You Might Have Klout, But What’s Your Kred?

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Erick Schonfeld is the Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular... → Learn More

Kred logo
Kred logo

Reputation on the Internet is a tricky thing to measure. But with the rise of social media—with its retweets, likes, +1s, replies, and followers counts—companies are trying to keep score. If you are a big user of Twitter, you have probably checked out your Klout score or at least heard of it. Well, soon Klout will have a competitor called Kred. It is currently accepting sign-ups for a gradual rollout starting next week.

Kred is the latest product from social data mining startup PeopleBrowsr. “We have been receiving the firehose since 2008,” says CEO Jodee Rich, referring to the full Twitter firehose, “indexing it since then. We have sorted it by community and topic. We look for small close networks of people and look for how they can be just as influential as rockstars.”

Every person or account on Twitter has a Kred score, which is made up of two parts: the influence score and the outreach score. Your influence score is a measure of your ability to inspire others. It is a number on a scale from 1 to 1,000, and is based on how often your tweets are retweeted, how many new followers you are gaining, and how many replies you generate. (Kred also looks at Facebook likes and Google +1s, but Twitter is the main source of data). It is very much like your Klout score. The Outreach score is measured in levels and is a reflection of how generous you are with retweeting and replying to others.

Kred also figures out which of 200 communities you belong to based on the information in your Twitter bio (which is not always a great description of who you are). It can show you the influence of your whole community and how you rank in that community. “Everyone is an influencer somewhere,” says Jodee. “Our job with Kred is to show you where you have influence.” Brand managers will be able to define their own communities (for a fee), which they will then be able to track.

So how is this different from Klout? The main difference is Kred’s transparency. It shows you exactly how you got your score and lets you drill down to every retweet to see how many points it was worth. A normal retweet might be worth 10 points, but one from somebody with high Kred might be worth 50. A mention is worth more than follow, and so on. Since Kred is calculating everyone’s scores in realtime, it normalizes your score against the average.

Kred also lets you incorporate your real-world accomplishments like degrees, honors, awards, and certificates. You will be able to send Kred a PDF proving an offline achievement, and they will add it to your Kred.


Product: Kred
Website: Kred.ly
Company PeopleBrowsr

Kred measures influence in online communities connected by interests. Kred is the first social scoring system to provide a comprehensive score for Influence and Outreach by valuing engagement and audience quality over follower count. It is the only influence measurement to offer complete transparency so users understand exactly how their scores are calculated. Kred celebrates the power of personal influence and generosity at the true heart of human relationships - tight groups of friends and subject matter experts....

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Company: PeopleBrowsr
Website: peoplebrowsr.com
Launch Date: 2007

PeopleBrowsr, the creator of influence measure Kred, is a global leader in the social analytics revolution. We believe social analytics can accurately depict human behaviors like Influence and Generosity, and that the openness and transparency of social networks will be the catalyst for the next great leap in community and productivity. PeopleBrowsr’s end-to-end social media marketing solutions assemble the collective intelligence, identify its most influential people, and make them accessible for analysis and engagement. Kred...

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Company: Klout
Website: klout.com
Launch Date: August 2008
Funding: $40M

Klout allows users to track the impact of their opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph. Data is collected about the content users create, how people interact with that content and the size and composition of their networks. Klout identifies influencers and provides tools for influencers to monitor their influence.

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