Whats the Score?

The Ultimate Guide to Social Scoring

WHATS THE SCORE?
The Ultimate Guide to Social Scoring
Author: James Carson
@mrjamescarson
Whats the Score? The Ultimate Guide to Social Scoring
Introduction
If youre online, the chances are you use social
media. A survey by Pew Internet research in
February 2013 found that 67% of all US Internet
users regularly visited social media sites; for those
aged 18-29, this was closer to 90%.
Social media has become a ubiquitous
communication method for millennials. It is also
the catalyst for the explosion in human data;
more information has been produced in the last
two years than the rest of human history
combined, and 43% of the data gathered on
people comes from social media.
As you access sites like Facebook, Twitter and
Google+ you leave whats been called a digital
exhaust of unstructured personal data. From this,
your connections, your updates and your media
creation can be measured, whether or not you
consent.
While Facebook is often touted as a walled
garden due to the login, a vast amount of the
interactions are public. If you change your privacy
settings, you can only see a limited amount of
information about yourself through accessing the
Facebook Graph API, but many people choose to
share more information, or are ignorant of their
privacy settings. Unless you choose to have a
private account on Twitter, then everything you
share is public information. Think about all of
your Facebook statuses and tweets ever if youre
a daily user, thats a lot of information.
The growth in this kind of public data led to
people wanting to measure it, and this in turn led
to the creation of social scoring companies. Out
there in the big data swirl, for better or worse, you
are being assigned a number your digital
exhaust is being collected and analysed, and you
are given a score to determine how influential
you are. This score can then be passed onto other
companies who may want to interact with you.


In some respects, social scoring presents a
revolutionary business opportunity; marketers
have long sought the amplification of influencers
to help spread their most important messages.
When a publicly available score indicates this, the
time spent finding influential people decreases.
With a list of influencers willing to promote
products, marketers no longer have to rely as
much on advertising or traditional PR to get the
word out. Its a new era of the citizen influencer.



But social scoring is a topic that divides crowds.
There has been something of a public backlash
against measurements that people may not have
consented to, and the apparent arbitrariness of a
score for influence.
In his book Return on Influence: The Revolutionary
Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence
Marketing, Mark Schaefer writes, Im fascinated
by this intersection of unprecedented business
opportunity and extreme personal loathing. At
Fliptop, a user of publicly available social
information, were fascinated too, so we created
this guide to better explain the realities behind
social scoring.
650,000 shares on Facebook 650,000 shares on Facebook 650,000 shares on Facebook 650,000 shares on Facebook
100,000 tweets 100,000 tweets 100,000 tweets 100,000 tweets
every minute every minute every minute every minute
Im fascinated by this intersection
of unprecedented business
opportunity and extreme personal
loathing.
Mark Schaefer
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Whats the Score? The Ultimate Guide to Social Scoring
The Rise of Social Scoring
In 2007 Joe Fernandez had jaw surgery and his
jaw was wired shut even his mom couldnt
understand anything he said. The only way he
could communicate was through social media. As
he did so, he began to realise that this new
medium was measurable. As people conversed,
their interactions would be recorded. Word of
mouth was now scalable and the data was there
to measure it.
When he could talk again in 2008, he moved to
New York City and attempted to get his friends
interested in a business idea that matched his
realisation. But social media usage was not
ubiquitous at this time and Twitter was only
really getting started thus Joe couldnt
persuade his friends as to why it would be so
important. Unperturbed, he couldnt stop
thinking about the idea of measuring online
influence, so he hired a team in Singapore to
develop it. He publicly launched Klout in
December 2008, and the next month he went to
the New York tech meetup, nervous about
presenting what he had determined as the
standard for influence. But he received a warm
reception, and his company was born.
Klout aimed to take publicly available data from
social networks and combine this to create a
points score, which is a measurement of
influence. A year later in London, social analytics
company PeerIndex was born, while in 2011 Kred
was introduced by San Francisco based
PeopleBrowsr. There are numerous other services
that assign scores to social media activity, but
Klout, Kred and PeerIndex are generally seen as
the leading companies for measuring influence,
with Klout being the largest. Indeed, Klout
receives more hits to its API from third party
applications that all competitors combined.












In late 2007 I had jaw surgery that left
my jaw wired shut for three months.
During that time I had to completely
rely on Twitter and Facebook to
communicate. This experience really
changed the way looked at these
platforms.
The fact that I could instantly tell the
people who trusted me the most my
opinion on anything was amazing to
me. It was the realization that word of
mouth was scalable for the first time
and even more exciting was the fact
that the data was there to measure it. I
became obsessed with the idea of every
person understanding and being
recognized for their influence and
Klout was born.
Joe Fernandez talking to The Tokyo Times
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Whats the Score? The Ultimate Guide to Social Scoring
How is a Social Score Worked Out?
Social scoring systems gather data from a range
of different public data sources and use an
algorithm to determine the score. While no one
has resorted to completely giving away the secret
sauce, they are all quite transparent about how
the score is worked out.
PeerIndex explains on its help page:
The PeerIndex algorithm recognizes the speed
and quantity by which users spot, share (and thus
endorse) content on any specific topic. Our
content recommendation decisions can thus be
used as a proxy to measure our knowledge and
authority in a specific subject area. Your authority
on a subject is affirmed when the content you
share is approved - i.e. Retweeted, Facebook
Shared, +1'ed or commented on, by someone
else with authority on the subject.
Of course, since its an algorithm, the scores can
potentially be gamed, and if there are benefits to
gaining a better score, then some people will
always try to cheat it. There have been numerous
blog posts about how its possible to game Klout,
with examples of spambots being able to raise
scores simply for being active. However, many of
the posts pointing out flaws were published in
2011. Since then, the social scoring companies
have become much better at measuring
inauthentic behaviour, and carefully working
spambots out of the algorithm.


















Despite decades of research and
formulation of theories of influence
in sociology, marketing,
psychology, and political science,
there has been no tangible way to
measure this force rapidly,
inexpensively, and across a broad
population. Until now.
Mark Schaefer
Social influence data as it stands
today is based primarily on one
core metric: public social profiles
and footprints. So if you have your
Twitter account set to public, then
companies like Klout and Kred will
create you a profile and allocate
you a score, based on their
algorithm.
Danny Brown Beyond Social Scoring
The Situational Factor of Influence
The potential for gaming of scores
is something weve been aware of
from the very beginning and a lot of
the work in our algorithm has been
to identify true influence.
Azeem Azhar, CEO of PeerIndex
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Whats the Score? The Ultimate Guide to Social Scoring
What Factors Make Up a Klout Score?
Klout uses more than 400 signals from eight different networks to update the score. It states:
The majority of the signals used to calculate the Klout Score are derived from combinations of attributes,
such as the ratio of reactions you generate compared to the amount of content you share. For example,
generating 100 retweets from 10 tweets will contribute more to your Score than generating 100 retweets
from 1,000 tweets. We also consider factors such as how selective the people who interact with your content
are. The more a person likes and retweets in a given day, the less each of those individual interactions
contributes to another person's Score. Additionally, we value the engagement you drive from unique
individuals. One-hundred retweets from 100 different people contribute more to your Score than do 100
retweets from a single person.
In simple terms, Klout explains it to be:
You x Your Topics x How You Talk About
Them x How People React = Your Influence







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Whats the Score? The Ultimate Guide to Social Scoring


Why Do We Need Social Scoring?
As social media came of age during 2008-2009
and became a serious marketing channel, the
number of metrics that could be used exploded.
Traffic referrals, YouTube views, Twitter followers,
blog comments and Facebook Likes had all been
added to the metric soup.
As the number of possible metrics grew,
marketers became increasingly confused as to
how to tie this back to company Return on
Investment. This was not a direct response
channel like search or email, and tracking actual
transactions was difficult.
In an exasperated response, marketing strategist
Dave Berkowitz created a blog post entitled 100
ways to measure social media. There was clearly
no shortage metrics, but Berkowitzs post
paradoxically highlighted an embarrassment of
riches: there were now too many metrics and
marketers were progressively dumbfounded.
How does having more blog comments or
retweets translate into transactions? Its a tricky
question, and one that cant be answered in
general terms.
The Problem with
Connection Counts
Many marketers began to rely on social
connection counts as the key indicator of social
media performance particularly influence.
Indeed, in the Technorati 2013 Digital Influence
Report, Twitter Followers and Facebook Friends
still came out on top as the metric to measuring
influencer attributes. But theres a hitch its easy
to buy fake Twitter followers and other fake
connections.
A recent article by Kevin Ashton, called How to
become Internet famous for $68 illustrated the
fallacy of credibility and influence being
determined by having a large number of social
followers or connections. He simply set up a
Twitter profile for a Mexican motivational speaker
called Santiago Swallow, bought 90,000
followers from Fiverr.com for $50, set up a
Wikipedia page and a personal website while
playing a number of other tricks to increase this
characters fame. Only that Santiago Swallow
was entirely made up.
Serious Business
Faking social followings and YouTube viewing
counts is a serious business, which is not confined
to the realms of the entirely virtual. In the 2012
Presidential race, there was plenty of speculation
that Mitt Romneys campaign team buying fake
followers after sudden boosts in follower counts
although this could have been done by third
parties. President Obama was far from squeaky
clean either, with USA Today reporting that up to
70% of his 18.8 million followers (as of April 2012)
were fake.

Just type buy fake followers or youtube view
clickfarm into Google, and youll be presented
with a glut of websites offering services. Its easy
to buy fake followers, thus social following and
view counts are regularly disingenuous. For this
reason, for many marketers theyve come to be
seen as a fairly meaningless vanity metric when
viewed in isolation. If you have 100,000 followers
but nothing else much like Santiago Swallow
there is very little value given by the followers.
Using social connection counts as a Key
Performance Indicator is therefore somewhat of a
fallacy.
In our Marketers Time Saving
Survey, 22.7% of marketers
stated that they felt the difficulty in
quantifying ROI was the single
biggest problem with modern
marketing.
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Whats the Score? The Ultimate Guide to Social Scoring
Finding True Influence
Simply using the most available metric the
number of social connections is clearly
troublesome for determining influence. It is not
so much the number of connections that
someone has, as the number of connections their
connections have, and the propensity of those
connections to engage with other people and
amplify their message. Measuring this
amplification is a key factor in social scoring.

But how do you find these influential people?
Clicking around Twitter in an effort to find the
influential people around a particular topic can
be time consuming. Social scoring can often aid
this process; through passing on an influencer
score, marketers are able to find influencers to
connect with quickly.
Finding and engaging influencers has become a
particularly important facet of both social media
and organic search marketing (SEO). Should you
be able to gain kudos from influential people,
that kudos may be seen by a wide pool of other
influencers and potential customers which
presents value.





If John is followed by 50,000 people
who have no followers of their own, he is
in a world of hurt compared with Jane,
who is followed by 10,000 people who
are each followed by 1,000 others. The
guarantee of creating an opportunity to
see for 50,000 pales next to the
opportunity to see for 10 million. Even if
you assume that only a fraction of them
retweet say 10 percent youve still
reached 1.1 million.
Jim Sterne, Social Media Metrics
Its like the reverse of a sales funnel.
The traditional advertising approach
is to hit as many people as possible
and a few will funnel out at the
bottom. Were hitting a few key
influencers at the bottom and letting
them tell the story to pass it up
through the wider part of the funnel.
Joe Fernandez
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Whats the Score? The Ultimate Guide to Social Scoring


The Benefits of Social Scoring
Social scoring assigns an influence score to
people who are active on social media. You might
be thinking, So what? Its just another number.
But as the social scoring companies matured,
they came up with a number of methods for
monetization, particularly in their ability to match
people they deem to be influential with brands.
The primary method of monetization is through a
perks program, which both Klout and PeerIndex
run. Indeed PeerIndex has positioned itself as a
company that brings you exclusive rewards,
offers and discounts because brands want
influential people like you to try their products.
The homepage of the site offers money off for a
seemingly random collection of products, but
linking up a Facebook or Twitter account brings
much more relevant offers.

Klouts Perks program has existed since 2010, and
has enjoyed quite a high profile history. The perks
have often raised eyebrows in the marketing
world and made it into the tech press, while the
company has been able to partner with illustrious
names such as Chevrolet, Audi and Disney. Its
been tremendously successful for Klout, with CEO
Joe Fernandez claiming that 80% of companies
who sign up for a perks program come back for
more.




An Abridged History of Klout Perks























One of the most interesting prospects for
marketers is that for every person invited to a
campaign, around 30 pieces of content are
created. Influencers are targeted, approached,
and if they like the campaign, they will become
advocates through expressing their satisfaction
on social media.




Influencer marketing is about
targeting your promotional spend
at the people who have real
influence amongst their network of
contacts. Deals services like
Groupon give money off deals to all
and sundry, meaning that youre
largely going to end up targeting
low-value deal hunters.
Azeem Azhar
June 23 August 23, 2010
In 2010, Klout was asked by Virgin
America to find a small group of
influencers to spread the word about
their new Toronto route. Free
roundtrip flights to San Francisco or LA
were given to Klouts top 120 Twitter
influencers, who in turn tweeted 4,600
times about the new route.
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September 8-15, 2011
To coincide with New York Fashion
Week, Floridian Bal Harbour Shops ran
an exclusive event where entry was
given based on a Klout score of 40 or
higher. Klout also gained publicity by
ranking the Top 10 Fashion Week
Designers according to their score.
May 9
th
, 2012
Coinciding with the launch of Klout for
iPhone, the company gave visitors to
San Francisco International Airport
with a Klout score of 40 or higher
exclusive access to Cathay Pacific
Airways lounge, usually reserved for
business class passengers.
19
th
March, 2013
Klout introduced Klout for Business an
analytical dashboard for business
owners to measure their interactivity
with influencers alongside Klout Perks.
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Whats the Score? The Ultimate Guide to Social Scoring


Going Beyond the Perks
Perks appear to be just the beginning for social
scoring. The data captured by companies
involved could be used for a wider range of
measurement, and is likely to play an increasing
role in a data driven society.
Employment
According to an April 2012 survey by
Careerbuilder.com, 37% of employers will view a
candidates social media presence before an
interview. Social scoring gives a quick indication
for an employer around an interviewees online
influence something that is likely to become
more important in marketing jobs, as social
media expertise becomes an essential skill. Mark
Schaefers book Return on Influence begins with
the example of marketing professional Sam
Fiorella, who was rejected for a job for having an
apparently lowly Klout score of 45.
Personal Finance
A recent article in The Economist described how
lenders and small banks are experimenting using
consumers social media activity and score to
analyse their ability to repay loans. This is
becoming particularly important in African
countries, where credit bureaus are
underdeveloped. Apparently having professional
contacts on LinkedIn are especially revealing of
an applicants character and capacity to repay.
One start-up US lender, Movenbank has launched
CRED, a financial credibility score that uses a
combination of financial wellness, social media
metrics, and transactional insight, to assess a
lenders financial health. CRED uses the figure to
calculate your monthly fees and interest rates,
amongst others. The bank even offers members
rewards and incentives, including lower interest
rates, for promoting the company on social
networks and getting friends to sign up.
Its also very likely that your social media activity
will affect your insurance premiums. Not only can
insurers look at public social media feeds for
confirmation of your whereabouts or activities
during claim periods, but your social score may
be an indicator of personal credibility.

Social Currency
Evidently, social currency is already in operation
with the perks programs offered by social scoring
companies. Perks effectively pay recipients
through their benefits, whether they be in
experiences or trials of material goods.
Paywithatweet.com has been used
4.5 million
times to pay for goods
There are also a number of ways that you can pay
for goods through Twitter. With
paywithatweet.com, products can be sold for the
price of a tweet, and this has been a popular
exchange for selling documents on the web
indeed, this has occured 4.5 million times. Last
year, a Twitter activated vending machine created
PR for BOS Ice Tea, while Twitter itself has also
experimented with the concept.
A Twitter activated vending machine
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Whats the Score? The Ultimate Guide to Social Scoring
Search Engine Optimisation
For a long time, Googles algorithm has relied on
a system called PageRank, which ranks the value
of a web document according to its citations
(links) from the quality and quantity of other
documents. With the social web, citation has
become increasingly fragmented; people now
share documents via social media at a far greater
rate than websites link to each other.
Additionally, who created the document, and who
linked to it, has not been factored in. With the
launch of Google+, and the verification of
authorship, this seems very likely to change.
Indeed, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt
has hinted at Googles desire to use verified
profiles in order to rank search results.
In September 2012, Bing announced a
partnership to strengthen social search and
influence online, and more recently, it has been
announced that Klout Expert Answers will go to
the top of Bings search results. Much like Google,
Microsoft was watching as social media and web
search became increasingly merged. As citations
and shares from social profiles continues to grow,
the ability to rank these citations for a searcher
will become paramount. Social scoring offers a
valuable method for working this out.


How to Improve Your Social
Score
Since having a higher social score can lead to
perks, you may be wondering how you can
improve it and join the party. Its important to
stay active 5-7 days a week, keep your visibility
high across all social platforms, post engaging
content, and stay true to your personal brand.
Remember: its not about the number of friends
and followers you have; rather, its about your
ability to move content through an interested
network.
1. Plan and Build Your Network
Find a topic of interest (this could be related to
your job, or a hobby) and search for people
around that topic. Dont be afraid to connect with
people with low social connections or social
scores - it wont affect your personal influence,
and can be beneficial for you in the long run.
2. Create Meaningful Content
Creating compelling content that connects with
an audience is crucial. Provide links, new articles,
rich media (video, photos) coupled with tweets,
to create content that people can benefit from.
Stay on topic with content you want to be
associated with to increase your topical influence
score.
3. Start Conversations
Ask questions about your topics at high posting
periods. For instance, if youre interested in
particular TV shows, tweet about them when
theyre on air to drive engagement. Aim to get
retweets and drive conversations.
4. Engage with Influencers
Follow leaders in a chosen topic and jump into
conversations. Retweet, respond to questions,
but make sure you can answer back.
5. Link all Your Social Network Accounts
On Klout, you can link up to 8 social networks.
You might be most active on Facebook and
Twitter, but if youre on others, connecting them
can contribute to your score too.
Within search results, information
tied to verified online profiles will
be ranked higher than content
without such verification, which
will result in most users naturally
clicking on the top (verified)
results. The true cost of remaining
anonymous then, might be
irrelevance.
Eric Schmidt
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Whats the Score? The Ultimate Guide to Social Scoring
The Social Scoring Backlash
In the introduction we highlighted that social
scoring was a topic that polarised opinion. So
along with explaining the benefits of the systems,
its important that we also detail some of the
concerns.
You Cant Put a Score on
Influence
Perhaps the main objection around social scoring
is that you cant put a score on influence, and
that the numbers are simply meaningless. After
all, measuring a persons online interaction and
conversations is not the same as measuring their
ability to influence decisions. Offline influence is
not practically measurable in the same way, since
a much smaller proportion of offline
conversations are recorded. Consequently, there
have been some odd results; it wasnt until an
update to Klouts algorithm in April 2012 that
Barack Obama surpassed Justin Bieber on Klout.
Influential on {random topic}
People have also been critical of the seemingly
random assortment of topics that people might
be seen as influential on, which are mistakes in
interpretation by the algorithm. For instance,
Klout mentions one of my topics to be angel
investing a subject I have seldom discussed or
mentioned in a social media conversation. While
Klout does a pretty good job with my topics
SEO, social media and books Ive seen enough
tweets expressing confusion at topic selection. It
thinks Im knowledgeable about pizza, Ive seen a
social friend say but its really that theyve been
talking about ordering a pizza in the last couple
of days.
Algorithms can be gamed
Fundamentally, Klout is an algorithm, and while
Klout does occasionally make human based
tweaks to profiles and scores, a lot of people have
expressed doubts about having their personal
merit reduced to an online figure particularly
when they havent opted in. Were potentially left
with unsettling feeling: social scoring is a
combination of technology and personal brand
that directly correlates the success, failures or
even the lack of our online persona with reality.
Suddenly, personality is reduced down to a series
of calculations and algorithms, rather than true
human influence which is by its nature
extremely difficult to put a figure on.
Its also just as possible to game algorithms as
much as its possible to buy fake followers. Just
like SEO and Google, there are plenty of people
looking at ways to take shortcuts with social
scores to gain perks. Even buying fake followers
can potentially increase your social score.
Social Media Hierarchy
Furthermore, since scores are often heightened
by interaction with people who are more
influential, it creates a hierarchical system a
digital elite that get to go behind the velvet rope
and enjoy perks. By its nature, this seems rather
against the flat democratic structure of the web,
so lauded in books like The Cluetrain Manifesto. In
some respects, social scoring could be seen as an
antagonist to some of the webs key benefits.
Perhaps Klouts most difficult period came in
Autumn 2011. First of all an algorithm update hit
a number of Klout scores significantly, and people
took to Twitter using #OccupyKlout to protest
their vexation.
Privacy Concerns
Just a month later, the New York Times added to
this controversy by highlighting that Klout was
creating profiles for minors. Klout CEO Joe
Fernandez responded in a blog post stating the
We Value Your Privacy and quickly rolled
changes back, stating on the subject of privacy on
the social web: like Facebook, Google, and nearly
every other company in this space, we are
working hard to figure this out, but will not
always get everything right.
Of course Klout is aware of the cases against
social scoring and CEO Joe Fernandez has been
extremely active on social media himself to
counter them. Social scoring companies cannot
access private social media data unless you give
them direct access by signing up to their services.
If you are concerned about your online privacy,
then it is your social profile privacy settings,
rather than social scoring companies, that you
should be concerned with. Additionally, even if
your profile is public and you want to keep it so, it
is possible to opt out of Klout on their privacy
page.
.
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Social Scoring and the Future: The Age of Big Data
The 1:1 future holds immense implications for individual privacy, social
cohesiveness, and the alienation and fractionalization that could come from the
breakdown of mass media. It will change forever how we seek our information,
education, and entertainment, and how we pursue our happiness.
This quote was taken from Don Peppers and
Martha Rogers seminal work The One to One
Future: Bulding Relationships One Customer at a
Time, published in 1993. Twenty years on, it
seems as relevant today as it did then; we are on
the verge of another data revolution and the
future looks bigger this time.
Social scoring was born out of the availability of
public social media data. Were now entering the
age of Big Data and theres a clear opportunity
for social scoring to be an important player in a
new era.
For consumers, there are four main ingenuities
that will drive the amount of recorded data:
The Ubiquity of Smartphones:
In the Western World,
smartphone saturation is likely
to come in the next two years.
In 2014, mobile Internet traffic
will surpass desktop Internet
traffic. The applications used in
smartphone ubiquity will record
much more of our existence.

Augmented Reality: While its existed through
smart mobile devices for some time, augmented
reality has yet to tip largely because
smartphones are not great devices for creating it.
However, Google Glass will be released to the
general public in 2014 this is likely to be the
augmented reality game
changer. The amount
of recorded real world
data will increase as
such devices are
distributed.

The Internet of Things: Imagine a kettle that
told you it needed to be replaced because it was
below the efficiency recommended by an energy
companys database. Household objects will
slowly become integrated into the World Wide
Web and their actions measured and recorded.
The Quantified Self: There will be more and
more applications that allow us to measure
ourselves, whether that be in our work life
productivity, or in our physical prowess. To some
degree, the quantified self already exists with
applications like Nike+ and Fuel Band, but the
number of possible data points will likely
explode.



Data production is estimated
to be 44 times higher in 2020
than it was in 2009
What were facing is a data mountain such a
tidal force of measurement that it will take some
serious algorithms to make sense of it all.
Social scoring will likely adapt as more data
points become available. For instance, with the
Internet of Things, Augmented Reality and
Quantified Self, it will occur that far more
activities which we now consider offline will be
recorded. Thus what is interpreted to be real
world influence can also be better explored.
We are just at the beginning. Companies who
have already been exploring social influence are
well positioned to make sense of the data
mountain. Having crunched a wide range of
factors to come up with numbers for influence,
they will look for new ways to interpret the new
influx of data points whether it to be to
contribute to the social scoring eco-systems or
new ventures.
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Whats the Score? The Ultimate Guide to Social Scoring


References and Citations
Social Media
Pew Internet: Social Networking
Filtering the digital exhaust by Laura Hazard Owen on Gigaom
Getting Started: The Graph API
How Klout Was Started
Where did Joe Fernandez go in Singapore to build Klout? on Quora
Founder Stories: Joe Fernandez of Klout by Ejovi Newere on The Tokyo Times
The Remarkable Story of How Klout Was Founded by Mashable Video
How Social Scoring Works
How is my PeerIndex calculated?
The Klout Score How it Works
Beyond Social Scoring The Situational Factor of Influence by Danny Brown
Here is How You Can Game Klout by Yousaf Sekander on Rocket Mill
Problems with Social Media Measurement
100 Ways to Measure Social Media by David Berkowitz on Marketers Studio
How to become Internet famous for $68 by Kevin Ashton on Quartz
Mitt Romneys Fake Twitter Follower Problem by Will Oremus
Obama has millions of fake Twitter followers by David Jackson on USA Today
Which Celebs Have Been Buying Fake Followers? by Adi Gaskell on Technorati
Fake YouTube Views Cut By 2 Billion As Google Audits Record Companies Video Channels on Huffington
Post
How to use social proof to increase conversions by Blair Keen on Econsultancy
Q&A: PeerIndex CEO Azeem Azhar by Vikki Chowney on Econsultancy
Klout Perks
Klout for Business
Cathay Pacific Opens SFO Lounge to Klout Users by Don Hoang on The Official Klout Blog
You must have a Klout score of 40 or more to get into this Fashions Night Out party by Sherilynn Macale
on The New Web
Top 10 Fashion Week Designers by Lan Nguyen on The Official Klout Blog
Spotlight on Klout Perks: Virgin America Campaign by Megan Berry on The Official Klout Blog
Improving Your Social Score
5 tips on how to improve your Klout score by Ayelet Noff on Social Media.biz
How to Improve Your Klout Score by Kayla Maratty on Digital Investments
7 Surefire Ways to Increase Your Klout Score on Mashable
Social Scoring and Personal Finance
Employers are Scoping Out Candidates on Social Media But What Are They Finding? Infographic on
Careerbuilder.com
Stat Oil: Lenders are turning to social media to assess borrowers on The Economist
Movenbank Announces Completion of US$2.41m Seed Round Funding on PR Web
The Facebook mortgage. Could social data be used for credit scores? By Craig Le Grice on Econsultancy
Paywithatweet.com
Twitter-Activated Vending Machine Launched in South Africa by Mfonobong Nsehe on Forbes
NO CASH? Dont worry our vending machine dispenses goodies for a single Tweet.
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Whats the Score? The Ultimate Guide to Social Scoring
Social Scoring and SEO
From Authorship to Authority: Why Claiming Your Identity Matters #smxlondon by Gianluca Fiorelli on
State of Search
Ranking Authors in Social Media Systems Microsoft Patent
Identity as a search ranking factor by Peter Meinertzhagen on Econsultancy
Bing and Klout Partner to Strengthen Social Search and Online Influence on Bing Search Blog
Social Scoring and Privacy
When Sites Drag the Unwitting Across the Web by Somini Sengupta on New York Times
We Value Your Privacy by Joe Fernandez on the The Official Klout Blog
Klout and Your Privacy
Cited Books:
The One to One Future: Bulding Relationships One Customer at a Time by Don Peppers and Martha
Rogers
The Cluetrain Manifesto, various authors
Return On Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing by Mark
Schaefer
Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers by Seth Godin
Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment by Jim Sterne
Influential People on Twitter Relevant to Social Scoring:
Kevin Ashton Author of How to become Internet famous for $65
Mark Schaefer Author of Return on Influence
Joe Fernandez CEO of Klout
Azeem Azhar CEO of Peer Index
About the Author
James Carson is a digital marketing consultant based in London. He is a regular writer for Econsultancy, State
of Search and Smart Insights, as well as a regular speaker on digital marketing topics in the UK.
Follow him on Twitter
Find him on Google+









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