I recently signed up for Klout. It’s a fun little vanity thing that tell you how much you influence your networks. They are mainly concerned about Twitter but they’re adding services to monitor Facebook and Google Plus.
When I signed up, they calculated that my Klout score is 36. That means I am active but get more influenced by my network than influence it. Around the same time, I joined up a service called BottleNoseApp (www.bottlenose.com) that helps in analyzing and interacting with your Twitter and Facebook streams. They have a pretty good set of tools that help you interact more with your extended twitter network (I use Facebook less nowadays). Two cool features are – Sonar and Assistants.
I checked my Klout score yesterday. It had bumped to 45!!! I obviously attribute this to better interaction with my twitter feed thanks to bottlenoseapp. Here’s how –
Sonar – Cute little tool. It displays you and the related topics, tags and Message types as nodes on a beautiful display. You can click on any node and then click Explore. That shows you related topics and tags as well as a stream of tweets related to the topic.
Assistants – These are your personal assistants that will help you manage and go deeper into your streams. The assistants that I’m using are “Suggested For You”, “Popular” and “Suggested Reposts”. I look at “Suggested for you” much more than I look at my normal twitter stream. I don’t know what algorithm bottlenose uses to suggest tweets to me (It’s actually based on the Interests I list or BottleNose deduces from my tweets) but every time, I get to look at really good tweets that I often reply to. A lot of tweets are from people not in my immediate network and so my replies to these tweets grow my network beyond what is already there.
Because I was interacting with people outside my current network and are generally popular people, Klout seems to have liked this and has upgraded my score to 45, calling me a Networker, someone who can be described as –
“You know how to connect to the right people and share what’s important to your audience. You generously share your network to help your followers. You have a high level of engagement and an influential audience.” (Source – Klout.com)
Things I do not like about the app is that the Suggested for you and the Popular assistants seem to show the same tweets to me (wonder what that says about me 😛 ). Also, the cache handling by the app is a bit weird if my computer goes to sleep. (I use Chrome on a Mac, go figure!). Finally, I wish they’d work on an iOS app soon and make sure they put Sonar and Assistants into that app! 🙂