I ran into Kred’s CEO, Andrew Grill, at Social Media Week today. We sat down for a few minutes and he explains here how the company’s Influence and Outreach scores work, how PR firms can integrate those analytics into their social media efforts, and what’s ahead for the company. One bit of intel that’s quite valuable: Kred has had access to the full Twitter fire hose since 2008. The 70 billion tweets they hold in their database lets them do all kinds of great analysis.
Social influence scoring systems like Kred and Klout are critical advances in turning communications into a real science. In his landmark book, The Information, James Gleick chronicles how squishy terms like “force” acquired definitive, mathematical meaning in the 17th century…
“For the purposes of science, information had to mean something special. Three centuries earlier, the new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time—and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas.”
I have not a single doubt that people like Grill are doing the same for terms like “Influence,” “Trust” and “Reputation.”
Rock on, gentlemen.
