Mad about .NET

Why has my Klout score dropped

Filed under Other

This seems to be the question that many Klout users asks themselves since yesterday. The reason is simple: Klout has released a new version of the algorithm to measure the influence to improve their accuracy and transparency.

The algorithm will now track better the quality of your interactions instead of the quantity. According to their official work there are three principles that form the basis of the algorithm to determine your score:

• How many people you influence
• How much you influence them and
• How influential they are.

So, something as having a more accurate system has been transformed in a very negative change because lot of users have seen how their score has dropped.

In my opinion the main error Klout has done is not the change itself as many users suggest, but how to reflect it in the score. They should have played more with the psychology of the people and increase the base of the score like for instance adding 100 points to everybody before apply the change, in that way people would have not seen a drop in their score and their egos would have been safe. I’m being a bit ironic but you get the point.

It is really worrying to see how many people trusts the score reputation indexes as the most important thing in Social Media, which in my opinion it’s plain stupid. Don’t get me wrong, I think any score system that allows you track your progress is good, because it will allow you to measure how you are evolving online. But it can’t become your only point of interest or action plan.

Some of the comments you can see in the Klout blog show the madness that is around the online influence and reputation Look this example

many organizations have coupled economic functions and job-related selection to your scoring system. By making this change, you have negatively impacted the job market

Really? Are there companies hiring based on your Klout score? If that’s the case I truly think it is very worrying where we are heading up.

As I said before in all our tasks it is important to have a way to measure success. So Klout, PeerIndex, TwitterGrader, TunkRank … and all the similar systems that give you an artificial and automatic way to measure influence can be a hint for how you are doing your activities online, but none of them can -neither should- replace how we evaluate the influence of a person. It is just common sense to see how any of these score systems attribute you online influence on subject but make you completely irrelevant on a secondary subject.

Don’t be fooled, B2B decisions are not being significantly influenced by conversations on Facebook or Twitter.

How to measure twitter reach

Filed under Technology

Today we are going to talk about how to measure twitter reach from one of my most used applications: Microsoft Excel.

The tool you have to download to do it is Analytics for Twitter and allows to query Twitter directly from Excel thanks to the free PowerPivot Add-in that needs to be installed too in order it works.

The installation of Analytics for twitter will place an Excel file in your desktop, once you open you will see that the usage is very simple, we only need to introduce our search queries separated by commas in the Excel sheet called “Topics”. The queries can be free text, hashtags or twitter alias, once we press the search button it will contact with the twitter api to extract all the info and present it to us properly formatted.

Once the search is completed we need to do two extra steps to see the information retrieved. First one is go to the PowerPivot menu and click “Update All”, when it finishes go to the menu “Data” and click “Refresh All”.

After this we can start analyzing the results of our search, which is divided in three Excel sheets:

• Topics: Contains the main dashboard where we can see stats related to the amount of tweets, how they are published by hours, overview of the tweets’ tone.
• People: Provides information about the users that have been tweeting about the topic we have searched and who are the most positive/negative twitters.
• Tone: Displays detailed information about the tone of the tweets based on a dictionary we can configure to adjust it to our language or preferences.

The best of all is that you will be able to apply several filters to the information extracted, which will allow you to fine investigate the reach of the topic you have introduced.

Below you have the resulting reports based on a query where I looked for the hashtag #IE9. As you can see the reports are very attractive visually.

Topics

People

Tone

As you can see create reports to measure the twitter reach is very simple with Analytics for Twitter, so just download and play with it.The file contains also all the information of the features and limitations the tool has today.