I have been and continue to be a skeptic of influence measuring.

From physics we all know about the “observer effect” – that the act of measuring impacts the phenomenon being measured. Surely this effect should be even more powerful in the social realm, with thinking and emotional actors, than when analyzing inanimate particles. In an earlier post I stated that from the principles Mark Schaefer outlines in Chapter 10 of his new book, ROI, these seven steps should be effective at raising a Klout score:

1. Post more often,
2. Post on trending or popular topics,
3. Post when your important followers are online,
4. Follow people with high Klout scores,
5. Don’t follow people with low Klout scores,
6. Unfollow followers who have become inactive or have had their Klout score fall below a cutoff level,
7. Do whatever you can to engage people with high Klout scores.

Six weeks ago I started focusing on steps #5 and #6, both of which I feel are a bit anti-social. My content is actually down over the period because we are at the end of the semester with grading and projects and committee wrap-ups…

Sure enough my Klout score has slowly risen from 48/49 to 53 over that period. [I will never do all seven steps as I write about what I am interested in and cannot be a sycophant…but if you REALLY care about your Klout score do them all!]

I encourage people to look at the Klout alternatives, PeerIndex and Kred. Because of the observer effect it is important to have more than one scorer. I examined relative scores on the three services. I consider @ckburgess @markwschaefer and @kenthuffman to be my three mentors on social media, so I looked at how the four of us score by the three measures. Two observations: (1) there is some diversity in the scoring (2) they are probably all wrong because all three mentors should probably score higher than me.

@markwschaefer                  71                                64                                922

@ckburgess                            55                                60                                843

@ProfessorGary                    53                                65                                789

@Kenthuffman                      49                                52                                783

More on influence measuring?

Mark Schaefer in a 9-minute interview talks about the power of influence marketing:

Schaefer Interview

Azeem Azhar, founder of PeerIndex is interviewed by Mark. An interesting insight into the power of the mighty middle (scores of 35-65):