We All Have Influence Somewhere

The social networking revolution provides the unprecedented opportunity to observe, filter and analyze conversations in real time. For marketers and anyone interested in human behavior, it’s now possible to examine the collective consciousness for insights into consumer behavior and detection and engagement with the most influential people.

Increasingly, we find that the elements that determine “influence” in online networks are the same as they are in “real life” relationships: Trust and Generosity within small close networks of friends and subject matter experts. These in turn have become the foundations for Kred, a brand new way to understand anyone’s Influence and Outreach across social media and within Communities formed around interests and affinities.

‘We All Have Influence Somewhere,’ so Kred sifts through billions of social posts from over 110 million people in real time to uncover who is most influential on any subject, keyword or hashtag. This all summarized in Kredentials, which displays anyone’s history on Twitter over the last three years with a single click, including their top communities, most used words, most clicked links and much more.

Here are just a few of the other ways Kred is an evolution of influence measurement:

Dual Scores for Influence and Outreach
Influence – scored on a 1-1000 scale – shows the likelihood that your posts provoke actions from others. Outreach demonstrates your generosity in ReTweeting and replying to others.

Community
Real influence comes from expertise and passion. Kred is calculated for everyone in Communities that naturally form around interests and affinities.

Complete Transparency
Visitors to Kred.ly can see how all of their social actions count towards their scores – and how their connections’ actions affect them as well. Those who want a more thorough accounting of their score can take advantage of our Score Audit feature.

Offline Kred
Kred is the only influence measure to integrate offline achievements with online identity. Visitors can add their accomplishments – anything from academic honors to club memberships – by sending us a PDF from the ‘Get More Kred‘ menu tab inside the Kred site. We will then hand score it and manually add points.

Kred is free for everyone at http://kred.ly and deeply integrated into Playground, PeopleBrowsr’s social analytics platform. For those who wish to build custom applications off of our datamine of 1,000 days of social data, Kred can be accessed via our Playground API, Kredentials API and through a standalone API.

Many key unique features of Kred – including score audits, privacy controls and real-time activity statements – are based on feedback from our community of friends and colleagues. What would you like to see in its next evolution?

Give Kred a try and let us know what you think via email: kred@peoplebrowsr.com or on Twitter: @kred.

- Shawn Roberts, PeopleBrowsr

In San Francisco, one of the flagship programs we’re excited to be a part of is called PeopleBrowsr Labs, a startup accelerator geared toward technology companies in the area. As you sit in the PeopleBrowsr office, the brilliance in the air is almost palpable … Young companies doing innovative things with everything they need to be successful at their disposal. One of the fringe benefits for participants in PeopleBrowsr Labs is that they’re actually rubbing elbows with the PeopleBrowsr team as well … Which is almost worth the price of admission.

In addition to the Labs sponsorship, SoftLayer is also the infrastructure provider for PeopleBrowsr and its unbelievable data mine of information. They’ve got every tweet that’s been tweeted since early 2008, and they’ve been able to take that content and make sense of it in unique and interesting ways … And that’s why we stopped by for a visit this week. Last night, PeopleBrowsr officially launched Kred, a dynamic and innovative social influence measurement platform, to a LOT of fanfare (see: TechCrunch).

In the midst of the launch-day craziness, we grabbed Scott Milener, PeopleBrowsr SVP of business development, to have him explain a little about Kred, what differentiates it from the other social influence measurements and what it means for users interested in engaging more effectively with their social networks. Check it out:

With the clear success of the announcement, we want to send a shout out of congratulations to the PeopleBrowsr team. It looks like a phenomenal leap forward in understanding social engagement, and we know it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what we’ll see coming out of the PeopleBrowsr office in the near future.

If you feel a little jaded by the social influence measurements you’ve seen, Kred’s transparency and community-centricity should be refreshing: http://kred.ly

-@PaulFord

After last night’s “4th quarter of doom” that probably led to crazy nightmares for my sleeping kids (I may have been yelling loudly and often), I decided to open Twitter to see what everyone in the world thought about the game. I have to admit I was a little shocked at how many Cowboy haters are out in the wild. Of course the game was trending, and the conversation was … diverse: You had your die-hard Cowboy fans that were saying, “Shake it off, you weren’t supposed to win anyway.” You had your fair weather fans that were saying, “Great, another season opener loss, I guess I’ll follow the Texans instead.” You had the fans of other teams that were saying, “Haha, the Cowboys lost again – Go (Insert your team here)!” And, of course you had the pure Cowboy haters who were saying, “#$%^#$%^#$ the Cowboys they #$%#$% and #$%# and then #$%#$%. Eat it!” I would say most were Cowboy haters, and most of the tweets were not even close to being rated PG-13.

Stay with me now … I’m finally onto the real topic.

Social Media
What I saw on Twitter last night was real Social Media to me. It was current, real time, opinionated, cool and sad all at the same time. It encapsulated the thoughts and reactions of the public to something that was happening or just happened. Why is social media cool? A couple of weeks ago when the earthquake struck the northeast, people were saying that they received tweet updates of the ground shaking and notifications that an earthquake hit seconds before they felt the tremors in their area. Think about that and how many possible uses that has in lots of different industries. X happens, Y needs to know about it right away, Z tweets it or posts it on Facebook (or any of the 2000 other social apps out there), and like magic you have the information almost before you are supposed to. That’s viral social media.

Social Marketing
Social Marketing isn’t nearly as sexy. It’s only and exactly what it sounds like. We do it at SoftLayer: You see tweets from us talking about press releases, new products, our new website, our new international locations and some of the other value we provide to customers because we know how easy it is to miss some of the best stuff in the noisy social sphere. It helps us build our brand and helps with awareness by getting our name in front of people who may not have seen it otherwise. It drives traffic to our website and straight to our order form. It is significant to our bottom line.

The challenge with this kind of engagement is that the volume of content can seem overwhelming to some. Some customers only want to hear the viral social media kind of stuff with up to the minute news (which is our vision for @SoftLayerNotify), but it’s tough to abandon the social marketing piece because it’s been so measurably successful for us.

With that being said, we want to hear from you about what you like and don’t like about our social engagement. What you would like to see more of? What would you like to see less of? Do you like it? Do you hate it? We’re definitely listening … Well as long as we’re not busy getting ready for the next flash mob.

-@skinman454