Like them or not, Klout has been around for three years and is continuing its quest to become the standard of influence online. Competitors have been announced, but have not yet launched.

Today I sat down with Klout CEO Joe Fernandez to discuss the future of Klout, and what the company has learned along the way.

Fernandez would love to see Klout scores rolling along the screen with Tweets on networks like CNN one day. But why? What is it that makes us want some sort of validation before we see someone or something as being credible?

Fernandez simply told me:

TV, Radio, and News are measured.

Since sites like Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Tumblr, and YouTube let us become “broadcasters”, Fernandez feels that people should be measured as well. The data we put into these sites needs to be cleaned up and normalized, and Fernandez thinks Klout is the one that can do it best.

Do we really need a score to validate ourselves?

The problem that I’ve had with Klout is how the loudest users have talked it up and beat it down. Early adopters are a blessing and a curse for any service, but especially one that brings out everyone’s inner ego.

Fernandez shares that the company receives emails and calls all of the time arguing that a person should be more influential in one thing rather than another, or that their score is completely off.

That’s the mystery though, nobody knows exactly what goes into the Klout score.

Google doesn’t tell you how its algorithm works.

This is what Joe Fernandez told me when I discussed Google’s approach to search engine relevance with him and how it relates to Klout’s business. This statement is true, and while SEO experts continually try to game Google’s algorithm, Google continues to update things which completely changes the game in real-time. Klout takes the same approach, and has been evolving its own scoring algorithm for the past three years.

He shared:

What we learn from people like Google, is that every decision comes with an unintended consequence. You have to keep making changes.

How does Klout change Customer Service?

Fernandez and I discussed Customer Service, and I brought up my own concerns about brands using Klout scores to lazily keep those with large followings happy by treating them differently. Companies not paying attention to those with lower Klout scores is not companies intention at all, though.

Fernandez points out that this segmentation already happens in most large-scale businesses, and Klout merely wants to help people learn that everyone has influence and how they can harness their own. The Perks service is a way that Klout lets users gain something from their never-ending updates on the internet. Fernandez says that 80% of the companies who have done a Klout Perk comes back to them with a new Perk.

Comfort through transparency and education

Fernandez discussed Klout’s heavy engineering focus:

Our DNA is science and engineering.

This “DNA” has caused some to attack Klout, wondering why one company should have so much data, and if it’s really worth it for people get so competitive about it. Actually, people are getting past just checking out their Klout Score. We’re told that over Fifty percent of users dig deeper into Klout, showing a little more engagement than the company’s early days.

Now that the company has grown to over forty employees, it is now focusing on marketing and education. Tomorrow the company will launch “Klout Score Insights”, which promises to give users a bit of an explanation when their score goes up or down. This type of feature can go a long way for transparency, as Fernandez explains:

Being “the standard” means people need to feel comfortable and have enough insight. Score Insight has been in development for five months.

Klout not just for Twitter users

Klout isn’t just about Twitter anymore, as the CEO shared with us that most of Klout’s growth in the past six months is coming from Facebook users, and that user base is quickly overtaking the Twitter early adopter set.

There are still a few things I’d like to see from Klout. I believe that more education and services are needed for the businesses themselves, especially since people are starting to add their Klout score to resumes and personal websites. Businesses should also have Klout scores, which would serve as a Better Business Beauru service for the connected crowd.

When asked why Fernandez chose the word “influence” to describe Klout, even though its an extremely subjective concept, he said:

Influence is such a lightning rod and could mean anything, and when I said it, people paid attention.

Will insights and continual tweaks to its algorithm be enough to show us that Klout is a data driven company and not a popularity leader board? Joe Fernandez thinks so, and we’ll see first hand tomorrow when the algorithm changes, and when we’re given some insights into why our scores have soared or dropped.

I was able to sit down with the Peoplebrowsr team this week to get a sneak peek of a new service by the company called “Kred“.

They shared a quote with us.

Time Magazine says:

Influence is impossible to measure.

Kred is most certainly an instant competitor to Klout, who calls its service the “Standard of Influence”. Peoplebrowsr wants to calculate influence in a different way, in a community way and transparently.

Peoplebrowsr’s CEO, Jodee Rich, told me that the company started thinking about how influence was being calculated online about a year ago. It seemed that the model revolved around how many followers, likes, or re-shares someone had on a service. Peoplebrowsr believes that Kred is a more contextual and community way to decide influence.

Rich calls Kred:

The first totally transparent social scoring system to evaluate influence among communities and reward generosity.

Kred has been announced today. I’ve had a look and there is a lot of data to view, and of course since it is very community driven, you can infinitely drill into topics and content on the site. Kred is officially launching on October 3rd.

Brands want access to reach, not just influence

What I find most interesting, Peoplebrowsr says that brands aren’t as interested in influence as they’re interested in reach. Kred creates a collective reach for a range of different topics, sorted by communities. For example, your Twitter Bio data is used to define communities and then Peoplebrowsr calculates a combined influence and outreach level score for that community. You can then get ranked within that community, instead of an overall ranking with others you aren’t even similar to. Measuring influence on topics as a starting point instead of broadly with followers and other social statistics is very smart. That’s why the Kred system is based on two scores; Influence and Reach.

The first is your influence score, up to 1,000. The second is your outreach level which is based on a calculation of things you’ve shared, said, and done in a particular community. You will have different influence score and outreach levels in every community.

Kred is powered by your tweets

Since the service Kred is powered by technology and data built by Peoplebrowsr, who has been around for since 1997, Kred has an activity summary of tweets going back four years. Every hashtag, @name, and link you have tweeted. This may sound creepy at first, but it is public information after all. Unless you have a protected account, then of course your tweets are not included.

Your Kred account is automatically turned on and public if you have a public Twitter profile, so once you’re given access to the service, you can turn it off if you like, or make certain items private, such as your Kred scores.

No more “class system”

Peoplebrowsr thinks that other services foster a “class system” the company likens to getting on a plane and having to sit in the back row. It’s not something that makes people happy, or proud about what they’re sharing and saying online. The company thinks Kred solves this.

Influence arguments

I’m personally cynical about measuring influence, online. I tend to treat people the same way, and I personally feel like companies should do the same. I understand that hotels in Las Vegas treat high rollers differently, because they’re spending a lot of money in the casino. What I don’t understand is why a brand would want to give something to someone just because they have a big online reach and mention their products a lot. It could be gamed easily.

I also don’t believe that any one company can call themselves the standard of influence.

What I do think that Kred can do well is manage this type of gaming and cynicism with simple transparency. It’s amazing how quickly you can get people on the side of your idea when you show them exactly how it’s done, and let’s hope that Peoplebrowsr sticks with that plan.

Look for a full review once we’re given full access to Kred.

The last time MC Hammer toured Australia it was the early 90’s, Hammer Pants were all the rage, and I had ambitions of being just like his arch-enemy Vanilla Ice.

Almost two decades on, Hammer (can I call you that, MC?) is returning to our southern shores, this time not as a performing star but as an Internet star. His social dancing startup, DanceJam, will soon be acquired for $3 Million if you believe the rumours and, according to WeFollow, he is the 34th most popular person on Twitter with over 1.6 Million followers.

Hammer is coming to Australia to launch the new Xbox exclusive karaoke title Lips: Number One Hits. The game features his chart topping smash hit ‘U Can’t Touch This‘.  He’s also going to be demonstrating the new Xbox Twitter feature.

On top of that, he’ll be attending the Social Media Club, Sydney, event on November 10th. Social Media Club Sydney is the largest SMC chapter in the world, so it’s good to see him speaking, particularly considering he has become somewhat of an expert on the subject including doing talks at Harvard Business School.

All this talk of Hammer as Internet star has got me thinking, though. How did Hammer, Ashton Kutcher and other celebs become experts on social media?

And reading some of Ross Dawson’s fantastic work on Influence has raised more questions: Is social media just a new space for those who already have influence beyond their ability (a generalisation of the modern celebrity) to further extend their breadth and depth of reach? Or is the social web transformative in the sense that it allows those who ought to influence to finally have their voice heard?

It’s a shame Hammer can’t find time for a 1-on-1 interview with me while here in Australia, because, outside of kicking his ass in a sing and dance off,  I’d like to ask him some of these questions in person. My feeling is that his answers would determine his true place as a social media expert.