Jun 11
28

Understanding Klout Topics

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note: This post was originally posted in Alan’s personal blog, . It is reprinted here at Alan’s request

The most widely known social media measurement tool right now in the market is most likely Klout. They have gained notoriety through their API which have allow hotels to look up your Klout score at check-in (and then providing special treatment to those with high scores), and other applications to help people evaluate other people’s influence in the land of social media.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit Klout’s head office in San Francisco and to sit down with Megan Berry (@meganberry) their Marketing Manager. We had a great 30 minute chat, where we covered a variety of topics from Klout Perks to scoring, to Klout Topics. Klout Topics have dominated my Twitter stream for months now with many people questioning how these topics are chosen by Klout especially when in some cases they seem completely out of character or have nothing to do with what these people tweet about.
People hard at work at Klout

Here is a summary of what I learned and it now is starting to make sense.

1. Klout first looks for specific keywords/themes in your tweets that generated lots of engagement. This can be based on lots of replies to your tweet or retweets of your tweet;
2. Secondly, if you replied to someone’s tweet and your response generated lots of engagement then they will look back to the original tweet for keywords/themes;
3. Once they have the keywords/themes where you yield influence, they use a Symantec dictionary to identify standardized and relevant terms
4. Klout then compares your influence on these standardized terms to see if you are yielding significant influence within your circle and within their user base
5. If you are deemed to yield influence on a specific term it will appear in your list.

Take these two examples:

On person tweets about personal “privacy” 20 times a day. If no-one ever replies to their tweet or retweets it, the term “privacy” will not show up on their list.

Another person publishes a single tweet on personal “privacy”, it generates 20 replies and is retweeted 30 times plus many retweets of the retweets. In this case a single tweet has generated influence and it will appear in their list (assuming that they are not more influential on another 10 other topics – the maximum displayed).

This can cause problems when the use of the Symantec dictionary presents terms that don’t make senses to you. For example, in my case for more than the past month Klout has told me (https:///clork/bons/danf.js?k=0&/clork/bons/danf.js?k=0&/clork/bons/danf.js?k=0&/clork/bons/danf.js?k=0&/clork/bons/danf.js?k=0&/clork/bons/danf.js?k=0&klout.com/#/aknecht/topics) that I’m influential on the term “tools”. I rarely use the word “tool” or “tools” in my tweets and I took it to mean items like hammers. Megan explained to me that I tweet a lot about analytics software, utilities for measuring social media, etc. In general I tweet a lot about “social media tools” and “analytic measurement tools” so Klout has simplified these items down to just the word “tools”.

I have theorized that some of the problems people are having occurs if they click the reply button on a tweet and then start a different conversation with the person not realizing that while in their minds this is a new tweet, yet in Klout’s eyes it is still connected to the theme and keywords of the original tweet that started the conversation.

So that is Klout Topics in a nutshell. Do you think they are on the right track or they off-base?

Jim Hedger

Jim Hedger is an organic SEO and digital marketing specialist. Jim has been involved in the online marketing industry since 1998 and a SEO since 1999. Best known as a broadcaster, interviewer, content writer and search industry commentator, Jim is a frequent conference speaker and organizer. He hosts the search focused radio show Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM and is a WebmasterRadio.FM conference interviewer. Jim brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, passion and creative thinking to each project. Preferring a teamwork approach, Jim strives to inform and train his clients and their staff to run and maintain their own search and social media efforts.

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This entry was posted on June 28, 2011 at 10:29 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Alan K'necht by Jim Hedger 1 Comment

1 Response to "Understanding Klout Topics"

  • Carmaniac says:
    July 1, 2011 at 9:35 am
    Reply

    Great post Jim! Helped me get my head wrapped around Klout-Topics (a 2 day research obsession of mine) and this single post told me more about the subject than anything else I was able to stumble across (including Klout’s very own web site).

    I want to start off with “I am obsessed with Klout”, so this is in no way a bash on them. But it appears to me that their method of measurement, although incorporates multiple different platforms, is skewed more to one in particular (which happens to be the single platform mentioned in your passage above). I know as a company just starting out, “ya gotta start somewhere”, which begs me to ask: When will the other social network platforms be tied in better?

    In my personal network it does not appear that people are using Twitter as much as they are using Facebook (if they are even using it at all) , and in many cases even LinkedIn seems to be getting more action than Twitter. Many of the people I have been working with, have a Twitter acct solely “because it is the right thing to do”. A lot of them claim to simply “not get it”, so they will either let it fester unused, or set up a system that will allow their Facebook posts land on Twitter also.

    So I guess my short answer to your question “Are they on track or are they off base” is ‘Yes & Yes’. If Klout topics and Klout scores are based solely on twitter, I think they are currently off base. I do however think they are pointing in the right direction, so they are on track to being accurate in the future. Once they are able to better incorporate the other social media platforms better, and potentially even individual blogs, only THEN do I think the the social media measuring device Klout will be both on the right track and on-base.

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