Klout is moving to target a slightly new audience with its latest product: businesses. Klout for Business will allow corporate customers to measure their company’s influence on social media, moving Klout away from just targeting consumers. Read more »
Optimizing content is crucial as customers migrate from being passive recipients to becoming active contributors. This opportunity presents a fresh set of challenges, not only for those in traditional broadcast industries but also for content managers and enterprise leaders. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Companies are offering up social media and “web footprint” rankings on everything from celebrities to Supreme Court Justices. Some recent examples make one wonder if there’s a point to all this. Read more »
Thanks to the popularity of everything from social media sites such as Twitter to email to mobile phones, it’s easier than ever to get data about who’s connected to whom. With the right tools, we can apply it solve certain problems faster and easier than ever. Read more »
Apple and Google still dominate the smartphone space, but look out for Microsoft, which finally has some muscle behind its mobile strategy. Meanwhile mobile-browser developers went head-to-head with native apps, and Facebook continued to buy mobile expertise via acquisition. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Social TV is any application, website or software that allows viewers to interact with television programming and share that interaction with others. Startups in this space hope to combine ubiquitous second-screen technology with well-established audience behavior to drive new value around shows. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A new study has shown that highly popular Twitter accounts such as Barack Obama and Britney Spears may be inadvertently contributing to the swell of tweet spam — and that millions of users trying to increase their online influence may also play a major role. Read more »
Klout perks are about to get a lot better. Read more at paidContent »
Social media are a great source of information on consumer sentiment, but the next wave of analytics in social media will be influence. It’s easy to ridicule your friends and co-workers who are actually concerned with their Klout scores, but this stuff matters. Read more »
Look under the covers of almost any data-focused web application — including Klout — and you’ll find Hadoop. It helps Klout accurately measure and score its users’ social media influence. But Klout also has another important, and very not-open-source, weapon in its arsenal — Microsoft SQL Server. Read more »
Klout, the San Francisco-based startup that measures people’s “influence” across a variety of social networks, has made its first acquisition with the purchase of Blockboard, a Twitter-like mobile app that functions as a community bulletin board for posting messages viewable to your neighbors. Read more »
Klout, the reputation-ranking service that recently confirmed a new round of funding, may not win the race to create a “PeopleRank” for the social web, but someone is going to do it — because the need to measure online influence is only going to increase. Read more »
Social startup Allthis found itself under fire this week for a viral marketing approach many people found spammy and invasive. But heinous though it is, its behavior is just part of a trend among new services to appropriate our online identities to power themselves. Read more »
Wahooly has created a group of 25,000 influential testers and is now opening the doors to startups to apply to engage this group. Startups will create testing groups of 5,000 to 8,000 people, who will share in a pool of equity ranging from 4–6 percent. Read more »
When it comes to users, transparency is important for taking reputation with them across sites. Being chattygirl32 in the New York Times comments section isn’t so helpful when you try to leverage online reputation elsewhere. A real name, however, might stick. Read more »
Critics claim Klout is invading the privacy of those who haven’t even joined the service, including children, by compiling “shadow profiles” of them based on their activity online. Is that an infringement of their digital rights, or just the new reality of living our lives online? Read more »
Users are outraged about changes that Klout has made to the way it calculates online influence, and some argue these scores are meaningless. But measuring “reputation rank” is clearly a huge potential market, and Klout is far from the only one interested in doing it. Read more »
Exclusive: There are lots of great summer internships at Silicon Valley startups. But top engineering students often pass them up for the money and name recognition companies like Google can provide. So Kleiner Perkins has partnered with InternMatch to attract top-flight students to its portfolio companies. Read more »
Facebook has launched a new “personal newspaper”-style news feed, while both Digg and Klout are using their internal ranking systems to try and create topic pages. But will any of these solve the growing problem of information overload, or will they just add to the noise? Read more »
When she decided to fan-fund and self-promote her new album, Terra Naomi knew there would be challenges ahead. Without the marketing power of a major label behind her, she decided to leverage new technology and social media companies, like Hipstamatic, to reach new audiences online. Read more »
Depending on who you ask, social stock market Empire Avenue is either an empowering personal branding tool or another sign of the downfall of modern society. But according to the startup’s CEO, the company is based on a much deeper philosophy than meets the eye. Read more »
As the race to build the social version of Google’s PageRank heats up, PeerIndex has added a new data source to its rankings: users can now connect their Quora profiles to the service, which will use their activity at the site as a measure of authority. Read more »
Klout has launched a Chrome extension that lets you see the Klout score of all the people you follow as you look at their tweets. But is that a good thing? At least for now, the Klout score is still something of a blunt instrument. Read more »
Klout — one of a number of services that are trying to measure influence in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter — has closed an $8.5-million funding round from Silicon Valley powerhouse Kleiner Perkins, and adding Kleiner partner Bing Gordon to its board of directors. Read more »
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff says the company tracks activity on Chatter, its internal Twitter-style social network, and gives employees who provide valuable information via the network extra compensation, in the same way executives are given bonuses for hitting sales targets. But is that a good idea? Read more »
As social networks become more popular, the challenge of finding relevance amid all the noise becomes exponentially harder. Klout, which is trying to build a comprehensive database of social influence online, says it is now integrating activity from Facebook into its service as well as Twitter. Read more »
Want to find the most influential and relevant Twitter users on the topic of baking? iPhone apps? The oil spill? The Twitter search startup Topsy has built a neat way to sort Twitter users to surface experts who tweet actively and influentially on any topic. Read more »
Internet companies have made an art out of creating algorithms that can mine data and unleash innovation and opportunities. Picture the famous recommendation engines behind Netflix and Amazon that drive their businesses and have launched new markets for niche content. Google has forever changed advertising and ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
