What’s in a Number: Reviewing klout.com

My uncle, a senior executive in a PSU, was at my home for Christmas and he introduced me to an important management adage: “What cannot be measured cannot be managed”.

klout.com is a social media analytics company which measures influence of users in the social networking world. To put it simply, it checks out your profiles on twitter, facebook, google+ etc to come up with a popularity score to measure your social charisma on the web.

If you have not used this yet, then the first thing that you should do is go to www.klout.com. There you would need to link all your social networking accounts and see the website churn out a number. To your surprise, the website can spew out a number with an accuracy of up to two decimal places.

Klout gives you some more scores namely True Reach, Amplification and Network Impact. They sift through your social networking activity and observe the number of retweet, mentions, followers and following on twitter. As of now it is unclear what they observe in facebook. They have a bunch of ‘scientists’ and engineers who refine the algorithm which produces the number.

Fig: A snapshot of my klout profile

Klout has this interesting feature called klout perk. If you are popular enough and klout identifies you as an expert in a particular field, you might be given perks by companies who would want you to use their products. For example, if you are an influencer with tablets, Amazon might gift you a Kindle Fire so that you might use it and possibly talk about it on the web (positively or negatively). This is a truly innovative feature(who minds free goodies :) ).

Inspite of all this, Klout has been under a lot of criticism. What I find most annoying about these scores is the lack of non-vague definition for all these terms. For Example, the definition of Amplification says “Amplification is how much you influence people. It indicates how likely your audience is to respond and how close you are to your entire network.” My Amplification score is apparently 37. I have no idea how good it is. I don’t even know the maximum score possible.  The moment I saw klout report card, I got reminded of indiblogger. Indiblogger is a network of bloggers in India. They come up with Indirank every month for all the bloggers in the network. Their blog metric seems much more reliable as they have measurable parameters (like alexa rank, google page rank, frequency of posting etc) which they use to bring out the score. I might not agree with the idea of scoring blogs on these parameters; however I think they do a good enough job in finding out the ‘reach’ of each blog.

Another thing which I find irritating in klout is the +k feature. It reminds me of Zynga’s Mafia War on Facebook. Every day, each user would be given 10 +k points which they can go and distribute among friends. This is a very non creative way of having user engagement and might be detrimental in the long run because if you can increase klout score by spending your time on klout.com(rather than on social networking sites), it is not a good scoring mechanism then.

Also, klout has only added facebook, twitter, google  plus and foursquare in their algorithm. Photosharing websites like flickr and Blogging platforms like  blogspot, wordpress etc have not yet been analysed. These websites are definitely an indicator of a person’s influence on the web.

Then why has klout received so many eyeballs? For one, everyone likes numbers. Numbers have an enigmatic pull. How many times have you felt tempted to click on links which say “10 worst songs of 2011” and the likes? Klout has used this attraction to the maximum and has got a good user base in a little time.

Also, klout caters to a genuine business need. There are a lot of companies which are mulling the ROI of their efforts in social media marketing. Klout promises to give them a number which they can use in board rooms to justify to their bosses that the money spent in social media is showing the desired result. It also promises to be an effective tool in recruitment process for the social media industry. In this world of supply and demand, let us see how klout survives.

P.S. - Now that I blogged about klout, will I get some brownie points?

The Christmas Playlist

The following is a compilation of contemporary versions of classic Christmas carols.

The Christmas Playlist includes:

1. Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas - Relient K
2. Silent Night - Sixpence None the Richer
3. First Noel - Toby Mac & Owl City
4. Joy To The World - Chris Tomlin
5. O Come All Ye Faithful - Jeremy Camp
6. O Holy Night - Kutless
7. Do You Hear What I Hear - Carrie Underwood
8. Angels We Have Heard On High - Sixpence None the Richer
9. Hark The Herald - The Fab Four
10. Away In The Manger - Cristy Lane 

Selling to new India: Bose gets it right

India is changing. If you have any doubt then go to a tier 2 or tier 3 city, visit a mall and see the number of people trying to ride the escalators with mixed feelings of fear and elation.

However, there is a sense of intimidation in all these shopping malls. This feeling is even more prominent in the smaller cities and towns of the country. Even with the burgeoning middle class pockets, the sight and smell of malls and high end shops seem inviting and uninviting both at the same time.

So, when I (a small town boy) went to Croma store, which didnt feel as 'posh' and where one was allowed to play around with the gizmos, I was bound to stumble across something interesting. I moved around in the store fiddling everything that could be fiddled with. Suddenly, I noticed this particular section of the store where all the Bose devices were kept. I had heard a lot about Bose (who hasn't), but had never used any of their products before. When I saw people trying out headphones and speakers at the Bose counter, I thought I should give it a try. I put on one of the headphones. Ecstacy.

What followed was akin to a guy stalking a girl. I would go to Croma store again and again to test the device to convince myself that the hefty price tag was worth every penny. Finally I decided to buy the thing.

However, when it came to buying the headphones, I decided to search for an exclusive store and was surprised to know that they had one in Forum Mall. On my previous visits to Forum, this showroom of Bose was nothing but invisible.

Premier Companies, take a cue. Keep the fancy showrooms in expensive malls, but your customers (the new ones) are not going to find you there if you don't 'open up'.Consumer electronics stores are seeing a transformation. Lets see where it goes from here.

Flipkart exits price war. Is it too soon?

Recently one of my friends (chocophilix) pointed out on twitter that the prices on Flipkart had risen. I went ahead and checked the prices of books that I have bought or want to buy and this is what I found:

 Fig: Flipkart vs Infibeam

In general I could see a 5 to 15 percent price difference of Flipkart from Infibeam. However, this price difference has been observed only in the book selling business (the first segment in which Flipkart entered). The consumer electronics business still shows a congruity in prices among the online stores.

From the time it has started marketing through television advertisements, Flipkart has become a household name. Their service is unanimously considered the best among all the online stores currently functional in India. However this price rise came as a surprise as Flipkart had just started attracting eyeballs of the non-geek India.

It would be interesting to see whether the cost conscious Indian customer be ready to pay the extra 10% for a better service. The case in discussion becomes more relevant because of the unique cash on delivery model which the Indian online retail industry has been promoting. The cash on delivery model negates the perceived risk from online shopping and obviates the need for better service.

Is it too soon for Flipkart to end the price war? Time will tell whether this is a cyclic change or a clear differentiation sought by Flipkart. Looking forward to your comments.

The Four Letter Word

Yesterday I saw this movie called In Time. Set in 2161, the movie talks about a world where humanity has been genetically modified such that they cannot get older than 25 physically, and their currency has been changed from money to time. There would be a clock running on each person's arm. The time shown on the arm is the amount of time left before the person dies. A person would die as soon as the time runs out (if they don’t happen to die of any other unnatural cause before that). Every transaction of goods or services is through transfer of time. A phone call costs 1 minute of life, for example. The clock starts when a man or a woman achieves the age of 25. From the point, their physical features remain that of a 25 year old for the rest of their life. Father, Mother, Grandmother, Albert Einstein, everyone is 25 years old in this world. However, their "real age" might be in centuries (reminds you of inception right?).

The plot of the movie requires the father of a pretty girl (who falls in 'love' with the protagonist of the movie) to pay some ransom for his kidnapped daughter.

Now here lies the dilemma. If this was a normal world, the father would pay anything to get his daughter freed. You cannot take anything to the grave right? However, in this world, it is theoretically possible to live for eternity. So can he waste his money (time) to save his daughter? Will he shorten his life to save his daughter? Will he do that out of 'love'?

LOVE

Here is one word which has puzzled me beyond words.

Is it a state of mind? Wikipedia calls it an emotion. Dictionary defines love as “A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness”. Isn’t that a little less romantic than what one might like?

What do you mean by 'falling' in love?

Is it dependence? Was Mother Teresa looking for dependence?

Is Kasab capable of love? What do you mean by being ‘capable’?

Is it a Verb? Noun?  Interjection?

Can we really truly love someone without having an ulterior motive?

Isn't love the righteous cousin of jealousy and guilt?

Is it lame to even discuss love?

Here is the blog post by my college junior which inspired me to write my share of confusion on this topic. Comments are always welcomed and in fact demanded.

The Other Salman Khan

This Salman Khan doesn’t like removing his shirt for no good reason, has 3 degrees from MIT (BS in Mathematics, BS and MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering) and one from Harvard( MBA) and has left his job at a hedge fund to teach school kids.

Salman Khan is a Bangladeshi American born to a Bangladeshi father and an Indian mother. He started of his teaching career when he started helping out his cousins in their school curriculum. He started posting 10 minute video tutorials on YouTube so that his cousins could have a look. Over the time, he started getting a good number of hits on his videos. So much so that it caught Bill Gates' attention. Now he has a $2 million support from Google to create more content and translation of content to other prominent languages of the world.

 He featured in TED in 2011 where he tells how a hedge fund analyst got into teaching kids.

Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education | Video on TED.com

I have been viewing some of his videos on finance and economics and they have been really enlightening. It is kind of eureka feeling when you come across something like this. It was as if you were looking for it all along but didn’t know where you might stumble across this thing.

Check out his webpage for some insane number of videos: http://www.khanacademy.org/