
Lithium acquires Klout? Whatever for?
There is an unconfirmed story lighting things up that community platform provider Lithium is process of acquiring Klout, the so-call Influence measurement service. Why? Especially since Lithium’s view of influence via their Chief Data Scientist Michae…

What color is your influence?
I read this week Klout “is evolving from a service that told you how much influence you had in terms of a numerical value, to a service that now tells you why you’re influential and how you can improve on that”. And my reaction was did the Klout score ever accurately quantify “influence”? 5 items […]

A Guide to Influence(rs): Chapter 2
I’m presuming that you’ve read Chapter 1 a.k.a. the first post on this. If not, here’s the link. Go do that now. If you’re reading this in the book form, I know you’ve read it because this says Chapter 2 and who reads Chater 2 before C…

A Guide To Influence(rs) Chapter 1
What this post is not is a discussion of how to determine influence. I’m going to leave that to my dear friend and brilliant scientist, Dr. Michael Wu, the Chief Scientist at Lithium. He, far better than Klout, PeerIndex and any of the other so-called influence indices, knows how to look at and determine the […]

Blog Carnival: The ROI of Social Media is The CRV of Revenue Impact
This post is part of the Social ROI Blog Carnival at Think Customers: the 1to1 Media blog. Visit the blog carnival post “Calculating the ROI of Social Media” to check out the full lists of posts from numerous well-known social media thought leaders. ROI = Social Media CRV There have been an amazing number of […]

The Science of Influence
All customers are not created equal. Nor are visitors to your website, followers of your Twitter feed, or ‘Like’rs of your Facebook page. While companies often give lip service to providing all customers and prospects equal allocations of resources and attention, the truth is that resources are limited – people, money, time. These limitations force […]

Influence and Business
Last week I was on a vendor briefing call (social media monitoring and response) and the subject of influence and it’s use by business came up in the discussion. It started me thinking again about influence and how (or if)…

Entering Marketing’s Golden Age
There’s a great Churchill quote, which I think applies to our long sojourn in the valley of social networking: Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing… after they have exhausted all other possibilities. Social networking is important and will be a major part of our future but I can’t help but think […]

What’s Your Customer Score?
I’ve been writing about Klout and the broader topic of social scoring for a while now, but after last week’s piece in the Boston Globe, the level of consumer awareness of the site has stepped up dramatically. What is Klout? In short, it’s an algorithm that assigns anyone (or anything) owning a Twitter handle with […]

Twitter in a Teapot
Have you heard about Klout.com? I bet you have because the Twittersphere did what it does best when friend Esteban Kolsky brought our attention to an article in the Boston Globe about social scoring upstarts Klout.com and PeerIndex.net in Friday morning’s edition (“Ascent of the social-media climbers”). Kudos to Kolsky who lives in the Rockies […]