Personal or private influence; power of effective action, weight (esp. in political contexts). slang (orig. U.S.).
But how much ‘clowt does a person wield? How do we measure the weight of personal influence? These questions have driven a number of projects in internet analytics and visualisations (many eyes is a good place to start exploring these) with data from blogs, online news sites, and more lately twitter.
Clowt’s homophone, Klowt, takes up the challenge of calculating the size and strength of a person’s sphere of influence on Twitter. It does so by taking up the notion of effective action in the definition. So, effective action in the Twitterverse is about repling to a tweet, retweeting or clicking on a link given in a tweet. The calculation of effective action is detirmined by how well a person nurtures their audience (see Howard Rheingold on this) and how significant their impact is on that audience. To calculate that influence Klout uses the formula:
True reach is broken down into a number of sub-categories that answer the questions:
- Are your tweets interesting and informative enough to build an audience?
- How far has your content been spread across Twitter?
- Are people adding you to lists and are those lists being followed?
- How many people did you have to follow to build your count of followers?
- Are your follows often reciprocated?
These questions are picking up what is unique to twitter in ways that other analytic tools don’t seem to do.
Applying the scores to one user of Twitter that I follow gives a flavour of the information that can emerge from Klout. Howard Rheingold’s Klout score is 57 and his total reach 10517.
That reach is further analysed to show followers, retweets and direct messages. For his audience, Howard (who describes himself as an ‘instigator’) is clearly influential and someone who, on Twitter, is instigating conversation.
What then of those using twitter in Cuba? With the restrictions on the ownership and use of mobile phones lifted in 2008 and the easing of sanctions against US technology firms allowing them to export online services (MSN and social networking) to Cuba, you might think Cuba would be awash with twitterers. But … the use of mobiles is heavily restricted by price – the vast majority of Cubans can’t afford a mobile phone and many who do manage to get one (many of those through relatives abroad) struggle to maintain a subscription with the single phone network on the island.
But there are people using twitter. One that I follow is Yoani Sanchez, author of the blog Generación Y, a user of twitter @yoanisanchez. What then might Klout reveal about Yoani Sanchez’ influence?
Yoani’s Klout score is 44. A couple of things stand out from Klout here: Yoani is more followed than following and her tweets have a high percentage of being re-tweeted. Her strategy mirrors that of her blog: she tweets (largely) into a conversation that she has limited possibility of interacting with. At the same time she is able to fuel that conversation with news and views which through being amplified and re-tweeted feed a community.