Klout Reveals Broader Scores, Adds Expertise to Influence and Sets New Standard for Digital Context
SAN FRANCISCO, May 5, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Lithium today unveiled significant new Klout improvements aimed at surfacing expertise across the social media landscape, growing new audiences in international markets, and making the Klout Score more meaningful for all digital participants, whether they use Klout or not.
Klout has long been the leader in scoring online influence based on a person's or brand's reach and engagement across eight different digital channels. Today, Klout adds the critical element of expertise to the company's algorithms. The Klout Score is now the first and only system representing the intersection of influence and expertise online, making it easier for everyone to know whom to follow—or find personally relevant—in a digital world full of noise and confusion. This brings digital participants two things that have been hard to find online: meaningful context to make better decisions and greater trust in whom to follow and on what topics.
"These new features make Klout more meaningful for more people than ever before and reintroduce context and trust back into everyone's online experience," said Rob Tarkoff, President and CEO of Lithium + Klout. "Our power Klout users and those with high Klout Scores will be publicly visible for the expertise they have built over the years on topics they are passionate about. All Klout users can more easily determine whom to follow or curate for their own content feeds and discover others who share their expertise and interests. Even people who don't normally come to Klout to find their score can now use others' Klout Scores to help them find what matters most to them in ratings and reviews, marketplaces, and communities. They can find and follow people whose expertise matches their own tastes and needs. This is a significant revamp of Klout and acknowledges definitively that influence and expertise together are a more powerful measurement for today's online users, consumers, and brands alike."
- Topic expertise is the most significant of today's enhancements. Across Klout's nearly 10,000 topics, users will now see experts identified in each topic area in addition to relevant topical content, see which topics an individual user is considered an expert in, and quickly discern the expertise of anyone throughout the topic ontology. This provides nuance to the overall Klout Score and helps everyone understand on what expertise any Klout Score is built. Klout users can also learn where they have established their own expertise in the digital arena—and work on enhancing or changing that expertise with a more programmatic personal digital strategy.
- Klout is now also adding Arabic, French, German, and Spanish languages. Starting this month, the interface and core product will roll out in these languages. Over the next quarter, topic expertise in those languages will come online (by language and across the ontology), and content feeds and suggestions will also be available in those four additional languages. This is the first true internationalization of Klout in the company's history and reflects the company's ethos that the digital world is about shared experiences unfettered by language, cultural, or geographical constraints.
- While these improvements benefit core Klout users and enthusiasts, all digital participants also benefit tremendously. Online communities, ratings and reviews sites, media properties, and e-commerce destinations are all teeming with dozens to thousands of conversations from individuals of varying influence, expertise, backgrounds, and experiences. Klout topic expertise will help those users quickly discern whom to follow—and on what topics—by finding people whose expertise is most relevant for what they seek. A critic with a Klout identified expertise in food will be more personally relevant for dining sites while a frequent flyer with a Klout identified expertise in travel will be more useful for finding the best flight prices online.
"We are making it dramatically easier for people to make personal decisions based on the right context and a higher degree of trust," continued Tarkoff. "The digital universe now has so much information that it can be overwhelming to sift through the noise to make it useful. Until today, all of us had to make intuitive guesses regarding whose random post, comment, or perspective to trust. Our improvements to Klout remove that guesswork and quickly surface the expertise of more than 600 million people or brands with a Klout score. This is a digital game-changer and fundamentally alters how people and brands will interact online."
Klout offered the first online influence measurement system for individuals to gauge and track their impact on social channels. Today, more than 600 million individuals and brands are scored in the Klout system, which evaluates more than 400 signals from eight different networks, including Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as well as real world data from Wikipedia. Each day, more than 15 billion pieces of data are processed to update Klout Scores. Klout remains the undisputed leader in online influence measurement. Klout was acquired by Lithium in March 2014 and is operated as a Lithium brand.
About Lithium:
Lithium builds trusted relationships between the world's best brands and their customers, helping people get answers and share their experiences. Customers in more than 34 countries rely on Lithium to help them connect, engage, and understand their total community. With more than 100 million unique monthly visitors over all Lithium communities and another 600 million online profiles scored by Klout, Lithium has one of the largest digital footprints in the world. Using that data and the company's software, Lithium customers boost sales, reduce service costs, spark innovation, and build long-term brand loyalty and advocacy. To find out how Lithium can transform your business—and to share the experience enjoyed by 300 other leading brands around the world, visit www.lithium.com, join our community at community.lithium.com, or follow us on Twitter @LithiumTech. Lithium is a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco.
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SOURCE Lithium Technologies
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