Last week I met Garth Holsinger, Vice President of Global Sales and Business Development at Klout, during a panel discussion entitled “Influence 3.0” in New York City. (Presumably we have passed Influence 1.0 and 2.0.) During the event Garth announced that Klout would add activity on professional social networking platform LinkedIn to its overall scoring matrix.
This was surprising to me because I assumed that Klout, a startup that attempts to measure people’s level of influence in social media, was already accounting for LinkedIn activity in its matrix. Well, today Klout’s Ranking Director, Ash Rust, (killer name, by the way) blogged about implementing LinkedIn and the startup is now asking people to connect their profiles, so I assume they weren’t fully integrated until this week.
The blog post is light on details, so I thought I’d share some of the broad strokes Garth shared with me last week about what exactly what kind of data Klout will be pulling from your LinkedIn profile.
1. Recommendations. On LinkedIn people within your network can provide you public recommendations. Klout will be looking at how many recommendations users are earning.
2. Messaging. Just like Facebook and Twitter, people on LinkedIn can post status updates and other messaging, which their network can respond to either by “liking” them or commenting on. Klout plans to look at this activity as well.
3. Network Size. The depth and power of your network, all the people you have connections with, will also be taken into account.
Because activity on LinkedIn generally moves at a slower pace than Facebook or Twitter, Klout will measure engagement over a longer period of time, Garth told me. Klout usually updates your level of influence on other social networks weekly, whereas LinkedIn is more likely to be monthly.
The most common complaint against Klout is that its scoring system oscillates too wildly. As changes to the system have rolled out, people have found their influence score has jumped dramatically from low to high. Garth agreed that the LinkedIn integration will probably cause people to see another round of ups and downs to their personal scores. But he said it was worth it to get a more complete picture of people’s overall influence across the social media landscape.
