Social Scorekeeping: Formulas Rank On-Line Influence; Driving Customer Choice Is The Goal

Trying to measure influence has been around as long as, well..., influence. Advertisers have used celebrities, actors dressed as authority figures like doctors, lawyers or accountants and anyone else that research or intuition suggested might drive customer purchase decisions. The impact of influencers ebbs and flows, driven by economic and social trends. Recently, for example, endorsers have suffered a decline in influence as public disenchantment with authority rose during the financial crisis. These cycles have, if anything, stimulated greater research efforts as the quantitative nature of on-line - especially social media - measurement spurs interest in figuring out how to corral reluctant consumer spending. The warning for marketers - and politicians - is that trends can change quickly, the measurement methods may be suspect and there is no substitute for the intrinsic quality of the product or service.

Jessica Vascellaro explains the on-line version of the age-old influence measurement game in the Wall Street Journal:



"When Katie Miller went to Las Vegas this Thanksgiving, she tweeted about the lavish buffets and posted pictures of her seats at the aquatic spectacle "Le Rêve" at the Wynn Las Vegas hotel.

A week later, the 25-year-old account executive at a public-relations firm got an email inviting her to a swanky holiday party on Manhattan's West Side.

"At first I was confused," Ms. Miller said. She read on to learn that she had been singled out as a "high-level influencer" by the event's sponsors, including the Venetian and Palazzo hotels in Las Vegas, and a tech company called Klout, which ranks people based on their influence in social-media circles. "I was honored," she said, sipping a cocktail at the $30,000 fete.


Katie Miller
.So much for wealth, looks or talent. Today, a new generation of VIPs is cultivating coolness through the world of social media. Here, ordinary folks can become "influential" overnight depending on the number and kinds of people who follow them on Twitter or comment on their Facebook pages.

People have been burnishing their online reputations for years, padding their resumes on professional networking site LinkedIn and trying to affect the search results that appear when someone Googles their names. Now, they're targeting something once thought to be far more difficult to measure: influence over fellow consumers.

The arbiters of the new social hierarchy have names like Klout, PeerIndex and Twitalyzer. Each company essentially works the same way: They feed public data, mostly from Twitter, but also from sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, into secret formulas and then generate scores that gauge users' influence. Think of it as the credit score of friendship or, as PeerIndex calls it, "the S&P of social relationships."

The companies say their aim is to provide benchmarks to help people figure out whom to trust online and a way for marketers to spot people eager to evangelize their brands. Their efforts have ignited a race among social-media junkies who, eager for perks and bragging rights, are working hard to game the system and boost their scores.

Casie Stewart, a 28-year-old social-media consultant from Toronto, has earned a free Virgin America flight, a shopping splurge at Mark's Work Wearhouse and an all-expenses-paid trip to New Zealand fashion week thanks to her prolific tweeting and blogging about her life.

"Just got shot by fashion photographer @raphaelmazzucco in the Diesel Lounge," she tweeted recently.

Klout dubbed Ms. Stewart a "networker" and awarded her a score of 74 (out of 100). As her score climbed, she gained the attention of a range of brands and public-relations firms who hooked her up with prizes, says Ms. Stewart, who has more than 5,000 Twitter followers. She says she tweets to build her "personal brand," and getting perks from companies to tweet or blog about helps: "I always wanted to be well-known for being really good at something."

Celebrities are seeking an edge, too.

Last year, Britney Spears' managers, Adam Leber and Larry Rudolph, requested a meeting with Klout Chief Executive Joe Fernandez in San Francisco. Over a lunch of Chinese food, they grilled Mr. Fernandez on why Ms. Spears' Klout score, then around 64, was lower than Lady Gaga's 78 and Ashton Kutcher's 77.

"What are these people doing better than us?" Mr. Fernandez says they asked.

Mr. Fernandez says he advised them to tell Ms. Spears to tweet more frequently and to send more tweets herself instead of having others tweet on her behalf.

Mr. Leber says Ms. Spears took some of Mr. Fernandez's advice, such as making sure to blast her updates across multiple services like Twitter and Facebook. But, he says, he's reluctant to inundate Ms. Spears' followers with too many tweets because celebrities shouldn't be that accessible.

"You want to leave them wanting more," he says. Today, Ms. Spears's score is 87. Lady Gaga's is 90.

Zach Bussey, a 25-year-old consultant, started trying to improve his social-media mojo last year. "It is an ego thing," says Mr. Bussey, who describes himself as a social-media "passionisto."

One of the services he turned to was TweetLevel, created by public-relations firm Edelman. It grades users' influence, popularity, trust and "engagement" on a scale of 1 to 100.

He decided to try to improve his score by boosting the ratio of people who follow him to the number he follows. So he halved the number of people he was following to 4,000. His TweetLevel score rose about 5 points and his Klout score jumped from a 51 to a 60.

"The change gave me more legitimacy," he says. But, he warns, you can't get lazy: "If you go on vacation for a week and can't tweet every hour of the day, you better be prepared to see your scores drop."

Even politicians are subject to the new pecking order. The Twitter accounts for President Barack Obama and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez are both registered on Klout, with scores of 90 and 80, respectively.

A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, which runs the @barackobama Twitter feed, didn't comment. The Venezuelan embassy in Washington didn't respond to requests for comment.

Seeking more traffic to his marketing blog, "The Internet Vision," Gabriel Elliott of Vancouver, Wash., attempted to dissect Twitalyzer, which provides users with a suite of scores free. It also sells packages for as much as $99.99 a month with extras like daily email alerts that track scores over time.

Mr. Elliott tried to manipulate individual variables, tweaking his frequency of tweeting, while keeping other things, like his rate of retweeting—or tweeting others' tweets and giving them credit—constant. He determined that the biggest overall contributors to his score were retweeting and mentioning other users in his tweets. He raised his scores in both areas from 5 to 25 and gained about 1,500 followers over the next two months. "It took burning both ends of the candle," he says.

While the companies encourage users to maximize their scores, some have had to crack down on behavior they deem unsportsmanlike.

Klout employees recently neutralized a tactic they dubbed "the one-night stand," in which people follow lots of people on Twitter, hoping they'll follow them back, then dump them a day later.

"Users are a crafty bunch," says Mr. Fernandez