In real life social circles, people are influenced by their peers. On social networks, influencers are trusted friends and authorities linked by interest-based communities.
How do you analyse and quantify influence on the social web? A search query for 'Social Media Experts' on Google returns 366,000,000 results – but how do you determine a so called 'expert' is exactly that?
There have been a few attempts at evaluating social worth and influence (Klout being the most memorable); but none do so in a completely transparent (or understandable) way. San Francisco's Kred, built by 'high tech social analytics company' Peoplebrowsr, are a new startup aiming to solve that problem.
Kred uses a set of rules that are publicly displayed on their website to rate influence. Users are scored by their 'Influence' (which is measured on a 1-1,000 scale with points awarded when you or someone else interacts with your content) and 'Outreach' (which awards a user points when they interact with other users or users' content). It may sound complicated, a quick read of the Kred scoring guide [PDF] will explains it in an easy-to-understand way.
Kred's been in closed beta since first launching in September. You can request access via email or Twitter on the Kred holding page and they'll be releasing invites slowly over the next few weeks. We've been using our account for the past month or so and, once it scales up from the relatively few users it has now, we can see Kred becoming the leader in the social analytics space. We're predicting some big things from Kred and Peoplebrowsr in 2012!