Klout and Kred: Are they relevant to your career or jobhunt?

By Neil Patrick

Scott Levy wrote a great article last week on the Forbes website, which I tweeted recently called Klout Vs. Kred: Which, If Any, Is Better For Your Business?  I have quoted some of his points below and would like to thank him for raising this highly topical subject.

Given what this blog is about though, this post is focussed on individuals and specifically those looking to advance their careers or find a new or better job. Are these things meaningful? Do they matter? And what if anything should you do with them?

In case you are only vaguely aware of these things, let’s start with a basic overview of the two tools and the differences between them:

Klout:

Klout was the first company to create an algorithm that would assign a number to people based on a mathematical measurement of their social influence.  It was a novel and interesting idea. People with high scores proclaimed what a great platform and measurement tool it was.  Those with poor scores didn’t care, shrugged it off or felt mistreated. Critically, there was no transparency as to how Klout had come up with these scores, however. 

Yet some HR folk with no real ability to understand or make their own determinations about social media prowess started to make hiring decisions based on these scores! As most people know, this score goes up and down daily and often without an understandable reason. In addition it’s always been easily manipulated - hire someone to spam your twitter handle and all of a sudden you’re a social media rocket scientist. If we accept the Klout algorithm as valid, then a 14 year old screaming about Justin Bieber every day is just as influential as an intelligent and insightful tech journalist with a solid following and engagement.

Kred:

Kred started off in a similar fashion, focused on a score. Their approach was different though in that they attempted be completely transparent about what factors went into their score calculations.

By displaying a massive real time stream of the data they aggregate via their data engines, it’s like a visual buffet of everything you have ever tweeted, posted, or commented on in social media. It also helpfully shows your retweets and accolades in sorted into different topics.

Kred proclaims, ‘This is what we see you doing, this is how people are reacting to your content, and this is why and what we feel you’re influential about’. To its credit, this transparency makes the tool much more useful to us than Klout; transparency is everything today and to do things better we all need meaningful data, not a black box which simply produces a number for everyone that only its proprietors understand the workings of. As Scott has pointed out, Kred is so transparent that they have even published a Scoring Guide: http://kred.com/rules

A Kred score (mine!) today

In addition to influence, Kred also measures what they call outreach. Think of it like this, influence is about how well received your content is (such as retweets for example), outreach is about how much you help others by sharing their content and replying to their messages. It’s perfectly possible to score very highly on one and very low on the other. The size of your network impacts both however.

The transparency of Kred is also its biggest problem. There’s too much information upfront. It’s cluttered & hard to sort through. It really does need to be restructured, and presented in an organised way versus a streamed and somewhat chaotic wall.  This way you could drill down and investigate your key social media moments and how certain pieces of content performed etc. Right now, the way it’s laid out is too difficult to sort through and understand.

As the situation stands, we have two increasingly widespread measurements, but their meaningfulness for hiring decisions is extremely questionable. Nevertheless the fact is that some recruiters, especially for marketing and media jobs ARE using them to assess candidates before or after interview.

So if you are in these fields, you need to manage your scores, whether you agree with their meaningfulness or not.

Does this mean the rest of us can relax and forget all about this stuff? Well yes and no. If you are job hunting or serious about developing your personal brand, then Kred in particular is actually rather helpful. Because of its transparency, it gives you real time feedback on the impact of your activities and their outcome. You can also benchmark yourself against those you aspire to match or outperform in your specialist field. And since there is so little real analytics available for social media, there aren’t really any better options out there.

So in conclusion, if your personal network and profile are important to your future career goals and success, then I believe these tools are useful despite the shortcomings I’ve talked about above. You might not like them, but the fact is some recruitment decisions (and probably more in future) are being influenced by these numbers. Don’t be afraid to use them to explore what someone does via social media, their interests, and even outreach. It’s a pretty neat way of stripping away the veneer and seeing what the people in your network are really all about. And if you are developing your personal brand successfully, it’ll give you some bragging rights too!