Klout is the Standard for Influence

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Today is National Wear Red Day and Klout has teamed up with the American Heart Association to raise awareness for heart disease. Be one of the first to see the Director’s Cut of “Just a Little Heart Attack,” a short film directed by Emmy-nominated Elizabeth Banks. The film is inspired by real-life stories of women affected by heart disease.

The first 5000 influencers to opt-in will receive a free Red Dress lapel pin!

Use your Klout for good and join us in the #GoRed movement today. Visit GoRedForWomen.org to learn more and spread the word!

How do you use your Klout for good?

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#KloutChat is a regular event on the first Wednesday of every month.

This month’s KloutChat is tomorrow afternoon! We will be discussing networks integrated into Klout.

#KloutChat

Wednesday, February 1st at 3PM PST / 6PM EST

Join us on Stanzr at stanzr.com/kloutchat

Tomorrow’s chat will take place on Stanzr! It’s a great new way to organize chats and also allows you to join whether you’re on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. All you have to do is go to http://stanzr.com/kloutchat at 3PM PT, sign in on the upper left and join the conversation. You can also check it out now to see the questions we have planned for the chat.

We’re looking forward to a great conversation! Remember, if your question is specific to your account it’s best to go to support.klout.com and get it answered there. Thanks!

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We’re happy to announce that we’re helping Airbnb celebrate their UK launch with a Klout Perk! Airbnb is offering 20,000 influencers in the UK a chance to get away with £50 off. Stay at a studio in Spain for the weekend or relax at a villa in Tuscany for a week. With over 100,000 holiday rentals in over 19,000 cities, Airbnb has something for you.

Airbnb has seen incredible international growth and is rising to meet the global demand by opening several new offices in Europe. Even if you can’t get away, you can still join the celebration by attending the opening of Airbnb’s London office on February 2nd, 2012.

Klout Perks is making major strides on the international stage. We’re very excited about launching our first major UK Perk and we look forward to bringing more exclusive experiences and products to our Klout users around the world.

Where are you from? What Klout Perks would you like to see?

Update: If you are eligible for this Perk and see “You are not eligible,” please email us at help@klout.com and put “Airbnb Perk” in the subject. We apologize for the inconvenience.

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Everyone makes lists. Whether it’s to keep track of your daily to-dos or remember what groceries to buy, lists keep us organized and efficient. We even use lists to motivate us to live it up and accomplish our goals before we kick the proverbial bucket. But what about Klout Lists? Klout lists are a great way to discover and interact with people in your influence network. Here are 3 ways Klout lists can help you:

1. Interact with the people you care about. We have lots of connections in the social media space, but sometimes you just want to check up on your closest friends. Are you looking to connect with your old college buddies? You might create a list called “UC Berkeley” so you can easily filter your 10 friends you spent those late nights studying in the stacks with to give them +K in “Berkeley” during the Big Game (Go Bears!).

2. Discover new users and grow your network. Klout makes it easier to connect with new people on social media by helping you find influencers in your areas of interest. For example, you can find video game influencers to talk about the latest game releases or tips using our topic pages. Then create a “Gamers” list so you can remember to check out those users on Twitter, explore influencers in their network, or drop in to give a quick +K in Nintendo. You can even give kudos to people who have impacted you lately by sharing Klout lists. For example, Matt Hurst shared a Klout list of journalists on Twitter for #FollowFriday. Don’t forget to include the hashtag #ff or #FollowFriday!

For #FollowFriday, check out my list of journos on Twitter, like @Learmonth, @Alexia, @lizgannes, and @film_girl! #FF klout.com/MattHurst/list…

— Matthew Hurst (@MattHurst) January 20, 2012

3. See how you compare with your peers. You can learn how to use social media more effectively by watching what your friends are doing. Maybe your boss asks you to create a Klout competition to get your team to be more active in social media. Create a “Klout Krushers” list to easily track participants and it will automatically be ranked by Klout Score. Who knows? Maybe the first employee who raises their Klout score by 20 points gets an awesome vacation to Hawaii. Oh wait, it looks like Bob is currently in the lead…

Do you use Klout lists? What do you use them for?

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With over 3,500 partners and Klout integrations out there, it’d be impossible to catalog all of the innovative uses of Klout data across the Internet, let alone all of the fun ones. We’re at a very interesting time in the API space: there’s an amazing amount of data and services out there, and the software development and startup communities are taking notice. While not exactly a new trend, hackathons have been evolving over the last year and a half. Rather than just being a one-off “hack” event, legitimate companies are launching based on the vision of founders and developers at events like AngelHack and StartupWeekend.

This quarter we plan to highlight the cool integrations we see from events like these, as well as more established companies doing something cool. So without further ado:

BitGym's Tron Game

AngelHack was held back in December. An extremely impressive event, had a lot of promise in its format and what it was offering to developers, investors, and partners alike. While the Klout Prize went to HireFluence, BitGym was among the winners for the overall event, with their Tron-influenced game that utilized Klout alongside their fitness game platform. Klout is used to determine the color of your lightcycle trail, as well as the size of your avatar. It’s a clever usage. I really look forward to AngelHack 2.0, being held on March 3rd. Video: BitGym at AngelHack 2011

MarketMeSuite

MarketMeSuite is a staunch supporter of influence metrics and Klout. With their upcoming new release, they’ve reinvented their product as an Inbox for social media, taking the mail management metaphor to a satisfying conclusion: you have multicolored flags you can flag tweets, FB posts, and LinkedIn data with. Content is presented as messages. A user’s Klout score is displayed on a user’s profile when looking at a message.

In the coming weeks and months we’re preparing for a number of new developer events, like Social Media Week, MusicHackDay, AngelHack 2.0, and, of course, SXSW.

What are some of your favorite Klout integrations? What would you like to see?

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#KloutChat is a regular event on the first Wednesday of every month.

This month’s KloutChat is tomorrow afternoon! We will be discussing Klout Perks and what you think about them.

#KloutChat

Wednesday, January 4th at 3PM PST / 6PM EST

Join us on Stanzr at stanzr.com/kloutchat

Tomorrow’s chat will take place on Stanzr! It’s a great new way to organize chats and also allows you to join whether you’re on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. All you have to do is go to http://stanzr.com/kloutchat at 3PM PT, sign in on the upper left and join the conversation. You can also check it out now to see the questions we have planned for the chat.

We’re looking forward to a great conversation! Remember, if your question is specific to your account it’s best to go to support.klout.com and get it answered there. Thanks!

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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!

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!)

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There has been a lot of conversation recently about Klout. As the CEO and Cofounder of Klout, I want to share my perspective publicly with you.

I get why Klout can rub people the wrong way. We are putting scores next to people and that can be initially off-putting. If you met anyone from the Klout team my hope would be for you to see that we are not elitist jerks but just a bunch of data nerds passionate about understanding the impact of every person online. We believe that every person who creates content online has influence on some topic, to some group of people. We want to help every person maximize their reach and influence and to be recognized for the impact they have.

Here I am sharing my vision nearly 3 years ago. We’ve come a long way since then, but the initial vision (first two minutes) is the same.

I started Klout in my bedroom almost four years ago while recovering from jaw surgery. During that time, I depended entirely on social media for communication. My goal was and is to create a system that recognizes people for the power of their voices on social media. I see Klout as a great equalizer for the normal person utilizing social media. Every day we are segmented by nearly every company we come into contact with. Usually this is based on how much money we spend; the level of service we receive is determined by the size of our wallets.

With social networks, I love that any person that has access to a phone can create an account, share their opinion with the world, and have an impact on their network. This value deserves to be recognized and I am proud of the work we are doing here at Klout to make that happen. To date, over 250,000 Klout Perks have been delivered to our community simply for being who they are online. These are real people getting real products of value and we look forward to continuing to help people understand, maximize and be rewarded for their influence.

The reality is that, while we’ve somehow become attached to celebrities like Justin Bieber, we don’t care about him. We may like his Christmas album, but Justin Bieber is not who Klout was created for. Everyone already knows the Biebs. We care about John Smith in Des Moines, IA who is passionate about music and wants to share his favorite bands with the world. We want to help John reach as many people as possible and hopefully unlock some really fun experiences for himself. This is only possible by continuously improving our service.

The idea of measuring influence is hugely ambitious and we have infinite work ahead of us. We know a lot of people think we’ll never get there but we love the challenge and you will never find a group more passionate about this mission than the Klout team.

As always, would love to hear any feedback you might have.

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Google+ is probably the fastest growing service of all time, and is certainly the most discussed launch of the year. Benefiting from Google’s unique distribution position, it’s already changing the landscape of social media, amassing 10M+ members in just a few weeks. It took Facebook two years and Twitter three years to reach the same milestone. Here at Klout, we’re taking a closer look at how it can help provide our users with a complete picture of their influence.

Our internal testing of Google+ has already demonstrated some exciting potential. Simple post-by-post privacy is undoubtedly a reason why so many feel more comfortable with who can access their content. We’ve also noticed people are sharing more, perhaps due to a more intuitive interface. A good example of this is the YouTube sharing integration, which allows users to search for videos, pick from their own uploads or enter a video’s URL.

That said, the most engaging element has emerged from the ability to post publicly (even to users who aren’t logged in) and receive responses in the form of in-line comments. Now users can follow and contribute to conversations in a way that wasn’t previously possible. Here’s a great example of the Gmail team using this feature to get suggestions on how they might integrate Google+.

We’ve already started work on ways to assess your influence on Google+, but we need Google to provide us with a system to access and identify your data. We’ve heard an API for Google+ is coming soon and we’ll be ready when it launches.

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Summertime between college years usually means one thing, internships. Although it’s the last time in your life where you get an actual summer break, you usually have to spend it the exact opposite way that you spent Summer in your earlier years: working hard.  It’s a scary and exciting time in anyone’s life. Most of us having been there before, we wanted to provide some lucky students with an amazing experience.

Klout is happy to introduce our first ever summer internship class. They come from various backgrounds and all bring something unique to the table. They will be working on nuclear fusion, global warming and the national debt…and hopefully their Klout scores too. Check out the all star team below.

1. Joe Marrama My name is Joe, and I study CS at Stanford. Besides crushing code, I like to surf, ski, play guitar, and skate.

2. Andrés Gómez Emilsson I’m half Mexican half Icelandic, studying Symbolic Systems. I love philosophy, friendship and maths. I’m grateful there’s more than nothing.

3. David Woo David is a junior at Stanford University majoring in computer science. He enjoys playing badminton and watching pro Starcraft.

4. Calvin Tuong I’m a rising junior at Stanford majoring in computer science. Born and raised in San Francisco, I enjoy basketball, pool, and bowling.

5. Sumit More A curious & dexterous S/W engineer with experience in multiple domains & platforms, with a will to enhance my programming skills further.

6. David Dolben Stanford Men’s Rower, Guitarist, Skier, and Computer Enthusiast. Likes to get things done.

7. Praveen Bommanna Praveen is a grad student at Stanford and loves a good adventure – which is why he’s at Klout this summer! He also enjoys outdoorsy stuff.

8. Samantha Lee Born and raised in the Bay Area, I am now a rising sophomore at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY. My life outside of making things look pretty on Photoshop includes: consuming large amounts of bubble milk tea, watching Miyazaki films, and fulfilling my passion for volunteer service.

9. Charlie Vuong Charlie Vuong was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. He currently attends Stanford University, and he is majoring in Computer Science.