Update: Klout seems to be listening. On December 2, CEO Joe Fernandez posted “What Does Klout Measure?” on Klout’s blog. You can find the link below.

At the end of October, Klout changed its standard for measuring influence. The Klout score is a 100-point scoring system that gives marketers, employers and users of social media the opportunity to surmise from a single number someone’s ability to drive action on the social Web. Recently, Klout changed the way it arrives at this score, resulting in dramatic changes for many of its users. Some scores went up while others went down.

Originally established as a scoring system for influence on Twitter, Klout now measures influence on a dozen social networks, including Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and Google+. More networks are being added, and the company’s CEO Joe Fernandez predicts the total will reach 20 by the end of 2011.

A person’s Klout score is based on three subscores: True Reach, Amplification and Network. How these scores are calculated – Klout’s PeopleRank algorithm – is Klout’s secret sauce, and on October 26 the ingredients changed. With the additional number of networks and the increase in data – over 2.7 billion pieces each day – the company realized it had to change its algorithm so that scores would more accurately and transparently reflect a person’s entire social influence.

Earlier in the year Klout had stated that the addition of networks to a person’s profile would create an “additive affect” and would not detract from one’s total score. But overnight, Klout scores changed dramatically. Many influencers saw large drops, leaving them wondering how Klout could have gotten it so wrong before. Mine dropped 30%, from 70 to 49. My true reach went from 10K to 2K, my Amplification went from 53 to 5, and my Network went from 71 to 18.

Since its earliest, Twitter-only days, I’ve been intrigued by the Klout system of scoring and have extolled its utility to my clients, and so the abrupt change in Klout’s “standard” came as quite a surprise. There was an outcry throughout the Klout ecosystem. I joined in as journalists, social media pundits and practitioners reached out to Klout for an explanation. We were referred to the Klout blog, which offered only a palliative post, at the end of which I expected to see a smiley face. Why would a company striving for more transparency not be more transparent with its users?

I began researching influence online, and very quickly one thing became resoundingly clear: influence is what’s wrong with social media.

The Larger Context of Influence

“Our friendships and professional connections have moved online, making influence measurable for the first time in history,” reads the first line of Klout’s About page. Klout would have us believe that our online connections represent the sum total of the measureable population of people who influence us, and that for the first time in history what constitutes influence in our lives is, in deed, measurable. If only hubris were measurable.

Quite simply, only a fraction of influence in social media is currently measured. Influence can only be approximated based on the very individualized uses – by millions of people – of hundreds of social media channels. Klout measures about a dozen channels and then distills that measurement into a single score.

But the real issue isn’t how or whether we’re able to measure influence. What concerns me is that social media influence is following the pattern of other forms of influence that have had pivotal effects recently on our society.

I don’t occupy anything these days, except perhaps my office. But I share the growing concern that America has done little to curtail the influence of our financial industry over Washington. I bring it up to illustrate a point about influence. It was influence, for instance, that facilitated the 1999 enactment of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a law that repealed the restrictions of the Glass-Steagall Act on commercial bank participation in investment banking activities. Influence again kept the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating derivatives. The result was the creation of the financial industry’s securitization conveyor belt that led to the mortgage lending crisis, which has pushed about 50 million Americans to the poverty level while creating a top 1% that in 2007 took in over 23% of the nation’s income, conditions we haven’t seen since 1928, just before the Great Depression.

Could an online class system form from social media influence? When we look at the evolution of social media influence, we begin to see distinct divisions.

During Social Media 1.0, some of our existing offline relationships moved onto the Web. (It would be more accurate to say bits and pieces of these relationships were copied over to the Web.) We connected with some of these friends on networks like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. And then during Social Media 1.5, we expanded our social graphs by adding people we hadn’t seen or heard from in years – old friends from high school, grade school, our childhood neighbors – people we hadn’t thought about much over the years. We even began adding people to our social networks based on relationships we had in our existing graphs. Friends of friends became first connections.

During Social Media 2.0 we began seeking even more friends, fans and followers, taking advantage of weak connections to build out our social graphs and engage larger and more influential numbers of people. While social media theorists and practitioners maintain that quality of engagement is more important than quantity of connections, none will dispute that there is a positive correlation between influence and number of friends, fans and followers. Size matters.

Klout currently scores over 100 million people, most of whom have not signed up for a Klout account. The company uses information from individuals’ public channels like Twitter and private channels like Facebook to build its data. More than 3,500 companies use this data to reach influencers with targeted marketing. In May, 2011, Fernandez told Forbes reporter Kym McNicholas that certain hotels in Las Vegas look up your Klout score when you check in to see how influential you are so that they may determine whether you should receive preferential treatment. The better they treat you, the hotels reason (if you have influence), the more likely you are to rave about your experience to your online community.

In social media, anyone with a small number of friends – at any level of engagement – does not have absolute influence. They can’t check in to a hotel in Las Vegas and be treated with privilege. Their numbers don’t cut it in Vegas.

And so at the end of Social Media 2.0, we face a new greed, one with the same unpleasant characteristics and ill effects of financial greed.

Social Greed

Not that influence is a bad thing, particularly when it’s formed and used in the aggregate. Even instances of individual ability to drive positive change are favorable when that change sincerely reflects the desires of many. But influence in social media is being co-opted by the second-comers to social media – marketers – whose interests aren’t necessarily those of the community.

An individual becomes an influencer in social media because her interests are well aligned with those of her online community. An accretion of friends, fans and followers occurs around this influencer, in some cases exponentially, as word spreads of the value offered by this individual. Marketers identify such influencers and engage them on various social media in order to reach their communities with a message engineered to slip seamlessly into the conversation. No harm, no foul, particularly if the marketer’s interests are genuinely aligned with those of the community.

But as gamification and award-based practices (like those of the hotels in Vegas) become rife in social media, the behavior of the influencers changes through incentive. Badges, mayorships, leaderboards and free orders of fries can cause someone with influence to act less in the interests of their friends, fans and followers and more in the interests of the marketers offering these rewards.

As badges build and connections accumulate and Klout scores climb, and as more and more people buy into the idea of engaging influencers to build their own influence, the ecosystem skews toward the interests of the few. And so the interests we find at the top of the influence pyramid once again are out of alignment with the interests of the many. Influence at one time may have been organic on the social Web, but no longer. As with a lot of things these days, social media influence is for sale.

Social Good

Where’s the social value in engaging only with influencers? Where’s the responsibility? A representative from Klout offered insight into Klout’s point of view when she answered my email questioning the drop in my score:

The reason you may have seen a drop is that we’ve improved our ability to take into account how *much* you influence someone. For instance, if I rarely like or comment on anyone’s posts, but choose to do so to yours, that is more meaningful than if I like 60 posts a day. For users whose engagement primarily comes from others with high activity, you may see a drop in your Score. [sic]

What part of the secret sauce is it that tastes really bad here? If I’m in the middle of an Arab revolution, and I retweet updates at a rate of 60 a day or I like 60 related posts a day, will that reduce influence? Do I care? I just want regime change.

Hotel rooms and French fries are one thing, or shopping for shoes online, or asking where to rent a bicycle for the day. But what if I want to learn about an emerging presidential candidate in a party other than my own? If I begin asking around in various social media, I’m led to destinations online that have been Liked, commented on, retweeted or otherwise shared by people in my social graph. My results are skewed because of our aligned interests – we’re members of the same political party, for instance. The results are further skewed if the activity of my social graph includes Likes, retweets, comments or shared objects that have been strategically inserted into their online conversations by influencers wishing to spread political messages that unfavorably portray this opposing candidate.

I wonder if Klout will ever see the need for a new badge: Trusted Objective Observer. Or if they’ll ever come up with a score that indicates how un-influenced a user is. Perhaps that score already exists, and that at some point soon instead of striving for a higher Klout score, we should strive for a score of 1.

Update: Klout’s reaction to these and similar concerns: “What Does Klout Measure?”

I arrive at my desk early with a cup of my favorite coffee, open a browser and log in. My cloud-based CRM has collected for me a list of new sales opportunities and has sorted them based on criteria I’ve created, mostly keywords, some of them geo-tagged.

I see in the list of new opportunities a company that happens to be a regular customer, a company we’re in touch with almost daily. But the contact name is different. Curious how this new contact popped up on the list, I see that the opportunity is from a different department, and it’s an opportunity for a new service that our company just added within the last week or so, one we’ve been promoting like crazy through our usual channels – AdWords, Vocus, email, and on our website and blog. We even built an engaging Facebook app, and we’re tweeting about it.

My CRM seems to have identified something relevant in the social Web belonging to this new contact, something in a blog post she wrote, or a press release, or a tweet, or an update on LinkedIn or Facebook, or most likely a combination of these, something that indicated a strong match for our new service.

However it happened, my social CRM has identified a potential sales opportunity for my company, and now I simply need to call or email or tweet this new contact. I’ll drink Obsidian Dark Roast to that.

What? No Social CRM?

Wishful thinking. My cloud-based CRM doesn’t do that yet. In fact, no CRM does. CRM systems have not yet done for businesses what social platforms have done for individuals, which is to say they have not yet facilitated the personalization of connections, interests, recommendations and discovery.

With Facebook, I’m able to find relevant information based on my likes and interests on thousands of websites simply by signing in using my Facebook login username and password. My friends’ activity on these sites informs me and, in many cases, steers me directly to the content I’ve come to that site to find, content that makes up those shared interests I have with my friends who also visit that site.

As businesses, we monitor relevant activity in social media, we go where the conversation is, engage, manage our brand, and we analyze our company’s performance. But the fluidity of our connections and our ability to nurture them continues to be interrupted by the walled-off environment of our CRMs.

Houston Neal, director of marketing for Software Advice, recognizes companies’ rapidly growing need for “a scalable way to engage customers in the social sphere,” but he points out that software vendors and analysts alike appear confused over the very definition of social CRM.

“In reality, social CRM is a misnomer,” he writes. “This catch-all nomenclature implies a category far more straightforward than the diverse set of specialized systems currently targeting the social media opportunity.” (You can read Neal’s post on social CRM here.)

Given the need for social CRM and the ability of current technology to provide a solution for inbound relationship management, it’s beginning to feel as if we have to squint to see the customer in Customer Relationship Management.

Community Within

Salesforce’s introduction of Chatter, a system that enables team collaboration and community around individual leads and accounts, is so much like Facebook it’s, well, comforting. In fact, there’s not much about Chatter that’s not like Facebook.

Steve Bobrowski, senior developer evangelist at Salesforce, points out a healthy side effect of the tool.

“The key insight for me about Chatter is how it flattens the traditional organization from the typical hierarchical reporting structure,” he says. “If your company uses Chatter and you’re a go-getter, no matter where you are in the organization, you’ll get noticed.”

As Bobrowski described it to me, Chatter revises our notion of the ladder to success within an organization. But while Chatter is a collaboration platform that boosts the business process layer within Salesforce, it’s not connected to other places on the Web where business opportunities lie.

FaceForce?

Social CRM is inevitable, and we may be close to a definition, if not a solution, with Salesforce taking the lead.

Recently, ReadWriteWeb reported that Salesforce has launched its Facebook Toolkit to facilitate integration between the two platforms. At the same time, Facebook announced it is looking for a developer to create and integrate Force.com applications for Facebook’s internal and external use.

A few system architecture differences notwithstanding, Salesforce users could be on their way to seeing the level of community in their business graphs that they enjoy in their social graphs. Hopefully, other CRMs will follow. Social objects within the business world could give a new meaning to the word “opportunity.”

Do you use a CRM? Would it help if it were more social?

Please share your comments.

…

HootSuite has climbed to the the top of the heap of social media management tools for individuals and teams who use Facebook and Twitter for business or organization purposes. Last week, HootSuite won Mashable’s Best Social Media Management Tool award, an award based on community votes and a testament to user loyalty. Mashable is a leading social media and tech news source with 30 million views each month.

In a further sign of its commitment to its growing legion of loyal users, yesterday HootSuite announced its Affiliate Program, which lets premium plan holders earn commissions by referring friends, colleagues, and clients to HootSuite Pro and Enterprise plans as well as HootSuite University. (See the ad, ahem, in our sidebar on the right.)

So what makes HootSuite so great? It’s the owl! The company’s wise little mascot consistently coaxes me into the plethora of features added frequently to this robust management system.  A quick Google search for “HootSuite vs [Your Favorite Twitter Client Here]” reveals account after account of people switching from popular services to HootSuite.

But to call HootSuite a Twitter client is a misnomer. The number of social media management features and the ease with which the uninitiated can discover and implement them is unlike any other tool I’ve tried. And the features keep coming. To see Hootsuite’s whirlwind 2010, check this out from their blog: http://ht.ly/3CyIL.

And with its freemium business model, the company continues to offer a free service to 95% of its users while monetizing its service with its heavier users.

I don’t mind. It’s worth every penny. Arrayed before me currently are 17 accounts that I manage. Tabs for these accounts appear across the top of the window, and within each are streams of social media updates from Twitter, Facebook and Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress.com, and other social media platforms. I can easily monitor @mentions and Facebook wall updates in a single glance, and with the team workflow capability, I can communicate directly with my clients and make assignments for responding to a particular update or social object.

Features like the easy importing of RSS feeds, the browser applets and the smart phone application make this an indispensable tool for my work.

Congrats and kudos to Ryan Holmes and the HootSuite team for their accomplishments, and many thanks for their continued innovation.

Do you use a Twitter client? What about a social media management system?

Which feature most appeals to you:

• Mobility?
• Scheduling your updates?
• Real-time stats?
• Managing multiple accounts and teams?

Please leave a comment below.

…

It’s the first browser to bring together a user’s social graph as well as the sites visited on a daily basis, which will only become more and more important. Obvious concerns are users’ understanding of the privacy issues and what’s being shared with whom. We’re through a lot of that already from Facebook’s attempts to build the graph through personal invasion and, of course, Google’s “don’t be evil” ubiquity.

As a social media enthusiast, my answer is: Yes! Check it out early and see how you can integrate it into your daily online workflow. For me, it will likely be a second browser that I keep open. I use Firefox for a lot of the work I do because of how easy it makes it to peek at website code and do other web-related tasks. Firefox has been promising a new version of their browser called Tab Candy for some time now that will do a lot of what Rockmelt promises, sans the social.

The other thing to watch out for with Rockmelt is how they will monetize their browser. It’s worth noting that they’re a small private company, albeit with some noteworthy investors. But they’re not Microsoft (Netscape) or Google (Chrome), companies who aren’t in a position to have to monetize their browsers. What this means for Rockmelt is that user experience may be compromised a bit as they invite paying sites into the mix. For instance, you may open your Rockmelt browser one day to discover the Amazon tab is permanent!

But my bet is on Rockmelt or other such browsers seeded form the same idea.

Just got off the iPhone with my friendly AT&T customer service rep. When the new iPhone 4 was announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, I had to know if I was eligible for the upgrade. The new iPhone 4 comes in two configuration, 16 gig and 32 gig, and is available for $199 and $299, respectively, for those who are eligible.

Here’s the deal. AT&T says that typically you would have to be at least 21 months into your current 2-year contract to purchase the new iPhone for the prices listed above. However, they’ll also consider your monthly recurring charges; if they’re high enough, you can upgrade sooner than the 21 months.  When you upgrade, you’ll begin a new 2-year agreement.

Your plan and plan charges will stay the same. But here’s an important little piece of information: If you’re lucky enough to have an unlimited data plan, hang on to it. If you ever decide to downgrade to AT&T’s 2 gig or 200 MB plan, you’ll never be able to go back to an unlimited plan. AT&T no longer offers one. Subscribers lamentably attest that AT&T wireless network can at times be excruciating slow, so AT&T is taking measures to reduce activity. (Hopefully they’re also taking measure to increase capacity.) If you have an unlimited data plan, consider yourself lucky. With the new FaceTime video phone and multitasking features, you’re going to want that bandwidth.

There is a one-time $18 upgrade fee, and AT&T offers new insurance plan called Mobile Protect for $13.99 per month. You can purchase this insurance within thirty days of your iPhone 4 purchase, and it covers you if your iPhone 4 is stolen, lost, flushed down the toilet or left at a Silicon Valley bar.

Check out Apple’s infomercial for the iPhone 4:

http://twendz.com/
Twendz is a service that helps you measure sentiment and brand impact on Twitter. Sentiment is a measure of how people feel about a particular topic, and it’s an important metric in Social Media. This is a great service for companies who want to see what’s being said about them or their products.

http://ezinearticles.com/
This article syndication site consistently tops the lists of best article directories. EzineArticles maintains high page rank and strong traffic count, they’re great promoters, offer great online publishing tips through their authors newsletter, have worthy editorial policies, and they’re persistently refining, enhancing and developing their services. It’s the personal committment of Christopher M. Knight, CEO, and his team that make this the number go-to article syndication site for publishers and authors alike.

http://www.goarticles.com/
GoArticles.com makes the claim of being the Web’s largest free content article directory, receiving 10,000 – 12,000 article submissions weekly. They provide good services to authors, publishers and visitors alike.

http://www.articlesbase.com/
This article syndication site is a free article directory where you can submit and find articles. Like most, it’s free. You can publish your original articles and includes a link back to a page on your website in the Author’s Bio section. The site is also useful for finding content for your website, ezine, or newsletter.

As everyone knows, Digg is big. The friendly giant of social bookmarking sites. Here’s what Digg says: “Because Digg is all about sharing and discovery, there’s a conversation that happens around the content. We’re here to promote that conversation and provide tools for our community to discuss the topics that they’re passionate about.” You’ve seen the icon, the little man with the shovel. He digs deep.

https://www.diigo.com/
A bookmarking site worth bookmarking! Research, share and collaborate. Great toolbar features. You can even highlight. Looks like this could become a Weejee favorite.

http://buzz.yahoo.com/
Buzz what you will, but Yahoo! does a lot of the work for you. They determine what topics are popular based on what people are searching for on Yahoo!, then they showcase the most popular stories based on buzzing, voting, commenting, emailing. And clever bookmarking strategies.

http://blogmarks.net/
Can’t really comment on this bookmarking service because when wee tried to register, as of the date of this post, wee got this: “public registration is temporary off, send us a kind email if you want to be invited, thank you ! [sic]“

http://mystuff.ask.com/
Add Web pages, add tags, add folders, add pictures from you desk top, add a Save button to your browser. But don’t ask Jeeves. Wee don’t think he’s around anymore.

Loving this one. I’m watching the sentiment rating of the movie “Nine” as tweet updates roll by me in real time. Not quite as exciting as the movie, though.

Heard about this site today on NPR’s Market Place: www.BookOfOdds.com. Great idea. I love, well, how social it is. You might want to have a look and bookmark it on Delicious, Digg or StumbleUpon. The site is worth being reminded of.

http://www.pandia.com/sw-2004/23-yahoo.html
This article gives the syntax to use in a Yahoo search window to see all the pages that link to your site, or to specific pages in your site. Useful.