The other day I reviewed Philip Sheldrake’s book on the Business of Influence, but I didn’t realize I’d use something I just finished reading as a formation for a position in this space, so soon.   A chance conversation led to an interesting thought about what is missing this iteration of existing influencer platforms I have looked at and reviewed lately (Klout/PeerIndex/TRAACKR/mPACT/SocMetrics/et all, etc) and probably a half dozen or more that I haven’t reviewed or don’t yet know of.

Philip said that we should devote as much time to being influenced as who we’re trying to influence.  My recent speaking engagements here and in London brought back feedback from some of the platforms (I’ll leave them unnamed) that went like this…….

Customer wants a customized Influencer list for Blue Widgets, writes a keyword query finding Blue Widget influecers and gets back a list that has irrelevant names of people on it that the customer knows for sure should not be on the list.

Customer gets annoyed at Influencer Platform and decides to pass on trying it out – can’t tell the difference between what he or she is getting here vs. dozen others, that all produce varied lists, with little overlap.

The problem, as I see it, is there is no where in these platforms to put yourself in, as the focal point.    How can you get a customized list of influencers for “you” if there is not way to put “you” into the platform?

Suppose your wanted to sort a list by influential by what is important to you, or a particular stakeholder/group within a brand (or, as Sheldrake puts it – be influenced by the Influencer, though he meant it in an entirely different way that I’m using it), the other polarity – how can you do it with just a keyword query that just focuses on the attributes of the influential, without considering your own preferences and bias?

I was speaking to a friend the other day, where we discussed this problem of differentiation in a field where many types of industries need influential lists, but they all have their own bias and requirements – just putting in series of keywords will identify a list of people who are using those words prominently and sort them by a propriety algorithm, but is that enough?

Probably not – especially as there is no clear way to add the customer’s own profile, needs and wants, in the algorithm, which would personalize the list.  This is much like putting out own “location” in a mapping program, along with our destination, which then gives us a route to get there.

I will have more to say about this in a few weeks, as I’d like to consider how to illustrate this gap, with a few examples, which I will stay away from tonight.

But I will leave you with this thought – when we are traveling to a location, and we what to know how to get there – don’t we need to put in our location, first?

Was meaning to write this post about Klout but didn’t have the time and have been penning it for a few days – and

.. I suppose if a person were to go  on vacation, or just “live” off the Web for a few days, like taking a trip to Hawaii, and actually relaxing, then their Klout score would go down.   Having said that – I think Klout is doing some things right, perhaps taking a cue from Empire Avenue (where I’m told many of the ideas Klout is implementing are coming from – can’t really speak to that since I don’t go on Empire Avenue much, maybe I should).

This sets up an interesting dynamic where having a life off the Web, perhaps off of Twitter, which is kinda what “life” is really all about – actually lowers your “engagement” scores.  Perhaps, Klout ought to let people notify them when going off for a vacation, or getting sick, because those things will affect your Klout Score negatively, yet they are a real part of life, and people do take vacations, and they do get sick – or need to withdraw, from time to time, yet should not be penalized for it.

I’m not so much speaking about the algorithms Klout uses which are easily gamed, but more about what surrounds them.  I don’t take Klout seriously for the Influence part yet (though they are getting better), but I do like the idea that people can actually use Influence as a currency – and actually get something for it (more often than not, it’s a bag of potato chips, or something like that… probably there’s a bit of horse trading in the back ground arranging perks, associating perks with accounts, and so on).  To be honest with you – none of the perks really do anything for me – though I suppose if I were really hungry, and had only a few bucks in my pocket, I could use my Klout score to get a  sandwich – ha!   However, every time I look at the Perks – they all seem to be “filled” … so I’m yet to get any perks – and they aren’t the one’s I’d pick… but I digress.

First thing Klout is doing right is sending me emails constantly, when there is a change in my account  – they don’t why most of the time, but they make it so I have to go and login (visit) Klout.com) which counts as a new visit (unless I was there in the last half hour, via Web Analytics, which is almost never going to be the case).   I suppose they could just tell me what the notifications are in the email – so I could decide if I want to visit Klout or not, but they don’t tell me – so if I really want to know I have to visit the site.

As a result, as far as I can tell from Compete.com (which doesn’t yet have July 2011 data) Klout.com and Perks.Klout.com are way up.  Of course, all of that is being generated by the marketing programs Klout is doing – so it’s more than anything else, a reflection on it, I see it more like direct response – you put out energy, and hopefully, get responses – it’s not a measure people like or agree with anything – and it’s not clear what notifications or perks one is actually getting until you go and look.

I suppose the first to parts of the following screen shot are addictive – we don’t know what the FourSquare output is going to look like yet – since there’s nothing yet to do but link your account, but the idea of giving Klout points is intriguing.  It’s a double edge sword, no doubt, as your Klout Score is going to be more about a popularity contest with who you know, and not so much what your doing on Twitter and Facebook.  On the other hand, you can argue that by giving people scores – Klout has made a more “human” approach that actually compensates for the deficiencies of their algorithm  – by letting people tell Klout who is influential to them.  That’s no different, in a way than Google + allowing people to vote on sites they like, or Facebook allowing people to “like” a page.

If Google and Foursquare can do it – why can’t Klout?  Or, for that fact, the other influencer platforms?

I would say the last part, who I influence and who influences me, has gotten somewhat better than before – but I can’t say I have much confidence in it yet.  However, Klout continues to get better with it’s topics of influence – and I do feel that is important and worth mentioning:

I think being influential for “edelman” might be a stretch – though I did write about TweetLevel 2.0 recently, which they put out, so maybe it’s right on.

I think the thing that I both like and dislike about Klout the most, is the change in the classification of what type of person I am – every time I look, it looks like I’m something else than the last time – the last few times I looked it said I was a “Broadcaster” while before that it said I was a Specialist, and before that, something else.

I suppose if you want to look at Klout as an oracle, like the I-Ching, or a Tarot Card deck – what you get in every reading is going to be somewhat different – and while I like and believe we are always changing, and that we can be a different people every day, or every couple of weeks – I find it somewhat stretching it that  I can be a Specialist one day, and a Broadcaster then next – though in reality, that’s true – it could be that does describe me.   The larger question is weather there is any value in classifying people in such a variable way, week to week, or month to month.

And look, it could be that some people’s characterization doesn’t change much – and others, such as myself are in a “cusp” position where we can change what Klout calls us, based on a few tweets and retweets, here and there.

And certainly, some of the things that Radian6 is doing with Klout, by passing on the Classification type to a topic profile is interesting – but if we don’t have a handle in what that classification really means, or what you can do with it once you have it – then why bother?

I mean, it’s no surprise that at SxSW, the majority of profiles were of Specialists and Neworkers – and by digging down you can see who the accounts are who talked or were at SxSW and which classification of Klout they were.

Sure enough, most of the “Broadcasters” was a single account, @SxSW itself.

So in short – a lot of good things to say about Klout because they are getting be involved in a way that is somewhat novel – people can actually trade in on influence, and can give influence to each other.

On the other hand, we have to then look at the next question … To What End?

Can I go and buy a new car based on my Klout Score?  No.  Can I get a bag of Frito Lays – maybe, but it’ll probably take 6 weeks for it show up in my my mail.   Can I do anything much actionable with the data I get from Klout?   Yes and No – I can find out who is influential for what they are talking about recently, and I have mentioned that in my book.

Except, right now, I can’t search by topics, which I could do before.   Nevertheless, to begin to make Influence a currency is a move forward – something I think which distinguishes Klout from the other influencer platforms.  If Influence is a currency of sorts- Klout lets you trade it – and that is actually closer to the way markets work – its how we buy things  – it’s how commerce works.    Most social media isn’t able to be translated into a currency – we know that the “currency” exists – but its’ not formalized, while Klout has taken a step in that direction – perhaps the right step, at least in this context.

Been  playing with the new mPACT influencer platform since late last week -  the new offering reminds me a lot  of Compete.com with its free offering for traffic analysis when it first came out several years back (and now a standard way of measuring traffic for many sites and businesses).

I think the same could be said for  mPACT/mBLAST and its new offering that is being announced today, which is also integrated with Facebook and Twitter and includes a way for an individual to measure their own influence against a keyword or set of keywords.

MPACT already offers a paid version of the Influence platform (which I have been using for several months) but this is the first time something like this, a full-blown influencers analysis freemium offering, has been open to the public with no strings attached.

Here’s a short analysis comparing mPACT, TRAACKR and KLOUT, which all report on online influence; mPACT’s real competition is from TRAACKR, I feel, not so much KLOUT – but here goes:

Note: Recent announcements by TRAACKR and Klout have modified some of the rows of this table, above which was prepared over the weekend – specifically, TRAACKR now, as of today, tracks an influencer over time and Klout tracks influence around specific subjects (but not any subject – you still have to choose from a list Klout presents to you).

According to CEO Gary Lee  today’s new offering allows anyone to  find influential voices on a single keyword or series of keywords — it is not a full Boolean search string like (Pro) version (which I have access to and have played with for the last 3-4 months).  People can try mPACT freemium and get used to finding influential voices and then graduate to the paid version if they want more information ( the full product allows for far more complicated search strings, reports, tabs / saved searches, and Influence Map, tracking Influencers over time and an Opportunities database of listings).

The new Freemium mPACT platform is meant to  go head-head with the public version of Klout and offer a true (free) alternative to Klout for determining influence on any subject in the market. While Klout does provide a readout of people who are influential in certain subjects, you can’t just search on whatever you want though Klout has often had as much relevance as mood ring in its results  though the results for Social Media Analytics look decent (see below):

It’s a second generation version of influencer scoring that allows people to see their own influence — but by topics they enter as well as see the top-10 voices.  Meanwhile, the new platform  provides an entry for the more versatile paid platform  for marketing professionals who need to really see more detailed influence reports.

Below is a search done in mPACT free on “Social Media Analytics”:

In the upper right part of this image, above, my influence within the topic of “social media analytics” is considered by mPACT to be 99 – this value can also be tweeted for shared on Facebook via the buttons immediately below the score;  as is known, an individual may be highly influential on Topic A and non-influential on Topic B.

CEO Gary Lee thinks this way of measuring influence is very different from  Klout’s  generic score .  In fact, there is a real need for people to measure their own influence, look at their own word cloud, etc.

mPACT differs from Klout in that it does NOT believe a generic score does anything other than measure your influence which is almost  meaningless unless it is applied to a particular subject.

TRAACKR has an advantage to mPACT and Klout in one very important way – you can add any outlet and any person to a TRAACKR list and it will be ranked along with whatever else TRAACKR discovers -  this has a use for PR firms that often have a list of PR-Influencers that are not showing up on a digital influencer list – TRAACKR allows you to add anyone to that list and reconcile, to some extent two very disparate ideas of influence that exist in marketing – online influence vs. offline influence (see below).

TRAACKR also has released new features today that I have asked for directly – as I interface directly with the development and marketing teams at mPACT/mBLAST and TRAACKR, as well as many other social media and search platforms; I am often in a position to suggest new features platforms I care about  should have.

Among the new features are some improvements for campaign tracking which I think some MARCOM firms will find very useful such as filtering a campaign by a specific tag or set of individuals (see below) that were triggered by specific suggestions I gave the TRAACKR development team – and they delivered:

Filter Monitor by Individual

TRAACKR  added the ability to filter the Monitor a specific individual.  By clicking on any individual influencer’s name in the Monitor, you will generate a “personalized” Monitor for that person.

These two filtering options give you much more flexibility when analyzing the content generated by your influencers.  We have more Monitoring enhancements coming soon as well!

It’s nice to see the direct influence I’ve had…. on platforms.  My real reason for doing this (be an advisor) is … I want a better set of platforms for Analysts such as myself to work with …  having the ear of interested parties at TRAACKR and mPACT has made that possible …. I’m not as close with people at Klout such as CEO Joe Fernandez, but was present at the New York Tech Meetup 3  years ago when Klout first came on the scene and was one of the first users.

All three influencer platforms are mentioned and detailed in my Social Media Analytics book that is going to press in August.

Getting back to Klout – take a look what Klout does with Seth Godin’s profile – Seth Godin does not tweet much – he’s not active on Twitter from what I can gather – yet no one could say that Seth is not an influencer in Marketing or PR – but Seth Godin will not show up in many influencer lists that look at Twitter because he is not participating in that channel much.  Let’s face it – Seth Godin doesn’t need to Tweet – he has plenty of influence via his Blog – but Klout isn’t really looking at Blogs – it’s looking at Twitter and to some extent, Facebook.  That is the issue with Digital platforms – they measure digital activity – but if your activity isn’t digital, or there is no direct path to your actions and digital, they will usually fail to detect important signals they we, as users of these platforms, ordinary expect to find.

When Seth Godin is being reported, last I looked, he was ranked with a Klout Score of 46.  Sometimes known influencers just fail to show up on anyone’s online influence list.  So much for digital influence – well …. nothing is perfect, and as I wrote last week B2B influence is a hard nut to crack anyway since many of the true influencers are “offline” so that neither mPACT, TRAACKR or Klout will pick them up – at least, not today.

But the platforms are improving constantly – but within a few years – who knows?   Maybe what we need is for everyone to be online and participating in all the social media channels – but for all the hype out there that sounds like online social media is the “in thing” – the truth is – we’re far, far away from that.

But then again, if you need a quick topic relevent influencers List – mPACT’s new free offering is hard, hard to beat.

Finally, if you need a platform that is more full spectrum (forums, YouTube, etc) you’ll find it difficult to get all you want from TRAACKR, mPACT or Klout – and that’s an issue when looking at closed communities such as message boards where one needs to be a member and authenticate with a login.   In other cases, we’re looking at Forums that simply may not have RSS feeds set up (perhaps by design) – ratings sites such as Amazon don’t make it very easy to crawl them, neither does TripAdvisor, yet there are influentials there, and Influential conversations that really have to be mined by individuals, for the most part, today.     Then again, anything can be had if one is willing to put enough effort into it – but it will cost a lot to mine Forums, YouTube or select closed communities and one will really have to step back and decide if the effort taken or methodology applied is worth it.

People looking for quick Influencer lists, however, should have a lot to chew on today with mPACT Freemium, TRAACKR’s improvements and Klout’s recent upgrade to Klout.2.0 (which improved their topic analysis capabilities for influencers).