For some wonderfully unknown reason the number of followers of the MyPE Twitter account keeps on growing steadily despite my resolve to not follow anyone as I feel it is an artificial way of boosting followers.
Keeping up with what is happening on Social Networks is a daunting and frustrating task as you can be guaranteed that whatever you write about, someone else will always pop up to say that they were first. In a way this is a ‘good thing’ as it has served to make me chant over and over again; “Give good well researched content with accessible links so that others can find out more”.
I have yet to get rid of that driving urgency to complete an article though and shake off the imagined chatter and stories that I may be missing as they flow past me in bits and bytes.
This ‘self gratification’, ‘me first’, ‘take the short cut to riches’, ‘gotta be the greatest’ world contributes heavily to our lack of excellence. If we don’t get instant results we move on to the next thing.
The main drivers of activity on the internet centre around instant gratification and that more is, well, more and better. We constantly start stuff and when we don’t get a little pat on the back telling us that we are the greatest we then sulk and blame others rather than stepping back and critically examining our actions with a view to improving ourselves.
But, once again, I digress (slightly)!
There is a startup (aren’t they all?) web site called Klout that uses sophisticated algorithms (aren’t they all?) and semantic analysis (give me a break, have you ever come across a machine that can discern meaning?) to measure the influence of people and topics on the web.
Make no mistake Klout is engaging and a bit of fun. The problem I have is that I will probably only use it once, finish this article and never go back to the site. My reasoning for this is that I have now seen the algorithm in action, judged the semantics to suck and received my score which is average (the story of my life, except for the Longhair, so far). I just did not receive a compelling message to return to the site which could have been solved with some form of add on or widget to be placed on MyPE proudly stating my attainment of the “Exalted Average Score of 44”. Of course it could just be that I am a sore middle finisher, average kinda guy with no ambition who is always grumbling!
Anyway, have a look at the people that Klout reckons influence MyPE and tell me if you agree.
As Klout explains: Network Influence is the influence level of your engaged audience. Engagement is measured based on actions such as retweets, @messages, follows, lists, comments, and likes. Each time a person performs one of these actions it is a testament to the authority and the quality of your content. Capturing the attention of influencers is no easy task, and those who are able to do so are typically creating spectacular content. Network Score looks at the Klout score of each person who interacts with you to determine:
- How influential are the people who @ message you?
- How influential are the people who retweet you?
- How influential are the people who follow you?
- How influential are the people who list you?
- How influential are the people who follow the lists you are on?
Factors measured are: List inclusions, Follower/Follow Ratio, Followed Back %, Unique Senders, Unique Retweeters, Unique Commenters, Unique Likers, Influence of Followers, Influence of Retweeters and Mentioners, Influence of Friends, Influence of Likers and Commenters.
Alan Straton
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