Got Kred?
November 8, 2011
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It’s Tools Tuesday Take Two (big fans of alliteration over here) and this week we’ve been hearing a lot about digital kred…
Image by National Archief, Flickr Creative Commons
What’s it all about?
Kred.ly is a new tool coming from the guys at PeopleBrowsr that is designed to measure ‘digital influence’ – in other words, to asses and rate the scale of the impact that a certain person, profile or organisation has on the social media universe every time they post, share, retweet or get retweeted.
Sound a bit familiar? Kred might be a recent arrival on the scene, but measuring digital influence has been the new black of social media for a while now, and you’ve probably already heard of or tried out the more established Klout, a tool that assigns a score to Twitter profiles on the basis of influence. If you are trying to spread a message or a brand through social media, understanding who the key players are is now considered pretty vital, as they are the ones that can get the word out. Being able to assess and hopefully then build up your own authority online is also an obvious benefit, though certainly not a walk in the park.
We’ve been happily using Klout for a while now (our score is 60, in case you’re wondering), so when we heard about Kred we decided to apply for an account to compare, which we will be doing as soon as we get access and a chance to explore it. But in the mean time we thought we’d share what we know about the new kid on the block in case you wanted to request an invite and do the same!
Sharing an office in San Francisco, which must get a little tense, both Kred and Klout are now on the same quest for these useful influence metrics, but take a slightly different approach…
How it works
Like Klout, Kred works by rating Twitter profiles, giving them a score based on their level of ‘kred’ or authority/power online – number of followers, retweets etc. It also looks at data from Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, but Twitter is its main source. So far, so similar.
However, there are a couple of heralded differences between the two tools:
- Credentials and communities
Kred sets itself up as being a more targeted, community-focused approach to thinking about digital influence. By using the bios of Twitter profiles, Kred can rate influential people/voices based on their credentials – i.e a famous astrophysicist will have a different sort of online authority to, say, Kanye West, and if your trying to get out a message about your new…eh, spaceship, it’s more useful to form a relationship with the astrophysicist than with Kanye, no matter how many followers or retweets he has. To take a more grounded example (see what we did there…) it’s often more effective to know who the influencers are in a small community like Brussels journalists and form relationships with them – and see how much influence you have in that community – if you’re communicating about the EU.
- The two way street
Kred also uses a slightly different, or rather, added analytic to try and score not just the reach but the level of engagement/generosity of a potential influencer. Obviously it’s fantastic if someone with a few hundred thousand followers posts about you or retweets for you, but most accounts with mammoth numbers don’t really engage that much. So Kred measures:
1) Influence score = the Twitter profile’s ability to inspire others on a scale from 1 to 1,000; Based on how often the Twitter profile’s tweets are retweeted, how many new followers the Twitter profile gains, and how many replies the Twitter profile generates.
2) Outreach score = measured in levels; The outreach score is a reflection of how generous a Twitter profile is with retweeting and replying to others.
This way, Kred attempts to treat digital relationships more like physical relationships – engage with people you know are listening and who can and will get your message out for you. In terms of scoring something like the @EU_Commission account, we probably wouldn’t have much outreach kred, even though our influence score could be similar to Klout.
The point has also been made by other bloggers and reviewers (check out Katherine Leonard’s blog for lonelybrand here for an interview with Andrew Gill from PeopleBrowsr UK) that there is more transparency with Kred’s data than you get with Klout because it shows you exactly how a score is generated, while Klout’s is a little more enigmatic.
Interested?
Kred and Klout are both free services and both definitely worth a try we think– Klout is improving and building all the time, so keep an eye on them.
Measuring digital influence is far from an exact science, and it remains to be seen how much benefit we’ll all really get out of this sort of monitoring. The downside is that it’s really just for Twitter users and works through Twitter profiles, so it’s limited in that respect. That said, Twitter is a village, and sometimes it does help to know who’s the best gossip around.
We’re going to be posting again soon about our own experiences with Kred and the differences between our Klout and our Kred, and it would be great if you could do the same here!
Got any thoughts?
@AmyJColgan and @Linda_Margaret
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November 8th, 2011 at 8:55 pm
Thank you Amy and Linda for the great article. Everything was really well said and we appreciate the time spent in learning about our product. Kred prides itself in being the first and only completely transparent influence measure that focuses on communities rather than overall influence. Measuring influence is still in the early stages and we are glad to be part of such a pivotal time in Social Media.
December 19th, 2011 at 5:21 pm
I’ve been using Kred as a beta and so far i really like the way it explains and ranks. The whole thing is pretty much as it says – transparent and even tells you more realistic ways in which you can gain more Kred.
It is more engaging and whilst different, I thinkthat it will do well because it seems to have a greater/better polished algorithm and a process that is far more user-friendly than Klout.
So far my scores have remained consistent based upon my usage. I find Klout to be a bit of a joke now ever since they changed their algorithm and re-wrote historical data. Even when I have had more engagement my score drops and does so for days, whereas never increases. Sometimes on quieter days it does a little.
I have currently lost all faith in Klout and hope that Kred becomes the new, more reliable measure of social influence. I believe they will not make the same mistakes as Klout in this still newish industry.