Just over a week ago I blogged about why (and how) I’d opted out of Klout. I’ve read yet more articles about it since that confirmed to me I’d made the right decision – I particularly enjoyed the The Fairytale of Klout earlier. Given their recent glitch where many ppl saw another drop of anywhere up to 20 points, I think it’s possible the Klout bubble is well on its way to bursting, but hey, who knows.
But it does leave me lacking a social media metric. Almost as soon as I started reading rumblings about Klout, I picked up on rumours of a new kid on the block, called Kred. Obviously I joined the waiting list ;), and this week I got my invite to the beta system, probably because they got tired of me going on about it 😉
First things first, it isn’t supposed to be a Klout replacement. Instead of a one of score, you get a two parter – one is out of 1000 and is based on your influence – and is normalised against other users. The second is your outreach score and is out of 10. I’m told by Andrew Grill (the CEO of PeopleBrowsr UK who are the company behind Kred) that your outreach score will never fall and isn’t normalised. So the headline score on the Kred badge might not tell the whole story – you need to look at ppl’s recent activities to be sure of what’s going on. At the moment the badge isn’t available to put on your blog/ site, but it’s under development.
The site is a touch on the slow side just now, which is a bit disheartening given it’s in beta and presumably not under heavy use. However, the positive points are many. There is an open and obvious privacy policy, so you can set your profile to one of three settings, public, private or anonymous. The company is responsive on twitter – I’ve had good conversations with both @kred and @AndrewGrill which leads me to hope they are listening to their beta users, and will avoid the major holes Klout seem to have dug for themselves.
The biggest plus though is complete transparency of how your Kred score is reached. It’s all in the Kred Rules – you can see what you get points for and how that translates to your score. This is a major major plus point – one of the biggest criticisms of Klout is its complete lack of transparency. Similarly I find Peerindex pretty inscrutable, and despite one tweet from their CEO this afternoon recommending I look at topical influences, he didn’t come back to say what they are or why. (I did go look. I’m very influential on swimming. That would be because less than 50 ppl have mentioned it apparently. Hohum.)
The thing I’m not sure about on Kred is communitites. I get the idea. That we form communities around our interests, and also that you can be influential in a community you aren’t really that involved in, if ppl in that community RT your stuff etc. But if you look at the top of the home business community, for example, it consists of ppl/accounts who have very little interest in it, and are mainly tweeting streams of quotes. I know this is a problem for social media metrics throughout the system, and I confess I do wonder why ppl so slavishly RT cliches and quotes (dons hard hat and prepares to go down in flames) but I think it can probably be worked around. I did enquire as to whether self created communities are on the cards and was told it sounded like a great idea, so you never know.
I’m hoping to have a bit more of a chat with Andrew and possibly run a blog interview with him very soon, so if there’s anything else that springs to mind for you all, do let me know.
Of course, you’re all wondering why I care, given how negative I’ve been about Klout recently and stats generally in the past. The bottom line is that measurement of our activity online isn’t going to go away, and if I want to make some money out of my blogging/ social media hobby (which I do, we have three children and another on the way!) then I have to know what ppl think is important and how it all works. I got burnt by Klout, and I’m not prepared to have it happen again. I want to know how these systems work, as I believe information is power. And yes, I like numbers. So there you go.
What was that? What’s my Kred? It shows at 810/9 atm, thank you for asking 🙂
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