I’m reminded of Jules Winfield– Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction…
“I was sitting here, eating my muffin and drinking my coffee and replaying the incident in my head, when I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity.”
I wasn’t sitting around, eating a muffin. But there was something. I’ve been thinking for the past few days about social media in general, but specifically thinking about metrics tools like Klout. About how we read and hear from “experts” that say we shouldn’t focus or spend too much time thinking about Klout scores, follower counts– all that stuff. And they’re not wrong. At least not entirely.
See, this is what I’ve been wondering. As much of a downside as these experts/gurus/ninjas/rockstars of the Social cosmos tout, I have to believe there’s an equal upside to them.
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”– Newton’s Third Law of Motion
What if there is a usefulness for these tools beyond the obvious ego stroking? What if we used these to measure something else?
The past couple of weeks, I’ve taken to Klout (I really don’t like to focus on one site, but since they’re the de facto leader in the marketplace, it just seems inevitable) and instead of looking at my score, I’ve decided to look at the breakdown by network. I’m looking to see how my general day-today breaks down. I took some screen caps to show you what I mean.
The overview– this shows what the current Klout score is, and the high/low scores for the past 90 days (why 90 days? I have no idea). It’s really not an important component, but since engagement is tied to the score, it bears mentioning.
One view of the breakdown. This is one area where I’ve been focusing my attention. It shows me how my calculated score breaks down. We’ll see in the next shot WHERE it breaks down more fully (the different colors correspond to the various networks associated with this account). In my case, it looks like the majority of my score right now is coming from Facebook and Twitter activity.
Here’s the legend to the previous pie chart (or is it a donut chart? I don’t know. I like both.). As I noted, the bulk of my Klout score is coming from Facebook and Twitter (almost 70% combined), with Instagram coming in third place. These percentages are fluid, and will vary depending on where you’re choosing to invest your energy and social engagement on a given “snapshot” in time.
What can I do with this info? If I were a job-seeker, for example, I could look at this and conclude that I might be spending a good chunk of my energy and time on Facebook and Twitter– not necessarily a bad thing per se, but odds are if you’re on Facebook, you’re not networking or engaging in what I’d describe as “professionally productive” engagement. So I might look at spending more time on Linkedin and seeing how the scales tip after some time.
Personally, my goal (lofty and unattainable as it may be) is to get to a point where my score is being calculated by a balanced split among the different players. I’ve taken steps to increase my engagement in places like Google+ and Linkedin, although with Linkedin there is the issue of involvement in groups, and my experience so far has been less than positive (in short, I find there’s a lot of noise and unnecessary self-promotion, rather than genuine conversations going on there). However, the Google+ community in general has been much more engaging. I’m surprised more people aren’t as actively involved there, but I understand the why behind it, especially in light of the popularity of the behemoth that is Facebook.
So, there it is. While a lot of people may have their issues and reservations with sites like Klout (could we consider them a type of aggregator), I believe it can be harnessed to reap potentially positive results beyond that for which it was designed.