The world’s your stage, and clients your avid audience, if you know how to conduct yourself online

Influence n. the power or ability to affect someone’s beliefs or actions, arising out of status, contacts or wealth. As succinctly as the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word, social influence is particularly difficult to define, and is one of those things that you just know when you see it. And unlike the word-of mouth brand champions of yesteryear, what we are increasingly seeing is the rise of the digital influencer—a small breed of somewhat special individuals on the Internet that have a strong effect on the opinions and even consumption habits of a large number of ordinary individuals. Crack this puzzle—figure out who is influential in which community, up to the extent of driving purchases and growing the brand—and you can crack the ultimate goal—sales. But if you thought it was difficult to define exactly who is influential online, measuring it and putting it to meaningful use is even more so. No wonder there is a slew of start-ups, each pushing their own metric of social currency to define how connected and influential you are online, and measuring social influence has fast become one of the key buzzwords to track this year. KLOUT: The tool to beat, and also the one you’ve probably heard the most about, Klout looks at your activity across all the major social networks–Facebook, twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, FourSquare among others—factors in a whole bunch of parameters such as likes, retweets, friends or subscribers, and who you’re connected to, to arrive at a Klout score between 0 and 100. Add in more accounts to your Klout profile and the formula works in your influence across various social platforms towards that magic number—your Klout score. If you are interested in analysing the score further, Klout provides some neat but basic graphs and a good-looking user interface for you to see what topics you are regarded to be an expert on, and how the Klout scores of your friends and peers compare to yours. Of particular interest is the Perks section, which allows businesses to offer products or services to individuals with a certain Klout score or influence in a specific topic. The idea is to get that product or service into the hands of the people who will then hopefully talk about it through their social channels and influence their audience towards the product or service. PEER INDEX: While it is not as flashy as Klout, Peer Index does a decent job at helping you understand what topics you and your social circle is influential about, as well as others who are influential about the same topics—very handy if you’re looking to engage with thought leaders in your space. Where it differs from Klout is that apart from an overall PeerIndex score, topical Peer Index scores are calculated based on category, making it easier to identify people with authority on a particular subject. It uses three variables— authority, audience and activity— to identify expertise in a particular subject and in my experience, does a better job at pinpointing specific areas of interest and expertise than Klout. KRED: While Kred is relatively new in the game, it has tried to differentiate itself by being transparent about how your Kred score breaks down, something that Klout and Peer Index cannot claim to do. Each tweet, mention or retweet on twitter is assigned a score (which is visible on your dashboard). The sum total of your interactions is then totaled and averaged across the Kred network to give you an idea of where you are placed. Kred calculates two scores, a measure of Influence, which is based on how often you are retweeted, replied, mentioned or followed on Twitter, and a measure of Outreach, which is reflective of how often you engage (retweet, reply or mention) with others. Now, in our numbers-driven world, does merely having a high Klout, Kred or PI score mean you have arrived? Understand this—most of these tools indicate the stature an individual possesses within a social network, what one could term as their social capital, and at best a limited range of interests that contribute to that standing. They then compute the influence using proprietary formulae, with little guidance to the individual on what they can do to improve their scores. At most, they introduce some elements of gamification, such as rewarding users for either completing their profiles or inviting more friends on to the network, but never a clear explanation as to how to consciously work towards a higher score. In short, there is no one ‘formula’ for being influential. So then is all of this just hokum? In the end, you as an individual or a brand manager have to decide, but my advice would be to take all these scores with a grain of salt. Any one metric will at best give you a hazy picture of an individual’s online presence, so it would be best to use these scores to augment your own primary research findings. There is no one-size-fits-all-solution, instead social influence scores should be taken as guidance to help inform but not dictate your social media and marketing outreach plans.