Kred: It’s All About Influence, Outreach and Community

To date there are two dominant players in the social influence/measurement game. One is Klout and the other is PeerIndex.

There are some other, boutique services that have great potential and also provide some incredible value, but are still very early in terms of gaining widespread adoption and traction (more on those great tools in a later post…)

I, being someone who follows this social/new media industry strive to understand and ultimately use each of these tools so as to share experiences and consumer value with you, our readership.

Recently I had the distinct pleasure of having a conference call with Andrew Grill, CEO of PeopleBrowsr UK. PeopleBrowsr is responsible for a new entrant within the social measurement landscape – Kred. By the way, this post is a timely exclusive since Andrew is on stage RIGHT NOW in New York at PivotCon launching Kred to the public.

What is Kred?

From a company perspective, according to Grill, Kred is “…an analytics company building an influence measure.”

The idea is to achieve synergy amongst like-minded individuals and foster that inherent communication.

From a practical, user perspective think of it as this – everyone 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 1000, and is based on how often your tweets are retweeted, how many new followers you are gaining, and how many replies you generate. Familiar model right?

Here's where Kred outshines anything else on the market today – the Outreach score is measured in levels and is a reflection of how generous you are with retweeting and replying to others. Get that, how “generous” you are. Fascinating concept.

But there's more…common sense would seem to imply that each of us is influential even when we're not online. We don't share and contribute to society 100% of our efforts through social media channels. Again, here is where Kred has taken a quantum leap above the other measurement platforms by representing each of our offline activities as well by allowing users the ability integrate their “real-life” awards and recognition — anything from frequent-flier status to academic honors to club memberships — into their score. One word – BRILLIANT!

Andrew was saying all the right things, we were having an great dialogue and then he mentioned something that took the conversation to a whole new level. He made clear the fact that all of this analysis, reporting, and measurement is done in an atmosphere of complete transparency. Meaning, people can access activity statements that show every action that increased their Kred. They can also view their Friends' Activity Statements so they can understand the sources of their Kred as well.

Very soon there will also be privacy settings so people can select how much they want to share or participate in Kred. According to Grill, the privacy controls will be available late October and will have options such as public, private, anonymous and invisible. This transparency and privacy control mechanism in itself is something that many users of social metric/measurement tools have been demanding from the other scoring providers.

Chalk yet another win up for Kred, and they haven't even fully launched yet.

Along with the influence and outreach components of your Kred, there is also a third component of the measurement. That is the concept of Community.

Based on the information in your Twitter bio, Kred attempts to determine which of approximately 200 communities you belong to. It can show you the influence of your whole community and how you rank in that community.

This is great for individuals, but this is going to be critical for agencies and social platform integrators. And it is going to be through THIS value-added service that Kred is going to make their money. Yes there will be a free model with all the tools, reporting and analytics, but the paid version will be focused primarily at the agency and those looking to further integrate into other platforms and those looking to setup custom communities.

Browse through the slide deck below to see the strategy pitch used to explain Kred.

Here are some specifics on my Kred score that Andrew was thoughtful enough to generate during our call.

Obviously, stay tuned, much more coming from Kred in the near future. Sign up for the service now on their main site here. Follow Andrew Grill on Twitter and also keep a good watch out for other great measurement tools coming out of PeopleBrowsr.