March 28th, 2012Top StoryCan A Dumb Social Media Tool Turn This Chump Into the Internet's Top Mom?By Mat Honan
Just because people talk to you, or about you, on Twitter, that doesn't mean you have real-world influence. My Klout score, for example, is 66, which is the same score as Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary—arguably the most influential messenger alive. Hey, we're the same! On PeerIndex, I actually outrank @PressSec, 56 to 48. Which exposes a simple truth: peer-ranked influence scores are ridiculous. To prove it to you, we're going to try to turn a drunken 20-something blogger into the Internet's Most Respected Mom. The most notorious of these services is Klout, but they all work similarly. Klout's big idea (which came to its founder Joe Fernandez when his jaw was wired shut and he could only communicate via social media) is that follower counts are important, but audience engagement is the real metric that matters—how many times people @ message you, retweet you and spread your messages and links. It looks at Facebook and LinkedIn and other social media signals too. It has fancy algorithms, but the bottom line is that it uses the ways other people react to you to measure how influential you are. Klout not only measures general influence, it's topical too. Not only does it look at overall influence, but it also awards scores on specific subjects. And one of the ways it does this is by letting other Klout users award a fey little "+K" to people they find influential on a particular topic. (Kred, which also measures subject-specific influence uses a +Kred metric. Originality!) So if I think you are knowledgable on the topic of, say, rocket science I can give you +K in it. In this way, the crowd can make one an expert. It means your years of education and hard work are meaningless, because the greater authority is what other people on Twitter think. It is, of course, also a great way to troll.
You know who is highly influential on the topic of Homosexuality? Rick Santorum. That's because Klout is pretty easy to game. Just give someone +K on something, and they are suddenly an expert on it, whether they want to be or not. Santorum has been subject to "Klout bombing," which is why he's now so homo-influential. But the thing is, Santorum really is an important voice on that topic—even if only in the sense that he argues against gay marriage. His positions are very much helping his presidential bid, in fact. And of course, as a former Senator and one of four men left in the fight for the Republican Presidential nomination, Santorum is by definition an influential person. You don't need Klout or Kred or PeerIndex to tell you that Rick Santorum matters. If you do, you are a clay-eating idiot. But what we want to know is whether or not anyone can become an important voice on Klout and PeerIndex and the like. Is it possible to make someone who is not already an established voice the leading expert on a particular topic, even if it's totally irrelevant? Someone like, say, Kyle Wagner, Gizmodo's burrito loving, Twitter-challenged, computer-losing, editorial assistant? Could Kyle become not just an expert on being, say, a mom, but the leading expert online, at least according to Klout? Can he beat out Klout's current top influencer on the subject, Andrea Fellman? Fellman's Twitter bio says that she's "A Mom that hasn't lost her style to Motherhood! Editor of SavvySassyMoms.com, Contributor BabyCenter's Momformation, iVoice for Village.com." Her Twitter handle is @savvysassymoms. She has 33,769 followers. She is clearly credible. Kyle's twitter bio reads "gizmodo peon who loves beer and comic books and falling down." He is well-known for losing 3 computers in 4 months, buying too many burritos, and avoiding the dentist to the point where he needed emergency surgery on his jaw. Is that who you picture when you think of a mother-figure? And the bigger question: Can Kyle knock her off? We want to find out, and so we're going to create a two-pronged experiment, and hope that you join us. Kyle only has 709 Twitter followers and a Klout score of 56. Those both need to be beefed up if he's going to win this. To pull this off we're going to need to interact with Kyle on Twitter, and also boost his topical credibility from within Kout itself. Here's how it's going to work. First, please follow Kyle Wagner on Twitter. Tell your friends to follow Kyle. We are all Kyle. Once you do, please send him @ replies and retweet him, as Klout measures engagement. This is especially true when you see Kyle tweeting about motherhood. And of course, you can tweet at him about motherhood as well. Here is a sample tweet to get you started. A few months ago Kyle gave me access to his Twitter and he's been too lazy to change the password ever since. I still have the login. Which means he's about to start tweeting about #Moms quite a lot. Please retweet him when he does. Remember, it's all about engagement. Here's one for you to retweet right now:
We also need to refine Kyle's expertise. Right now Kyle is influential on the topics of Alcohol, Laptops, and Johnny Depp. These are all valid Kyle-related things! But they're not Mom-worthy.
To get Kyle on Klout's Mom-dar, we need to send Kyle +K on the topic of Moms. You will need to log into Klout to do that. (I know, I'm sorry.) Once you log in, go to Kyle's Klout topics page, and hit the Give +K button next to the Moms topic. (I've already given Kyle some Moms +K love to get things started.) Once you have, please tweet about it. We're hoping to make Kyle the most important Mom on Klout, not just because it's funny, but because we want to see what's possible, and make a point about crowd-sourced authority. And besides, isn't Kyle a great mom? Wouldn't you want to turn to him for motherly advice? Hell yes. Let's do this.  |
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