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MEASURE THE SOCIAL GRAPH
Measure Your Influence: Klout.com
Klout offers an assessment of social influence—similar to what Twitter Grader does with
Twitter—but then provides an additional for-pay service that returns the influence of individual
members within a given social network.
http://www.klout.comPTable 11.2 Measures of Influence
Metric What It Means
Average Number of Friends The degree to which people are connecting to others is useful in under-
standing the ease with which relationships form. If this is low relative to
expectations, look at the mechanism for friending or consider adding auto-
mated suggestions for relationships.
“Top 10” by Friend Count Who are the most connected, and does this change over time? This will help
you identify your community leaders.
Popular Group or Topic
ThemesWhat are the big interest areas? Knowing this is fundamental to encourag-
ing the development of new applications.
Most popular brands,
products, servicesWhat are the common interests, focused on marketing and business? What
are people talking about that is important (business-wise) to you?
Most viewed events,
members, etc.What are the popular activities? Combined with popular groups and con-
versational themes, this information provides specific guidance in ongoing
activity development.Spread
One fi nal measure that may be of interest: Referring back to the discussion of homoph-
ily—the tendency for like-minded individuals to link together in a social network—
there are ways to measure the degree to which this is happening. This is useful to know
because it suggests, for example, the degree to which a particular site is bringing indi-
viduals together as a rate that is different from what would happen by chance.
In other words, by studying the effects of homophily in a social setting, the degree
to which the social network itself is successfully driving friendships or other relationships
over and above what would be expected, provides an indication as to the value and per-
formance of the relationship tools—the ability to search and discover interesting connec-
tions, for example—and hence a measure of how likely the community is to grow, and
the degree to which it is adding social (versus purely functional) value to its members.
Measure Your Influence: Klout.com
Klout offers an assessment of social influence—similar to what Twitter Grader does with
Twitter—but then provides an additional for-pay service that returns the influence of individual
members within a given social network.
http://www.klout.com