above will receive a discount of 10% to 30%. The developer has to elect to make discounting available, so you won’t see the Klout Discount on all, or even most, apps.  And unless you have a Klout score of at least 40, the discounting won’t be visible to you.

We’re really excited to see this project come to fruition; Appbackr’s founders have an innovative viewpoint, which won them the distinguished PayPal X Developer’s Challenge Award.

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We’re seeing a really similar model of incentivized social sharing with a product called AddShoppers. AddShoppers’ concept is that if you’re influential with a strong network, and you’re promoting a product, you should receive a discount on that. The AddShoppers platform is embeddable into multiple eCommerce systems, and will offer a lot of interesting possibilities to reward influencers for what they’re already keen to do.

Interestingly, AddShoppers also registered a new verb for the Facebook Open Graph: “want.” Rather than “liking” a product, you can now like it, and maintain that list of desires.

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Chrome, Firefox, Opera

What’s the easiest way to see Klout scores next to your Twitter feed? The Klout Chrome, Firefox, and Opera plugins!

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Upcoming Events

3/3/2012 – 3/5/2012 – Klout is a huge sponsor of AngelHack. You hay have seen our recent perk with them. We’ll be offering a prize to the best startup that utilizes Klout. We’re really encouraging the power of Klout and curation. Some great stuff come out of it last September.

3/9/2012 – 3/12/2012 - Klout will be at SXSW. Come talk to our Developer Evangelist at Mashery’s Circus Mashimus.

3/15/2012 – Klout will have a booth and be presenting at Cloudstock. Join 3,000 developers at a 1-day cloud developer event on March 15 in San Francisco. Get hands-on with the latest platform and API innovations from Force.com and Heroku, and interact with experts from leading cloud service providers like Amazon, Spring, Box, GitHub, PhoneGap, and Twilio.

Past Events

MusicHackDay in San Francisco was on 2/10/2012. MusicHackDay curries developers interested in the music space together for a weekend to crank out new innovations in the curation, creation, distribution, and promotion of music. Some previous winners include the awesome Bohemian Rhapsichord, a sample instrument for making new music based on the classic song. In today’s social media driven world, musicians take a direct approach to their fan communities via Twitter and Facebook, and the efficiency of their communication can be measured and compared via Klout. Likewise, influential music bloggers could stand out via a directory based on their Klout and influential topics.

For MHD we made a Spotify app (Kloutrock) that finds the Twitter account for the artist you’re listening to, and provides some community information for them, including their Klout Score.

Where else would you like to see Klout used? Have an idea of your own? Hit the Klout Developer Portal.

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We’re excited to announce that our friends at Simply Measured are launching a sweet Klout integration today!

Simply Measured is a social media analytics tool that offers comprehensive Excel-to-web data and beautiful reporting options. Simply Measured aggregates data from all your social media channels so you can save time and make sense of it all quickly.

By leveraging Klout data, Simply Measured offers four new reports that provide insights about your audience and your own brand engagement. Who are the influencers driving the conversation around your brand? What do they care about? Are you reaching a broader base of consumers or a highly specialized group of people? How effective are you at reaching influencers?

All Simply Measured customers will have access to Klout reports for free along with the entire suite of social media analytics and reporting. If you’re new to Simply Measured, check out some of the samples below!

Klout Audience Analysis – @Nike Twitter
Klout Share of Influence – Top Car Brands
Klout Stream – Monitoring for #Oscar (one day)
Klout Influencer Engagement Report – @JetBlue Twitter
Klout Influencer Engagmenet Report – @MichelleObama Twitter

Simply Measured is even offering a free Klout Audience Report which will analyze your Twitter followers, rank them by Klout score, and measure topical influence.

For more information, visit simplymeasured.com or connect on Twitter at @simplymeasured.

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Yesterday, we witnessed the internet go on strike with companies like Google and Wikipedia blacking out their logos or entire websites in protest of the SOPA and PIPA bills in U.S. Congress. This coordinated effort resulted in a surge of engagement on SOPA-related content on Twitter. There were twice as many retweets about #sopa, #pipa, #blackoutsopa, #stopsopa, #blackout, and #factswithoutwikipedia yesterday than in the past 30 days combined.

Out of the clamor against SOPA, we found the most influential voices. Some you may recognize and some you won’t – others, you may find a bit surprising – but these ten influencers had the most reach and impact on Twitter.

Generated Using Data from Dec 1st, 2011 through 4pm PST Jan 18th 2012.

If you followed the Occupy Movement on Twitter you might have recognized groups such as @YourAnonNews and @TheNewDeal. Other familiar influencers in SOPA include Wikipedia and its co-founder Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia helped galvanize the anti-SOPA effort with a tweet heard round the world.

English Wikipedia is going dark January 18 in opposition to #SOPA #PIPA.ur1.ca/7j5s2 #wikipediablackout

— Wikipedia(@Wikipedia) January 17, 2012

Retweeted 7,897 times

Jimmy Wales took a more humorous approach to announcing the Wikipedia blackout on his personal Twitter.

Student warning!Do your homework early.Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday! #sopa

— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) January 16, 2012

Retweeted 11,776 times

In the midst of SOPA protest, some new influencers emerged on the scene. David Shares had a Klout score spike, going from 34 yesterday to 63 today after he burned up Twitter with a warning:

If #SOPA passes, there’ll be NO YouTube, Twitter, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook & Tumblr, #SOPAstrike today and End Piracy, Not Liberty!

— David Shares (@DavidShares) January 18, 2012

Retweeted 16,669 times

And possibly the most surprising of them all is YouPorn, asking the Internet to save porn by stopping SOPA.

Save Porn, #StopSOPA! Please RT.

— YouPorn (Jude) (@YouPorn) January 18, 2012

Retweeted 6,051 times

These ten influencers have had the most impact on the SOPA conversation recently and they are certainly ones to watch as the debate continues. Like many influencers in this movement, Klout believes in the power of free expression. #stopsopa

How have you been following the SOPA debate? Who has influenced you about SOPA and in what way?

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The @KloutAPI is wickedly simple to work with. Recently, @Mashery made it even more straightforward. With their I/O Docs page you can now interactively run queries against the API and view the response right from your browser.

Wait. What is an API? An API is an Applications Programming Interface.  It’s basically how software and web developers use a service like Klout to integrate it with their site.  Klout uses APIs from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the other networks we score to get data.  Some APIs allow you to get data, other APIs let you send data.  APIs are, in essence, a social contract between developers: I offer you this data, and you agree to these terms.

But, even the most intuitive APIs need excellent documentation, and we’re working to improve that.  Stay tuned over the next few months as we revise the portal.

In addition, we’re ramping up the public presence of our API’s potential by attending more conferences, hackathons, and driving inspiration across a multitude of use-cases. Recently, we attended the retail-API focused ReCommerce Day in Las Vegas, a hacakthon sponsored by @ZapposAPI, @Mashery, @Chargify, @EtsyAPI and others.

@rahims won the Klout Prize at ReCommerce Day for his Klout implementation in Today’s Threads (http://www.todaysthreads.com/), a LookBook/Polyvore-like app that lets a blogger identify clothes they’re wearing, and link them to be purchased by online vendors.  By using the True Reach score as part of a multiplier for affiliate commissions on fashion sales through Etsy, Zappos, and Sierra Trading Company, Rahim allowed bloggers to leverage their influence with retailers.  A short demo is available here: http://screencast.com/t/wiwe58f6GEv

This illustrates the simplicity and power of the Klout API.  Here’s how you can get started:

1. Register for a Developer account at: http://developer.klout.com
   

   Developer Registration

2. Use I/O Docs at http://developer.klout.com/iodocs to query Klout for a score.  All requests require a Twitter username. The API returns data in either JSON or XML.
3. Build something more robust in the language of your choice! There are a number of Klout API wrappers available on GitHub, some of which are available here: http://developer.klout.com/docs/read/Profile_Request
4. Tell us about what you made!  Follow @KloutAPI or @harmophone on Twitter.

What can you do with it? Well, given a Twitter username you can get their Klout Score, the other Klout scores like True Reach, the topics the user is influential on, and whom they influence, and whom they’re influenced by.  The implications are rather astounding: you can do some serious work with this data if you mash it up with other APIs.

If you have any questions about the Klout API, definitely visit the Developer Portal, or contact me at @harmophone.

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Online marketplace Addoway gave sellers the option to add Klout Scores in April of this year. Addoway believed Klout was an important component of trust and would help improve confidence in their network, but they didn’t realize by how much. They found “sellers that display their Klout score on Addoway are 5 times more likely to make a sale than sellers that don’t.”

The Klout Score is an indication of the trust your network puts in you and Addoway has shown that consumers value that trust when they’re looking to make a purchase. Fredrick Nijm, CEO of Addoway adds “Klout is valuable information because it indicates advocacy and that trusted relationships have been formed. Bringing value to eCommerce by indicating an individual’s social status will only lead to safer buying decisions, because shoppers can make more confident decisions.”

We’re excited to see Klout used more in purchasing decisions, as a valuable indicator of reputation and influence.