Product Management Color Analysis: Klout

The promising Klout must prioritize power users.

If you are involved at least to a moderate degree with more than one social media outlet then you have likely at least heard of Klout. And chances are that even if you have heard of Klout you are probably uncertain exactly what it does and how it fits in with your overall social media participation, not to mention personal and professional strategy. For the sake of those who maybe have not heard of Klout, they claim to ‘put real metrics’ behind the natural process of sharing and recommending across social media platforms. Klout even goes so far as to claim to ‘make your life better’ (NOTE: whoever wrote that copy really ought to reevaluate their approach to product marketing. . no one wants to be told that some website is going to ‘make their life better’ – perhaps a post for another time). But what is the drive and intention behind this relatively new service, and where is it headed?

Before we get into what product management decisions could be outstanding for the Klout team it is important to understand the ‘hook’ behind the service. Essentially Klout calculates for you a score that represents your influence and reach across multiple social platforms (at the time of this writing these platforms include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and YouTube, Instagram, tumblr, Blogger, Last.fm and Flickr with Google+ planned for the near future). The premise is the higher your score the more credibility you have over the topics that Klout claims you dabble in the most when active across social media. So the Klout score is partly established to place some semblance of order over the cluttered and noisy landscape of constantly updating social media feeds. But the real hook, in my opinion, is that Klout offers Perks that seem tied to the strength of your score. For instance I received my Spotify invite the day Spotify launched in the U.S. via Klout. This in turn incented me to do two things. One, invite others to Klout on the promise that if I was responsible for five friends signing up I would get a month of premium Spotify access, and two, I began to pay more attention to Klout because that first perk was interesting enough for me to see if I could influence my Klout score and gain access to more Klout related perks.

With this new incentive I began to consciously see if I could influence my Klout score with my online activity. The results were immediately interesting. I found that with the notion of trying to improve my Klout score my activity across the varying platforms almost immediately changed from broadcast to engagement. I realize that this is not a new revelation, that engaging with others is the natural destination of social media, but admittedly it is not something that I was ever making a point to do. The results can be seen here and you’ll notice that the effect was that with increased activity, sharing and engaging the score did indeed rise. More importantly the incentive to engage more to push the Klout score higher began to establish a habit of more collaborative participation across the networks that I belong to.

My excitement over the potential of what Klout represents – directing social media participation in a most decidedly social way – started to give way to some obvious limitations of Klout as a tool. The functional gaps in Klout became more obvious and more frustrating. The premise is strong, I’m not aware of any other service that not only strives to improve the social in social media use, but also proclaims to reward that use. Candidly I find it to be absolutely brilliant. The promise of the service is that it will better help me as a consumer of social media to know who I want to consider as a trusted resource, monitor my progress over the topics that I want to be that trusted resource of, and reward me for both. It is this excitement over Klout’s potential that I decided that I would offer my perspective over what can be done to properly prioritize the product management efforts to improve the user experience and increase the stickiness of the tool so that first time users immediately see the value to them and become lifelong Klout subscribers.

Prioritize the Power User: Klout has two natural applications. The casual social media contributor and the power social media contributor. The two groups will dictate how the tool is used, and the information that should be available to not only each, but to the companies that want to leverage Klout as another marketing and advertising channel. Priority must be given to the power user first and foremost because the power user has mastery over how to best leverage the social web in order to advance both relationships as well as specific business objectives. If the tool does not offer this group more ease of control over guiding their Klout score and the power of analyzing not only their personal participation but those of their networks it will never gain traction. The only caveat is that engaged users are critical to the near term success of any such socially oriented web service. Therefore Klout obviously has to worry about increasing their user numbers. Therefore the prioritization of the power user must be done in a way that also continues to court new subscribers. Good news for Klout is that this should be possible.

In follow up posts we’ll take a closer look at the user requirements that will, if fulfilled, should help improve the Klout experience for the power user while enticing more casual users to take notice.