TechStuff Classic: TechStuff has Klout

when we recorded this episode, it was a thing. Clout, as you will learn, was all about social media influence and reach, and depending on your point of view, it was either an incredibly useful tool, a tool to turn people into narcissists, or something even more sinister than that. But spoiler alert again, it's all moot now because it's no longer a thing. Anyway, enjoy this lastic episode as Chris and I tout our cloud. So today we wanted to talk about clout and whether whether or not you

have any uh and maybe you personally. You know that guy over there, he's got no cloud. Apparently I apparently I have some. Um the it's a not insignificant amount, though not nearly as much. As you know, like Justin Bieber. Uh so, what is Cloud? So? Cloud is this company out of San Francisco that was founded by Joe Fernandez back in two thousand and eight. He started to build it when he couldn't talk. Did you know about that? There's an article and Wired and I actually revisited it.

It's it's called what Your Cloud Score Really Means. It's from Seth Stevenson. Actually read it in the print edition, but I went back and revisited it so I could throw in my electronic notes. Yeah. He uh, this is really really funny. He um had had had to have his jaw wired shut. That that's not funny. I don't

think that's funny. But because he couldn't talk, he started, Uh, he started tweeting and using Facebook to communicate with people because it was driving him nuts that he couldn't talk to people, he said, And in fact he said he couldn't his mom didn't even understand what he was Yeah. Really, uh so, I mean, thankfully he's apparently all better now. But I've seen I've seen interviews with him where he

was not wired shut and he was talking. Yes, so he actually started uh, he actually started talking about or tweeting, tweeting about this, all sorts of different things about um restaurants that he had been to and making recommendations, and you know, again kind of iron as they point out the art kind of ironic. He couldn't open his mouth

and go eat there, but basically product recommendations. He started thinking, because he had had some experience with with statistics, and started thinking, you know, how many people am I talking to? And and to who are they talking and how much influence do they have over people who buy stuff or go shopping or go out to eat with these different people.

And that's when he started. He started making some rudimentary calculations, rudimentary by the terms of clouds algorithms today, and started putting together this idea of you know, how much influence do people have in the social media? So that's this is really an interesting concept to me because some people would have you believe that influence can be measured solely by things like the number of followers you happen to have on social networks. But Fernandez's point is that's not

necessarily the case. You could have lots of people following you, but if no one's really paying attention to what you have to say, and they're following you anyway, then your influence isn't that great. You know, there's a lot of people who could potentially hear you, but no one's really listening to you, and that's a problem problem. So you could you could conversely have relatively few followers compared to someone who has millions, like you know, Justin Bieber's got

millions of followers on Twitter. Now he happens to be very influential on Twitter. So that's I've heard that. It's kind of a bad example. But let's say let's say you've got someone who's got over example. Let's say the same You've got someone who's got over a million followers, but for some reason, their cloud score is not that high. The reason for that might be that perhaps a lot of those followers aren't real people. They might be boughts,

So that could be one factor. But what Fernandez wanted to do was measure how much impact a person has on their various social circles and on the web in general. Uh, not just how many people are following them and those are those are two different things. So he built this, uh this company and this algorithm helped to Yeah, the His side, of course, is called cloud with a k UM, and since its inception there have been other imitators. I

don't know some of them were actually out beforehand. And Twitter itself is working on its own implementation of a similar software that would allow you to see, like when you tweet, how how much of your audience are you actually reaching when you send out a Twitter message. And this really applies to people who have lots and lots

of followers. So for example, if you take me, I don't have you know, thousands and thousands of I've got like four thousand followers, which that's that's a that's a lot for me because I'm like, well, I'm just a guy, you know, I'm a guy that four thousand people follow I hope that I'm interesting enough to justify that. But there are other people out there who have millions of followers, but they don't know necessarily how many of those people

they're reaching when they send out a message. Yeah, just just for independent confirmation, I am sitting here directly across from from Jonathan and he is in fact just a guy. Yes, um, I'm just a guy with a sixty five cloud score though that's true. And then and part of the reason that that Jonathan does have a five Cloud score, and that's of the day we're recording this. These things do change. It could be, it could be it could be in

the low forties. By the fame of this Podcas goes out, part of the reason that that Jonathan has a cloud score of sixty five is because there are a lot of people following him. But he's also well networked with people also in the tech world. So there are people who share his tweets with other people. That's part of the score. There there are people who who talk back to him who also, boy do they talk back to me? Shut up? You? Uh see what I did there? Yes?

I do. Who There are people who have conversations with him on Twitter, let's go with that, who are also influential in the Twitter sphere and on cloud and therefore, uh, that boosts his reputation um and his his ability to to network with other people, and so therefore he has a higher score than than maybe some other people with more followers. This might sound really familiar to you, especially if you are familiar with like Google's page rank algorithms

what used to be called page rank. Anyway, Uh, the idea that Google would use this complex formula to determine how well various sites would rank and search for any particular term that you're searching for. So when you're searching for, I don't know, uh, cool tech gifts for the holidays, then Google would look through its use its algorithm and rank all these pages that relate to those search terms

and give you the highest ranked ones. And that ranking is based on lots of different factors, including how many websites link into it, and how old that particular website that you're looking at is, and and other factors as well. There's a lot of stuff that goes into it. This is the same idea except for people instead of pages. It's it's how well a person ranks, partly due to their behavior online, partly due to their network that's around them,

partly due to how many people are following them. There are a lot of different actors at play. There's actually a web page on cloud site that goes into the different factors that that they will admit to. Now, they don't give you the nuts and bolts. It's a secret

sauce if you will. Clearly, you wouldn't want to be able to give out all the information, because then people would game the system like crazy just to get their cloud score up, which is not the purpose of the of the site at all, or to to start a competitor to another good point. Um, yeah, let's let's talk.

I'll mention a little bit more about what what they say, Uh, competitors are critics, I should say, actually criticize cloud because it's usually the comparison I've seen is to a credit score, because the credit reporting agencies don't tell consumers what's actually going into your score. Um. And in the in the case of credit, it has to do with you know how much you spend, how quickly you pay it back? Um,

you know how many cards credit cards you have? Are it accounts, lines of credit that you have opened, and lots of different little proprietary things, and each of them has a little different mix. Well, the cloud is sort of the same way. They tell you roughly what goes into it, but they don't tell you exactly how much weight each one carries. Um. It's based primarily on on Twitter and Facebook. Um, this is not really much of

a secret. Things like mentions of your name and Facebook posts. Um. People who who are engaged with a lot of brands on there, the likes that you have, the TV shows you like, UM, the the UH stores that you like on Facebook, UM, the number of comments you have, people who subscribe to you, uh, the number of friends. Obviously

that's a metric and obvious metric. You know, how many people follow you on Twitter, how many people follow you on Facebook, people who mention you on on Twitter, or people who um people you reply to and people who reply to you shows your engagement with that network. They've also extended it you to Google Plus, LinkedIn, four Square, Wikipedia, UM, things on on LinkedIn. UM they go by your reported title. So if you say you're CEO of the World then

and guess that that would probably help your cloud score. Yeah. So, although I think that's probably hard to verify. These are relatively new in the in the cloud world. These these UM these items, because before what it was really looking at was Twitter and Facebook mainly, First it was Twitter, and then it was there in Facebook then and it also linked You could choose to link stuff to your

your cloud. If you create a cloud account, you could choose to link things like Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms as well. Now it looks at these other elements like Wikipedia, or if you are mentioned in something like the New York Times, so that it can determine all right, well, um, you know you're getting press, people are writing about you, so then that means you are more in Floyd Childen someone who is not getting pressed,

So that would impact your score as well. Yeah, if you want to sign up for Cloud, you would sign up using your Twitter or Facebook information. Basically, once you're logged in, you can you can uh sign up for Cloud and it will access your account um and it will say, okay, do you want to add your other accounts? Do you want to add these other accounts? And they're even more than they're mentioned here, things like Flicker and other accounts and things um and so yeah, what what

Jonathan said is is true. They're also measuring this information whether or not you sign up for Cloud. Yeah, because you're you're if you have a Twitter account and it's public and you are sending out messages, that's public record. That's stuff that anyone can access. So what Cloud does is it will automatically start to index you and look at how other people are responding to you. So whether you have signed up for Cloud or not, you may have a Cloud score and uh, you know the we

have we mentioned what the range of scores is. It's between one and one hundred. So the higher your cloud score, the more the more cloud you have, and the more influence you would theoretically have over the web based upon uh, you know, the algorithms assessment of you. Most people are not like you would think the average would be fifty, but the average is really closer to the twenties range.

And it's that the people who are fifty or higher are are assumed to be more influential in whatever fields they've been identified as being experts in. Yeah, I mean, I'm sorry. I was gonna say, if you sign up, you'll find out that they ask you, hey, what are you influential in? Yeah, And it turns out like if I log into my cloud and I'd look to see what I'm influential in. There's some things you would expect, you know, like technology is up there, which that that

makes sense. I do a tech podcast, I write tech articles for a website. Uh, that makes sense. There are other things like Atlanta restaurants. Huh, I didn't know that I was that influential with Atlanta restaurants. I should get better tables darn it. Um. But yeah, there there are other things that I look at on that people have identified me as being influential, and some of them maybe jokes, but that's that's kind of interesting to me. Yeah, And I think I think here is a good point to

point out. And then there are critics and their proponents of cloud, just like anything else. But um, I think it's a good point to go right down the middle and say, look, this is what one person and his company have done, you know, as as as Joe built this company up, this is how they chose to measure people.

And it's not it's it's based on one system, so it's not really I think, Uh, it was a couple of years ago, or was a couple of years ago last year where they where they rejiggered the algorithm, and was this year? It was this year. It was late some earlier this year when they changed it because my score, my score skyrocketed. I had been around sixty two and uh, and then I jumped all the way up to sixty nine. I was almost seventy. It was very close to seventy,

and I was thinking, whoa, how did that happen? Holy cow? I'm more and I started comparing myself because it cars. You know, I'm a bit of an egomaniac, you know, I admit this, and so I was like, let me see what my good friend I as actar of this weekend tech Let me on tech news today. Let me see what how he ranks. Oh, he's he's at sixty five. He's lower than I am. Gosh I as and of course now I think he I think he ranks rightfully

so above me, because these things, do you know? It was it was like an initial shock because people's scores changed pretty dramatically. Some went up quite a bit, some went down, and then it's been slowly kind of readjusting to where it needs to be based on all this

new information. Um, and you know this, this could be really challenging because you're building an algorithm that needs to identify people, and it needs to be able to make sure it links to the right person, because, as it turns out, there's some folks out there who share the same name as other people, and so you have a lot of false positives. For instance, if you were to search Jonathan Strickland in the metro Atlanta area, Uh, some mug shots to be popping up and none of them

are me today today. Okay, but let's be fair. Today, here's the recording of this podcast of those mug shots would be me. Who knows what tomorrow may brain. But but that's the thing is that I could end up identifying this stuff like, oh, John, this is being written about in criminal newsletters. That's odd. But I guess that ad just his cloud score, Like, no, that's not me. That's another Jonathan Strickland and the same spelling and everything. But you know, so the algorithm has to take that

stuff into account. The other thing that's kind of a controversy with clout is how companies are using clout in various ways. Guys, it's Jonathan from two thousand nineteena interrupting this classical episode because I don't yet have quite enough clout to get away with this without taking a break to thank our sponsor. So what is cloud other than other than influence? A measure of influence in the social media world. An idea of of that, what does cloud get you? Very little or or al or a lot,

depending on how high your cloud already is. Um, yeah, it's cloud is a weird thing. In some cases, all it might get you is bragging rights in the sense of you know you, you measure your cloud against your buddy, like your buddy i azactar of this weekend tech news today, and then you say, hey, look at that, or you may say cloud scores going up because you mentioned in very well and deservedly. So the man does good work. As much as I joke. He he is an actual

friend of mine. Uh so, maybe not after this podcast, but he. You know, the these these numbers for a large part of the population may not mean much, although it can tell you how effective you are online. So in a in a sense, it's doing what it's supposed to do. It's telling you what your impact is. And if your impact is low, you might say, you know what, you might be cool with it. You might be saying, oh, you know, I just use this for fun, to stay in touch with my friends. That's all I use it

for that. I don't care. But if you're trying to get a message out there, then what it's telling you is your message is not being heard. It's not it's not punishing you. This number is related back to that algorithm, and if you want to make sure your message is heard by more people, you need to look into ways of delivering that message in in a in a way that that interests people, that gets other people talking, that goes beyond just your immediate circle of followers. And if

you're able to crack that code. And by the way, I do not have the secret sauce for that. There are some messages I send out there that go bonkers and I think, Wow, that's amazing, and then I and then I'll sit there and I'll craft what I think is the most brilliant, funny, uh timely tweet of all time, and I send it out and no one replies, no one favorites, no one retweets. So I mean, I don't have that secret sauce. Definitely you need to ask people who have a much higher cloth score than I do.

But if your score is low, that could be an indicator that, hey, you need to change things so that you can make sure that whatever message you're sending out there is being heard by the right people. Yeah, yeah, and so and and for somebody like um, you know, for politicians for example, yeah, um, this is incredibly important.

Or entrepreneurs want who get their name out. And then there's the the other group of people who are are short of in between there there, they're doing this shorter because they want to, and then they might be getting perks are cloud perks. So if you are an influential person, then you are an attractive person for certain brands. If you are influential in a particular field. Let's say with me,

I'm apparently I'm influential one technology and Atlanta restaurants. Then let's say an Atlanta restaurant opens up and they are cloud savvy, they understand how cloud works. They and they know, Hey, if we convinced this guy to come into our restaurant and eat our food, and we really pull out all the stops, he's gonna go out and he's going to talk about this incredible experience he had. And because his influence is high in this area, that means we could

see a return on that investment. We could see people come in because we tapped the right person to talk about this, and that can go across all sorts of industries. So that being said, I'll come out and say it right now. I have not received any cloud perks. I am not I don't use cloud to get cloud perks. I'm not saying that I would ever use one. If one came along that was just unbelievable, and I'm like, hey, this is exactly why I need and exactly how I

need it. I would probably do it, but I've never had that. I've never had that happen. Yeah. The companies, the companies involved in cloud perks are generally people who want to do some promotion. That's it's pretty simple. Um. And so once you get your cloud score up to a certain level, and it could it depends on what it is. Yeah, it depends on the company. Like some companies will say, Okay, anyone who's below a seventy five, we're not interested in because that's not that's not worth

the time it would take to do this. Yeah, but you might, um, you might pass let's say thirty, and they'll say, hey, people with cloud score of thirty, we'll give you a coupon for a free UM six pack of our new soda flavor. Go ahead and redeem it at your local store, you know, tell us where to mail the coupon. So they mail the coupon and you get the beverage and you try and you go, hey, this stuff is pretty good what they're hoping. But there is no requirement to do what they're hoping is you're

going to share that experience with their friends. Hey, I was Uncloud. They sent me a coupon. I tried this stuff. It tastes like a combination of mangoes and feet, But I happen to like the taste of mangoes and feet. So I'm gonna, you know, tweet this on Facebook and Twitter and put it on my Google Plus account and

mentioned it on LinkedIn. That you just did exactly what the promoters were what apparently my choice of mangoes and feet was not just having I just want to do something so trying not to think about that taste right now. I just wanted to say something silly. I don't like mangoes and I really don't like feet. But yeah, okay, so um so that's essentially what they're hoping that that will say that clout for it for its uh, you know,

just to to promote its own credibility here. And I feel like it's fair to mention this Cloud says there's absolutely no obligation on your part as a cloud participant. If you get a perk to promote it in any way at all, you can take them up on the perk. You can decline the perk. You can tweet about it or not. Um and uh, and you know it's up to you whether you you could say, hey, this stuff is nasty. I don't ever want to see it again. I hope they pull it from the market fast before

I sue them. UM, you know that that is completely up to you. But it it depends on partially on your cloud score, and it depends partially on generally, and it depends partially generally on what areas you are influential. And I would assume that uh, President Obama and Justin Bieber probably you know, get all the cloud perks they want.

They probably can't. Don't take anyone up on them. Yeah, there's also we should also point out that, UM, with perks comes the responsibility of revealing the fact that you have received this as a perk, because, uh, there's an ethical problem if you don't do that, and a legal problem too in the United States. Um, you know the the quote unquote mommy bloggers, um without cloud this was going on for a while and they were not revealing that they had received this as again to its credit cloud.

UH encourages you to remember, if you're going to post this, say hey, I got it free because I was here. Yeah. So yeah, yes, the clouds not condoning unethical behavior, which you know that's important to remember because their critics who kind of overlook that, UM, And you know, that's why I wanted to mention that what you get for it first before we got to the critics. Yeah, so it's it's gotten. It's become a great tool for UH companies

to try and court influencers. Chris and I have a little bit more to say about clout, but before we get to that, let's take another quick break. In some case, says it may be that a company says, hey, this person is really influential in the field that we're involved in. Let's not just give him a perk, Let's hire them

to do something for us. So in that case, you're talking about, like you might have a freelancer out there who is just an incredible influencer in a particular industry, and then this company says, this is who we need to get to represent our brand or to message out something about our brand, UH, and we're going to actually

hire them. Maybe it's a contract for a certain number of appearances, or maybe we actually give them a job offer and that's another way that people are using cloud Some companies, particularly advertising firms, marketing firms, places where uh your ability to get a message out is clearly an important part of your job, they are looking at cloud scores because if you if you're going into an ad agency and you're saying, hey, I know how to message

out information. I am. I am the guy that you need or the lady you need to hire for this position because I know what I'm doing, And then they look up your cloud score and it's like twenty two. They'll say, hey, um, can you show us a better example than your cloud score, because according to this, you are not getting your message heard, and and that's you know, that's also drawn some criticism. People have said, well, how

is that fair? And the counter argument is to say, well, if the algorithm is measuring how well a message is going out across networks and the and the score is really low, how would it be fair to this company to hire someone who is not as good as a different uh potential employee who has a much higher cloud score, who has proven that they are able to get a message out across networks? Yeah? Yeah, the the cloud score has come into hiring practices recently, I've seen articles written

on it. And you know, people who were unaware of the cloud score, you know, they hadn't signed up for it, didn't know it existed. Uh, sort of taken aback by the fact that there is a cloud score. Yes, you are being measured. Um, that's a little uh, that's a little weird, I think for some people, um and people

without knowing. And it's again the reason they compare the cloud score to the credit credit score is that without knowing exactly what you're being measured on, it's difficult to improve on it, um and be a bit of a treadmill to to constantly try to figure out what to say next and how often to say it, exactly what way to fit in, what time to say it, because there are you know those are that That's something I

actually take into consideration. You see, I, Chris and I we don't just uh, interface with social networks for ourselves. Sometimes we have to. We do it for our text off brand, right, because because we want we want people to know what we are doing as tech stuff. We want to stay engaged with our audience. We want to

know what they're thinking. So uh, but there comes a time where you're like, should I post this now because my audience might be asleep, you know, and then you think, well, considering how many of us are tuned into the social networking crazes out there, a message that was posted four hours ago may never be seen. You know. If I log into Twitter and there's a message that was posted about four hours ago that I think would have been amazing, I might never get to that because too page back

through that many tweets, uh, is a daunting task. I'd have to clear out a half hour five minutes of my schedule just to do that. So you know, that also comes into place when you should post if you're trying to if you're if you're really trying to use social networking to get a message out. You know, if you're just using social networking to say I watched that episode of Blah Blah blah last night and it was phenomenal, it may not matter that you posted at two in

the morning or eight am or four pm. It may not have any impact there, and that might be fine for you. There's nothing wrong with that. Um. The other element of this is, unlike the credit score, the cloud score is something that I think a lot of people are not aware of and that's the problem, you know, because they could be judged on something that they themselves had no knowledge of going into, you know, a job interview. Yeah.

I also found an article by a Manachum Wecker about a professor at Florida State University who was using cloud to grade his students in class. Now it was for a marketing class. It was, you know, for an electronic marketing class. So people were upset about it. But it kind of makes me think, well, if this is specifically a metric for measuring your ability to market yourself in

electronic media, maybe clouds. I don't know that I would make it the soul thing that you grade someone on, but it probably at least belongs in part of it. Um or should build an aware that the clash should build an awareness of its prominence in in today's society for that. But I wanted to mention to one thing that where it doesn't compare to a credit score, however, is there are more than one agency developing credit scores

in the United States. Cloud is not alone, but it is an unusual prominence and it's a cloud, it turns out,

you might say that. So, yeah, it's if we If we assume that the cloud algorithm is looking at things in a very methodical and measured way, and that it is, in the end of the day, looking at the how how influential people are based upon how widely their message has heard and how many people are writing about that person, then cloud and of itself is an interesting and I think valuable service for people who are trying to get a message out. It's it's not it's not necessarily a

good thing or a bad thing. It's a useful tool. Um. The way other people are using this tool might be, you know, might make you upset or it might throw you depending on your cloud score. Um, but that's you know again, you can't blame the tool for the way people are using it, right. I mean the same thing we could say about Twitter. Twitter. When it was launched, people were talking about Twitter being a way that you would send out a message to a group of friends. Right.

That was the main use case of Twitter. That is

totally changed since Twitter launched. And one of these days we are going to do an episode or at least at least one episode about the Twitter will probably a two parter, but the story of Twitter, to really talk about the foundation of it, what it was originally meant for, and what it has turned into, especially in light of the controversy of how Twitter has handled the whole API approach and third party developers, because that's definitely caused a

lot of frustration in the tech world. Um, and you know, I've got companies like Cloud that are very much leveraging Twitter to get, you know, to to become a valuable service. So, um, at the end of the day, does cloud really matter? I guess it depends on the industry you're in. And Uh, the nice thing about the Cloud score is it's not static. It will change over time, and if you are dedicated to increasing that Cloud score, you can do it in

legitimate ways. Hopefully, the cloud algorithm will be able to take into account things like dummy Twitter accounts or dummy Facebook accounts, so that if you were to get a huge number of followers immediately, it would not automatically adjust your score because obviously you could gain that system. I mean, there are companies out there already that only exists to provide people fake essentially fake accounts. Uh. There are even other ones that will try and get real accounts to

follow you. There's this whole um, I scratch your back, you scratch mine approach where you like, if you follow these twenty people, these twenty people will follow you back. You know. That's kind of you know, almost like a pyramid scheme of Twitter followers. I would hope that the cloud algorithm takes that into account and again really concentrates more on the impact and hopefully avoids counting false positives. And that wraps up this classic episode about cloud. The

cloud went belly up. Originally it started to kind of get away from the whole scoring system, and then eventually it went away entirely. It was an interesting idea, but one that was almost guaranteed to go sour pretty quickly. If we ever assigned scores for anything, people will start trying to figure out how to game the system, because

of course, getting a high score means winning well. If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or pop on over to tech stuff podcast dot com. You're gonna find archive of all of our past shows. There. You will also find links to where we are in social media and a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show, and we greatly appreciate it, and

I'll talk to you again really soon. Y Text Stuff is a production of I heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.