Skeptic Geek

Continuing the discussion in my earlier post, PeerIndex: Rating Authority and Relevancy, let’s look in detail at some of the challenges for PeerIndex and what lessons Klout can learn.

Challenges for PeerIndex

1. Get More Accurate Scores of the Big Guys

I saw several folks yesterday seeing their PeerIndex score as Zero. Apart from that, look at just these examples:

Something is clearly not right. These are two of the most influential people in tech and media. These are folks who can make or break a startup, and you better get their scores right if you’re to gain any credibility and leverage their influence.

2. Adapt to Different Content Curation Approaches

Different people use Twitter in different ways. For example, Louis Gray’s sharing is primarily through Google Reader, which is tweeted by @lgstream. Robert Scoble’s content curation is through his Twitter Favorites.

These are influential early-adopters, who consume and filter from a massive information stream, and have hence tweaked their Twitter usage habits to suit their needs. The use of their primary Twitter account is for conversation, while curated content gets a separate, dedicated feed.

PeerIndex probably needs to find a way to incorporate multiple Twitter accounts and Twitter favorites into its ranking.

3. Offline Influence Tracking

This is a tough nut to crack and I’m only reiterating it here for the sake of completeness.

Lessons for Klout

1. Diversify Beyond Twitter

If you’re not leveraging Facebook, you’re yet to capitalize on the social web. The Twitterverse is a significant, but small part of the social web.

2. Remember Your Promises

In January 2010, Klout announced that they will be releasing lists of the top influencers for a new country every week. By August 2010, how many country lists have been published? Three – Brazil, UK, and Germany.

3. Leverage Twitter Lists

For a startup aiming to build definitive influence ranking on Twitter, you would think you can readily follow top influencers by region, topic, etc. from their Twitter account. Here are the only lists Klout has created on Twitter:

This is a failure to capitalize on and leverage a core Twitter feature.

4. Don’t Sacrifice Functionality For UI

I have said it before and I’ll say it again: If You’re Removing Features, Please Tell Your Users!

In May, Klout launched a revamped site with a new classification system and UI. What was not announced was that you no longer had the ability to view the top influencers in a topic, or see the Klout scores of users in a Twitter List.

It is critical for users to be able to use Klout not just to check scores of people they know, but to aid discoverability, easily create Twitter lists using Klout and so on.

Both these startups are very innovative and doing some great work. These are my thoughts on some of the challenges they face and lessons they can learn.

Since Analyzing Twitter Lists-Follower Ratio As An Indicator Of Influence, I have been occasionally checking out Klout as the least followers-driven and interesting influence tracker on Twitter. Now, there’s a new kid in town in the influence measurement space and more – PeerIndex.

Coverage of PeerIndex on Guardian, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch Europe focused only on the influence measurement aspect. Azeem Azhar, founder of PeerIndex, is a former Reuters Innovation Head, who’s also worked with The Economist, Guardian, and BBC. This rich media background drives the topic-based approach of PeerIndex and distinguishes its vision from Klout.

Comparing Ranking Methodology with Klout

Klout Score is a normalized ranking based on:

• True Reach: The people who regularly pay attention to what you say.
• Amplification Probability: How far (and often) your content spreads.
• Network Influence: The influence of your engaged network.

PeerIndex Score has a fundamentally different approach. Rather than calculating a global score first, it defines topics and then calculates an Authority Score in that topic. The rationale behind this is sound: that experts in one topic are not necessarily experts in another.

The PeerIndex Score is a normalized ranking based on:

• Authority: Quality of the links you share and content you recommend.
• Activity: How active you are in a topic based on relevance.
• Audience: Number of people you can reach after discounting spam/gamed/inactive accounts

The key difference between the two approaches is:

PeerIndex also analyzes quality of content you share, rather than just monitoring Twitter activity.

Influence Tracking vs. Relevancy Rating

While Klout is focused solely on Twitter mechanics, PeerIndex also focuses on relevancy of content shared in the context of a topic. Azeem tells me that they are presently tracking over 100 topics, and more topics will be made public in phases.

LinkedIn and Facebook Integration

PeerIndex integrates your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles in scoring, while Klout only works with Twitter. I think this is a huge difference that will affect the usefulness of such services. If you have a Facebook fan page with lots of fans, and are connected to other influencers on LinkedIn, Klout won’t take that into account, but PeerIndex can.

At present, it only considers raw number of connections, but may use more engagement metrics from these services in the future.

Blog Integration

Another interesting factor is the ability to add your blog or website to your profile. At present, there is little effect of adding a blog on one’s PeerIndex score, but it is a step in the right direction. It will be interesting if PeerIndex can assess the authority of your blog and factor it in its ranking.

People Focus: No Brands

The team has made a conscious decision to keep brands and organizational accounts out of its site. The focus is on finding people, exclusively. So, @TechCrunch and @Mashable may have high Klout scores, but they don’t have a PeerIndex.

[Update: As Azeem clarifies in the comments, brand scores are kept internal to the system, just not made public.]

Valuing Curation: Oversharers Penalized

I had written in March about oversharing in social media and how curation increases your reputation. Now, PeerIndex puts this principle in action: there is a cost for oversharing. Noise in your feed reduces the relevance of your shares, hence your ranking goes down.

Challenges: Real World Influence

As with any web service, the challenges for PeerIndex are that there is no standard way all influencers use the social web. For example, authors of real-world books, who may in fact be really influential, may not be active users of the social web. Some may not use Twitter at all. In the end, these services are really useful only for people discovery on the social web.

Future: Authoritative News Aggregation

PeerIndex plans to sell a premium service to brand marketing and PR, to help them identify which influencers their clients should target. More interestingly, Azeem also shared with me the idea of collating the opinions of different authorities to create an aggregated newspaper.

The possibilities are fascinating. Imagine sections from Flipboard – like FlipFinance or FlipTech being powered by topic-based authorities from PeerIndex. According to Azeem, their topic model is not constrained and can be extended to any number of topics. What we have here is an Open-ended Authority-cum-Relevance Ranking Engine.

API? Coming soon.

Azeem’s Interview With Scoble

Do check out this really insightful interview by Robert Scoble with Azeem Azhar.