Why Klout and Peerindex fail to measure your online reputation

4025835162 cd1bf4cfc5 Why Klout and Peerindex fail to measure your online reputation
Image courtesy of nothingelseis (Flickr)

Over the festive period I’ve been engrossed in Clay Shirky’s book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age Why Klout and Peerindex fail to measure your online reputation (Amazon Affiliate link). One of the chapters has a great anecdote about McDonald’s wanting to find out how it could increase sales of it’s milkshakes. It hired researchers who diligently asked McDonald customers what characteristics they cared about from their milkshake.

However one researcher, Gerald Berstell, chose to look at things a little differently – he focused on the people buying the shakes not the shakes themselves. What Gerald uncovered was a set of morning milkshake commuters who would buy the milkshakes for the commute into work. By focusing on the actors engaged in an activity rather than the results of that activity, Gerald was able to uncover a pattern of behaviour that none of his fellow researchers picked up on.

This brings me on the topic of social graph tools such as Klout and Peerindex who use a raft of algorithms to gauge a person’s influence online. The main focus of these services is to apply a value on our online reputations. Can you really apply a value to some one’s online reputation so easily? In applying a value, does that not go against the opportunity to socially engage with one another?  This posting on Doc Searls weblog eloquently sums it up

What I write on this blog, what I tweet, what I share through LinkedIn and Facebook, is not for an “audience.” I have readers here. That’s who I write for. While my services, whatever they are, have value in the marketplace, and I get paid for some of them, that’s not why I write what I write—here, in Twitter or anywhere other than in private correspondence that concerns actual business.

If we follow the logic of Peerindex and Klout it’s users should ideally engage with those with a strong online authority. Their focus is not on content but on the transmission of that message. If only human behaviour were so black and white. Instead our online and offline patterns of communications should be seen as part of a broad spectrum, not a narrow subset of social network sites.

There’s no doubt that the measurement of social graphs will be a growing market over the next few years, but to go back to the analogy of the McDonald Milkshake example, are services such as Klout and Peerindex applying a narrow insight of our social media conversations? True insight is to look to answer a question from a different perspective. To that end Klout and Peerindex can only offer a narrow perspective by focusing on transmission and reach and not the value of content being conveyed.

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  • http://azeemazhar.com/ azeemazhar

    Hi Tom,
    There are two things to consider here:
    the first is the person’s need: that is do they want to understand in some aggregated or derived fashion the impact of some segment of their online activities. That is enumerate that beyond having some vague idea that they get engagement. For some people that will be important, for others it might not be.

    The second is the need of anyone dealing with that person – and can you find a simple way to snapshot and help understand the inflow of thousands of people we come across each year. Can you find some way of saving the five or six google searches you do to figure out who you are dealing with and how you need to respond?
    (Rather like credit ratings help you quickyl distinguish one bond from another)

    It’s early days but we value your feedback!

    A

  • http://twitter.com/eldonedw/status/21697961725530112 Eldon Edwards

    Why Klout and Peerindex fail to measure your online reputation http://lnkd.in/ajTUdG

  • Anonymous

    The key question for me, about services like Klout and PeerIndex, is What would they be measuring if we removed the contexts of advertising and popularity-mongering? I don’t know, but meanwhile I take Azeem’s considerations seriously, and believe the folks at both services are trying their best to come up with results that are both nuanced and free of weighting toward crass purposes.

    Still, we should ask: Without those crass purposes, where would tweeting be? I don’t know that, either. I do believe that less and less of what we see online fails to repose in the advertising economy, and I fear that this economy is becoming a giant bubble. We’ll see. But for now I think that’s the way to bet.

  • Tom E

    Hi Azeem,

    Thank you for your response, I really appreciate that.

    To my mind 2011 will be the year for services such as Peerindex and Klout to flourish. The exponential growth of social media channels and content being produced means that any tool or service that can sort the wheat from the chaff gets my vote.

    My position in the article is whether applying such a value to an individual’s online presence can truly articulate the breadth of their authority offline as well? To my mind, true engagement opportunities are those that facilitate interaction beyond the retweet. Peerindex and Klout offer the opportunity to provide direction, but it’s at the discretion of the user to take that engagement opportunity further.

    What I found really interesting about your response was your reference to the individual person using the service. Perhaps it’s better to ask the question what context that individual person is operating in? If they are part of an enterprise looking to reach a wider audience for their product or services they will have different needs to that of an individual looking to widen their social circle. I think therein lies the difference.

    Keep up the good work

    T

  • Tom E

    Thanks Doc for your insightful comments. On your last point there does seem to be an uneasy relationship with monetizing certain online channels that runs counter to the spirit of the internet as envisaged by Tim Berners-Lee. Reading the business press here in the UK – the sentiment is that tech stocks are en vogue again on the back of speculated IPO’s. The conditions could potentially be ripe for another tech bubble in which case new monitization models will have to created.

  • http://www.jpdesigntheory.com Design Theory

    I agree that measuring social graphs is important and will be very important in time to come. Currently I can’t believe the numbers in these services because I don’t think they’re totally accurate. Then again, if you tweet a lot and your tweets are RT’d over and over, that should mean you are of some influence. Even if that original tweet was about a Justin Beiber concert. Maybe if you can be rated on how relevant you are to your subject matter or topics, maybe then people would care more. Hmm…

  • http://azeemazhar.com/ azeemazhar

    Great comment Doc, and a really good way of framing the question.

  • http://invisibleinkdigital.com Invisibleinkdigital

    Thanks Doc for your insightful comments. On your last point there does seem to be an uneasy relationship with monetizing certain online channels that runs counter to the spirit of the internet as envisaged by Tim Berners-Lee. Reading the business press here in the UK – the sentiment is that tech stocks are en vogue again on the back of speculated IPO’s. The conditions could potentially be ripe for another tech bubble in which case new monitization models will have to created.

  • http://invisibleinkdigital.com Invisibleinkdigital

    Hi Azeem,

    Thank you for your response, I really appreciate that.

    To my mind 2011 will be the year for services such as Peerindex and Klout to flourish. The exponential growth of social media channels and content being produced means that any tool or service that can sort the wheat from the chaff gets my vote.

    My position in the article is whether applying such a value to an individual’s online presence can truly articulate the breadth of their authority offline as well? To my mind, true engagement opportunities are those that facilitate interaction beyond the retweet. Peerindex and Klout offer the opportunity to provide direction, but it’s at the discretion of the user to take that engagement opportunity further.

    What I found really interesting about your response was your reference to the individual person using the service. Perhaps it’s better to ask the question what context that individual person is operating in? If they are part of an enterprise looking to reach a wider audience for their product or services they will have different needs to that of an individual looking to widen their social circle. I think therein lies the difference.

    Keep up the good work, I’d love to see at first hand the effort you and your team are putting in

    T

  • Nan Dawkins

    One of the big issues we are grappling with in regards to influence measurement is the CONTEXT of the influence. Services like Klout provide an overall score of influence, but how relevant/useful is an overall score to a client focused on a specific product or service?

    Example: Let’s say I’m selling an elemental formula like Elecare, Neocate or Nutramigen AA. I’m interested in influential moms who produce and share great content about infant milk allergies. Klout gives a high influencer score to Mom A, who has a huge network of followers, gets retweeted constantly, etc. But…how many of Mom A’s followers are relevant to the product set? In other words, how many people in Mom A’s network care about infant milk allergies? If it is a small percentage, then Mom A’s Klout score could lead me to waste valuable time and resources.

    There are some great things about Klout. I love the “influencer of” and “influenced by” feature, but in terms of making decisions about where to put engagement time and resources, there are some critical missing pieces around context and relevance.

  • http://twitter.com/wendyflanagan wendyflanagan

    I’ve tried Klout twice now, and found that it isn’t real time, doesn’t update when you click. Support forum was riddled with similar complaints from other users, none of which were being addressed in a timely manner. Just because you bring a product to market and get some press on concept doesn’t mean you actually have a product that works or is meaningful, even if it did measure anything.

  • http://invisibleinkdigital.com Invisibleinkdigital

    Many thanks Nan for your comment. I do think the issue of context and relevancy that you’ve painted is a pertinent one. If the teams of Klout and Peerindex can somehow capture and incorporate that into their service, than that would be a game changer in bringing sense and relevancy to understanding ours and others output across the social media channels

  • http://azeemazhar.com/ azeemazhar

    You are in London. Drop me an email aa [at] pi dot mu

    we are hiring too.
    a

  • Akram

    I agree with you Wendy on the press thing. Although the reality showed us at Soovox http://soovox.com that the user wants it that way. While we are working hard to make our Social IQ a the most meaningful real time measure of influence; It seems that users like the easy analysis of your last 20 tweets which is bascially what other competitors are doing.
    Let us know how we can improve. Thanks

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