Product Management Color Analysis: Klout (part 3)

Order, anchoring and participation would increase adoption

Continuing the analysis of possible product management that could help Klout accelerate adoption of the power social media participant today we’ll examine the remaining 4 of 8 major areas of functionality. These four additional functional enhancements would inject greater control over a user’s Klout experience, and foster a greater sense of community across the networks where each Klout user spends their time. The obvious risk is that adding too much functionality has the potential of resulting in users feeling as though Klout itself becomes yet another social media destination and requires too much of a time investment. The reward for that risk, however, is a much easier interface that provides the intelligence power social media require to solve the problem of order and monitored performance over their day to day activities.

Order of the Network: As discussed in the second part of the Klout product management color analysis mining one’s networks is not a very easy task in Klout. For example when I got to a page of my twitter connections it is a long laundry list of those I follow in chronological order and the search tool isn’t that helpful. The same seems to be true for every other network that Klout monitors. Adding the ability to instill some sense of order over the multiple networks that a Klout user leverages would go a long way in helping the power user discern much about how they are sharing, how they are consuming, and with whom they are connecting (building new lists in Klout isn’t the solution)

The objective is simple; allow me to search my networks in a way that I already am accustomed to searching. Improve the search results so that when I find one person it automatically serves up others in my network that are similar to the person I was looking for. In the previous post we discussed the ability to have easier control over the topics that one wants to influence, therefore leverage that control by allowing me to search for those in and out of my network that score well in a specific topic and offer me the option to view them in specific high, medium and low Klout score ranges. A little more control over how I dive into my own network coupled with suggesting how I could augment my social connectivity with those that mirror my interests and influence would almost immediately pump up the usefulness of Klout for the power social consumer.

Professional Anchoring: It seems as though today Klout’s current integration seems to be mostly with twitter, but perhaps there is greater value in aligning Klout with one’s most professional social media presence, LinkedIn. Linked owns so much of the socially literate pro’s curriculum vitae, and professional interaction that it would seem a good bet to anchor one’s Klout score with that element of their online persona. Linked inherently has one share their career and work history, has solid recommendations that detail an individual’s performance over that history, discloses the trade groups that are of interest, and serves up career related ‘shares’ that one found interesting. Activity over linked should potentially have greater affect upon the Klout score than any other platform.

Again it is important to remember we are discussing enhancements for the social media mature, and the argument that maybe the more lucrative 18 – 34 demographic might not find this interesting is inconsequential in the adoption acceleration of the group we’ve been discussing.

Klout Kontour: Another area that is tentatively risky in that it will ask users to invest more time with Klout. The idea here is to offer greater control to Klout users as to what their profile should look like. There are services out there, like about.me that allows one to condense their digital footprint into a single and simple business card of sorts; Klout should give me this capability. But inherent in the ability to build out my online business card should be the ability to set the priority over which outlets the user values most. If he does  most of his sharing across Facebook then give him the ability to rank Facebook activity as being more important in his Klout score calculation. These two features do two things. First they start to transform Klout as a destination of sorts. By having an online business card I might send someone there rather than giving them links to all the networks on which I participate. Secondly it grants me the authority over how I am evaluated by the Klout algorithm thereby allowing me the control that I want as I’m creating and sharing content.

Klout-unities: Finally, and again the acknowledge risk here is duplication of existing social platforms, Klout should incent sharing and participation. Today it is singularly focused, give K+ or share perks, period. But with the aforementioned control and intelligence it is a natural next step for the power user and would be power user to turn to a reliable credible source in order to place some order over how they are participating by enabling that participation. This area can be a little more green-field if it is thought through. Perhaps Klout invests in acquiring one of the Twitter chat tools like Tweechat or an analysis tool hashtracking and integrates it in a way that monitors participating in organized social media and facilitates the same. The end result could offer up to the Klout user organically created groups or communities – Klout-unities if you will.   The idea is that as the Klout score becomes more reliable and trusted power users want to use that trust to make their participation a little easier, as well as uncovering that which they may not yet have discovered. This begs the question of integration. Taking this route would force the decision of how to execute the sharing facilitation. On Klout or integrated with the platforms.

It is important to state that I really haven’t done too much investigation over these suggestions, they are simply ideas. Also I think the posts ultimately have been more a matter of evaluating how product management decisions ought to be considered. These high level statements of direction would be used for debate over their priority and purpose and fleshed out to yield a directed course of action. That course of action would result in detailed marketing requirement documents and very well articulated use cases. In turn these use cases would be handed over to development to begin their work.

Product management works best if it is a conversation, so if you are so inclined share your thoughts and let’s have that discussion.

photo credit: geir tønnessen