Klout, the service for measuring online influence, is boosting its integration with both Bing and Instagram today.
On the Bing side, the news follows last fall’s announcement of a strategic investment from and partnership with Microsoft. That announcement included the unveiling of a feature in Bing that would show Klout scores for select people. (And Bing continues to surface more data on that front.)
Now Klout users can add Bing to their Klout accounts. It sounds like that won’t have an immediate effect on their Klout scores, but according to the company blog post, “Bing search data will start becoming integrated into Klout’s algorithm” and “search results will eventually factor into each user’s Klout Score.”
I was a little confused about the timing of events here (perhaps because I’ve only bothered to add Twitter and Facebook to my Klout profile), but a spokesperson explained that this sort of staggered integration is normal: “Before we are able to incorporate any data into a person’s score, we need users to connect the network to Klout so we can begin to process the influence data. So, with Bing, we are now asking people to connect it to their accounts, and eventually search data will actually factor into their score.”
The spokesperson also confirmed that this is the first time Klout has integrated with a search engine.
Speaking of that staggered integration process, starting in 2011, Klout allowed users to add Instagram to their accounts, and now it’s ready to take the next step, incorporating Instagram activity into your score. So talented photographers whose photos get a big response on Instagram should see their Klout go up.