Klout | Social Media Public Relations BlogSocial Media Public Relations Blog

Last week I asked if Klout is a good way to measure a person’s influence online. Not really.

Well I just found another approach that seems a lot more interesting using you number of followers and the number of lists you are a part of.

Here’s how it works:

To calculate LFR quickly, add a zero (0) to the Listed number and then divide that by the number of Followers, i.e. I have 4088 followers and appear on 483 Lists, my LFR is 4830/4088 = 1.18. A number > 1.00 means people are paying attention to you, a score approaching 2.00 means you have the focused attention of many!

For practical purposes, I actually think this is quite useful because a good sign of a person’s influence is the number of lists he/she is a part of. It’s easier to manipulate your number of followers, but not the number of lists you are a part of.

If someone added you to a list, it means that person is using you as a filter and wants to keep an eye on you. While some will say that retweets are a better sign of online influence, it’s a lot more difficult to measure because getting retweeted depends on a lot of factors.

This approach is certainly more practical and intuitive than all the measurement metrics Klout uses. What do you think of this approach?

What’s the best way to measure social media influence? (sphinn.com)
The trouble with measuring influence via social media (econsultancy.com)
The Great Klout Plunge of 2011 (cc-chapman.com)

One thing marketers yearn for is to the find the all elusive influencer or influencers who can help them spread the word about a new product or service. And now, with social networking tools giving us instant access to an almost infinite amount of people, finding these influencers becomes easier.

In theory.

Here’s the problem: measuring online influence is a hard problem to solve. There are many factors that contribute to measure a person’s influence. Another reason why it’s hard is because online influence, just like Google rankings, can be easily gamed.

There are quite a number of companies who are trying to crack this problem. One of them is Klout, who has been making major inroads into the emerging social media measurement business. And, social monitoring and analytics tools like Radian6 are using Klout’s data to find those online influencers.

Simply understanding how Klout works, a clever person can systematically do things to influence his/her Klout score to appear influential and then use that as a reference.

With that said, it doesn’t answer the question of this post: Is Klout a good way to measure online influence?

Collin Kromke says it’s total BS. Why?

Because one’s influence isn’t temporary.

I agree. A person’s influence shouldn’t go up or down if you stop ‘socializing online’. These scores make it look as if we were playing a game to see who interacts the most to get that influence score up.

But at this point it’s all experimental because, as stated above, it’s a daunting task to measure one’s online influence.

What do you think, is there a better way to measure online influence?