About Tony Greenberg

In creating my piece on Klout and Clout, I reached out, as I usually do, to some smart people who typically have great perspectives and distinctive takes. In this case, I asked Alex Lightman and Daniel Rasmus about influence and how we measure it.

I incorporated their thoughts in the main piece, but wanted to share their (slightly edited) full takes here, to give you a broader sense of their always distinctive thinking. Thanks to both for their help as I thought through this issue. Go online to follow their powerful thinking on a variety of tech and other issues.

Alex Lightman

I see value in both the Klout score and, especially, in the +K topics and recipients. I find Klout fascinating because it is a giant step forward in the dream of the West: Pantometry, the measure of everything.

There is also an emerging art form and comedy in the data. For instance, Rupert Murdoch is No. 5 in “Hacking” as measured by +K, and No. 19 in “Cloth Diapers.

I thought that the outcome of the recent online protests that pushed back against the SOPA/PIPA copyright legislation could be seen as a clash of the Titans, pitting “influence” (people with high Klout scores and a personal commitment to transparency and making one’s case in writing and video to the public) vs. “power” (secret people meeting in secret rooms with secret agendas, exchanging secret favors for secret payments).

I also think that, just as a large market capitalization for an Internet company is based on that company’s potential more than actual (achievements), Klout scores and high +K rankings are more indicative of trajectory, and who the leaders will be in the future, if they don’t derail themselves or blow their opportunity with reputation-harming choices.

Klout should be given time to morph into what it will become. The history of measurement shows that it takes 100 years or more before a truly new and novel measure is goes from “unconscious incompetence” to “unconscious competence.”

Only about 1 percent of the world’s 2.1 billion Internet users are even at stage 2, “conscious incompetence,” of this four-stage evolution. Less than one-tenth of 1 percent of Internet users are in stage 3, “conscious competence.” Those are the people who are No. 1 in five or more topics that are related to that person’s work, career, or form of professional expression.

You can see more from Alex at www.alexlightman.com or follow him on twitter.

Daniel W. Rasmus

One of the biggest issues with influence and reputation analytics is the incompleteness of these companies’ models, on a number of levels.

First, they don’t have a model for all of the sources of influence. By focusing online, they miss conferences, for instance. Even if conference participation might be picked up and included in the stream, the size of an audience at the conference (and the audience’s influence) certainly isn’t.

And they don’t do anything with traditional media. There is a correlation between social media influence and media influence in general, but I think it is contextual and we don’t yet understand the relationship.

The other big completeness issue is one of action. Retweeting or liking is an action, but it isn’t an economic action. Klout, for instance, can’t equate a tweet about a new tennis racket to tennis racket sales, or a post about a movie to ticket sales.

Think also about the completeness of the influencer’s own action. Does the influencer follow through, behave in a way that is aligned with the influencer’s personal brand messages? I don’t think these online systems have any way to gauge that except via proxy, and any of those proxies is completely opaque.

There are a lot of other completeness issues, too, like not including comments on posts, charitable work, awards won or books published.

One final issue I see is that of standards.

We don’t have standards to represent the inputs and we don’t have standards to represent the model, so each firm mines data in an apparently unique way, and apparently also analyzes it in a unique way.

As a result, not only are reputation and influence opaque, they are perhaps even unfathomable to the average user. I don’t think anyone understands their credit scores, and I don’t think anyone will be able to understand their social influence score or online reputation either.

This means that the companies that develop these metrics sell their “insights” to buyers, who then use those “insights” about people who don’t understand, and therefore have no control, over the scoring.

I don’t think that has worked well for the average consumer in the credit market, and I don’t think influence and reputation scores are going to be meaningful to them either.

Furthermore, tying scores to gamification, as Klout has done with Klout Perks, creates an even more dubious situation: people are competing against each other to win a game whose rules they don’t understand. It reminds me more than a little of the Land of Toys section of “Pinocchio” (or Pleasure Island in the 1940 Disney movie).

You can see more from Daniel at www.danielwrasmus.com or follow him on Twitter.

 

 

 

There’s been a lot of noise lately about a company called Klout, which recently rounded up another $30 million in venture capital funding from several big firms. Klout, for those who don’t know it, attempts to put a single numerical value on your online influence across social-media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

This effort seems to piss off a lot of people, who detail numerous shortcomings in a service that aspires to be the metric of choice for companies trying to reach social-media “influencers,” in much the manner that Google’s PageRank system helps people understand the reach and reputation of websites.

The Klout complaints are many, even as the company rapidly signs thousands of corporate partners who use its evaluations to dish out “Klout Perks,” such as free entry to parties and events, early peeks at hot products and more. The issues include:

•  The algorithm for determining one’s Klout score is opaque. You know, kind of like Google’s PageRank system.

•  The system can be gamed. One tech-savvy skeptic showed how Twitter bots could be used to create a very strong Klout score in just a couple of months of “work.” You know, kind of like Google’s PageRank system.

•   The system doesn’t measure off-line influence, (or even on-line sites such as most blog services). As one thoughtful writer put it, there’s no way for the system to goose up Marc Andreessen’s Klout score just because the dude helped found the modern Internet. To put it succinctly, Andreessen’s Clout far outweighs his Klout. But again, the inability to factor in most offline and some online influence is hardly unique to Klout. In fact, it’s kind of similar to Google’s PageRank system.

So, Klout already has attained its goal: it is like PageRank, at least in some key ways, the only difference being that no one complains about Google for trying to rank them. Whiners probably would be consigned to Eternal Search Result Limbo if they did, but that’s another story.

“I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don’t have as many people who believe it.” George Carlin

John Battelle’s “The Search” (http://www.amazon.com/The-Search-Rewrote-Business-Transformed/dp/1591840880) details what he calls the Google Dance, the Darwinian tech tango caused when tweaks to Google’s ranking algorithms can transform a site’s fortunes. An algorithmic shift can make the difference between living on a yacht and living on the street, fueling an endless evolutionary minuet between Google engineers and SEO gurus.

Klout scores merely take this tango to another, very personal level. As David Rock points out [“Your Brain at Work” (http://www.your-brain-at-work.com/)], neural circuits and brain chemicals such as oxytocin influence us in areas such as trust, connection, fairness and status.

The resulting interactions can translate into all kinds of unexpectedly irrational behavior, such as why people like to win even pointless arguments, spend unnecessarily on designer items, and battle ferociously to be “mayor” of the corner coffee shop. From a social perspective, Klout scores wire directly into these deeply ingrained structures and behaviors.

As Cloudonomics [Cloudonomics.com] founder Joe Weinman, now at Telx, observes, concerns about Klout mix rational economic decision-making with “lazy, hazy, and crazy” behavioral economics. Valid quantitative decision-making blends with deeply ingrained neuroeconomic drivers such as the quest for status.

Actually, the point of this piece isn’t really to slag Klout, though I personally much prefer PeerIndex, one of its competitors. And to his credit, Klout CEO Joe Fernandez says the company is constantly trying to improve its product so it can more comprehensively measure online influence. Presumably, the extra $30 million now in Klout’s bank account will help.

“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”  Benjamin C. Bradlee

He has an uphill battle ahead. Some people are outraged about Klout in ways they never would be about Nielsen, comScore or other services that strive to measure how many people are looking at some form of media. Why? Because, in this new era of self-created and -generated media/social networks, what Klout is measuring is not just the work product, however flawed, of some distant and massive media corporation.

Instead, Klout is measuring the work product, however flawed, of you. There aren’t many things more annoying than feeling your worthiness judged by a seemingly arbitrary number derived in ways you don’t quite understand.

But really, all this kerfuffle misses the point. Having a single number somehow describe your true influence on others is, at its heart, kinda ridiculous.

Recent research (admittedly also criticized) suggests that social media postings about our likes and dislikes barely affect the opinion of even our friends when it comes to brands, products and experiences. For all those companies now handing out Klout Perks and studiously trying to enchant alleged online influencers, this is just a bit deflating.

At bottom, Klout, PeerIndex, People Browser, ProScore, Twitalyzer, Kred and other competitors are trying to measure (in slightly different ways) the same thing: someone’s intent to buy.

But why are we online, tweeting and posting and sharing and all the rest? Like an actor might ask, what’s our motivation? Are we trying to influence others when we post about events in our life, or products we like, or stuff we find interesting? Are we shilling for someone? Why are we doing this stuff?

It’s a little like, in a different context, spending $25,000 to buy a table full of tickets at the United Jewish Fund annual banquet, then advertising it to all our friends and enemies. Why did you give that $25,000? To help the needy recipients who benefit from the UJF’s programs? Or just to show your hyper-competitive fellow rich schmoes what a noble rich schmo you are?

Personally, I don’t think it should count as philanthropy if the donation comes with self-promotion and personal rivalry, but that likely would empty the coffers of most American charities. 

“I didn’t do it because of the underlying greed that’s prevailing, but it is about greed, doing the right thing at the right time, using your clout when you have it and what for and what reason.”  Danny DeVito

To put it another way, is the most influential and powerful person in a room the one with the most keys, or the one who can get the most doors opened for him/her?

At the heart of these rather cosmic questions is a really important basic truth that Klout score can’t quite capture: other people grant power and influence to you. You only have influence when someone else gives it to you.

Gartner is a well-known research company that makes money publishing and selling lots of moderately priced white papers and research briefs on various industries to lots of people. Accordingly, a lot of people know about Gartner.

My companies, RampRate Sourcing Advisors and DeepStrat Digital Strategy, do tech research too, but we don’t publish any of it publicly. Compared to Gartner’s big bullhorn, we might as well be mimes in a black box.

Instead, we publish our tailored research to highly focused audiences, i.e., the client who commissioned the project. We don’t ask how much a random pair of jeans costs; we ask how well does this specific pair of jeans fit your body? A lot of times, our work shapes the decisions of very big clients that in turn affect entire industries.

Given that, which research company is more “influential?” The big one or the little one? The prominent one or the quiet one whose targeted work helps shape major decisions? Sometimes, a strategic silence can be golden.

On the side, I blog a lot for my own site and various outlets. Occasionally, my posts are about the industries my companies serve. But my blog-driven bullhorn seldom touts my companies or even me as their glorious and brilliant leader. Hard to believe, I know.

Instead, many of my pieces are motivated by a Ralph Nader impulse, when I’m frustrated by the anti-consumer misdeeds of power utilities, car dealerships, computer stores and others. Other times, I highlight the lifestyle and moral choices that can improve our lives or the planet.

Am I trying to influence you? Yes. Do I make money off this writing? In nearly all cases, no. But based on the responses I get to my blog pieces, I know lots of people are listening, and that is its own significant reward. I started writing because when I meet people, they almost never understand what I am talking about. Writing gives me a chance to actually make sense to them.

And because they’ve decided to “listen” to me by reading what I write, they’re granting me influence when they think about what company they want to do business with or how they want to live their lives or how they can preserve this wobbly blue marble we live on.

Measuring that influence, which isn’t about selling anything but might help change the way we think about our world, will never be something Klout and its competitors can fully tote up, no matter how much Clout I also might have.

Power, real power, comes in many forms. What you do when no one’s watching can truly affect our world. Random acts of kindness prevail where pompous over sharing fails. True clout is what you get as others measure your actions. 

“Nearly everything you do is of no importance, but it is important that you do it.” Mohandas Gandhi

Originally posted at www.TonyGreenberg.com

A friend of mine in the research industry used to give out little post-it-notes to trainee analysts that said “be wrong boldly.” Her reasoning – if you are bold and right, you will be hailed as a prophet. If you’re wrong, most likely the crowd will have moved on by the time your prediction fizzles. But accountability for our past advice is a core value here at RampRate, so we have to see how we did on our 2011 predictions – and see just how well our crystal ball was working. By our count, we have 4 hits, 2 partial hits, 1 miss, and 3 TBDs that won’t be known until later. What do you think?

1. Everything that’s old will be new again – we predicted that the main technology splashes 2011 will be retreads. The year was a bit short on new fads compared to 2010, with most of the top tech gifts like new tablet PCs and phones being evolutionary rather than revolutionary developments. The one true innovation that we got to participate in — the purely electric car — is, however, a classic reprise. The first electric cars held speed records and went head to head with internal combustion (and steam) in early days of the industry only to be trounced by cheap gas. With several major manufacturers mass-producing all electric cars, the old electric car new again, making this prediction a hit
2. Markets will stay irrational longer than companies stay solvent – although the year was a busy one for data center and telecom M&A activity, most of the acquisitions were hardly fire sales. And while there were 9 telecom bankruptcies for the year, the only ones that made it into the top 20 were in satellite communications. That said, bets on rapidly rising data center prices have continued to not pay off as RampRate customers typically saw material per-kilowatt cost decreases in their renewals and greenfield projects, leaving the prospect of further shakeout down the road and a partial hit for the prediction.
3. A large firm will overpay to jump on a bandwagon – while most of this prediction covers 2012-2013, there are several examples of cloud / data center acquisitions that start off on the hype path, such as Verizon’s purchase of Terremark at 5.4x annual revenue and a 35% premium vs. market  and CenturyLink’s Savvis purchase at 3.2x revenue and an 11% premium vs. market prices (which would have been a 53% premium had it been bought at the same time as Terremark). Time Warner’s purchase of NaviSite (albeit at a smaller 1.9x revenue multiplier) completes the trio. We wish these folks all the best, but the prediction still stands as TBD.
4. More CDNs will be built and fail – Dan Rayburn’s list of current and former CDNs keeps growing. However, 2 of the main exits of 2011 and the first week of 2012 – Cotendo and Voxel – could be considered successes, and Tata’s pickup of BitGravity at least a salvaging of a mediocre situation. So this one will be a miss… for now. Some catastrophes like Amazon web Services failed it customers, but not financially for Amazon..
5. More peering disputes will be recast as net neutrality – As predicted, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings elevated this issue to headline levels by publicly lobbying Congress for a better deal for its provider. Others such as Global Crossing and Voxel followed suit, leaving a harried AT&T and a cable providers’ industry group pleading with the FCC to decide on the issue. Regardless of the outcome, the prediction is a hit.
6. The media industry will step into another content rights PR nightmare – Ah, where to start? Should it be the inability to sell Hulu – the one digital property that the media industry nurtured to prominence due to content rights issues? My favorite suitor was Amazon. Or with getting half the Internet to mobilize against the SOPA and PIPA legislation? Or yet another single-player game rendered inoperable by remote server failure – but only for legitimate users? A clear hit. 
7. A top exec or politician will demonstrate technology cluelessness matched only by his / her influence on the industry. This year’s Ted Stevens memorial award goes to the many sponsors of SOPA and PIPA, with special mention for Mel Watt (D – NC) and Maxine Waters (D – CA).
8. Security restrictions will cripple productivity without actually improving security. Without another scandal to stir the pot, the pace of silly security measure adoption has been slow. With the UK government actually moving to more, rather than less sanity on allowing open source software, we were about to label the prediction a big miss. But between proposals to build a whole separate secure internet and contributing to LA’s inability to migrate to Google apps, the FBI salvaged a partial hit for us on crippling government productivity for the sake of security aspirations destined to fail due to simple social engineering.
9. Analysts will invent a new acronym destined to melt away by 2013. It’s altogether too easy to say that an acronym or buzzword will fade away. A bit harder to say which one will. Will “gamification” join “protail” (forecast to be a $1.5B industry by 2012 as of 2008 and nonexistent by 2011) in the dustbin? Or will it be underperformance of a hyped segment like PaaS joining data loss prevention’s failure to deliver ($2B in 2012 as forecast in 2008; $832M in 2015 as forecast more recently)? We’ll rate this one as incomplete for now. I  certainly hope this stuid world cloud gets contained or it will be the greenwash term of the decade.
10. Something big will be lost in waves of hype. This one won’t be final until 2018, but Gartner has some guesses. Then again, most of their guesses from 2009 either stayed in the same place on the curve or disappeared, as predicted by number 9. Incomplete.

So, all told, we didn’t do badly, certainly not compared with other prognosticators of more wobbly consistency and clarity. Only one outright miss, and three others that will take a while more to fully determine. That leaves us batting, more or less, .600 with prospects for further improvement. That’s enough to get into the Pundit Hall of Fame, presuming of course than any other pundit actually bothered to look back at what they used to predict would happen before things actually did happen.

Up next, predictions for 2012.

Electricity is really just organized lightning.
—George Carlin

Let me start by saying that I love new technologies, especially when I can try them before anyone, even if I’m sometimes out on the “bleeding edge.” I don’t mind the cuts for the cool that comes with them. Who would have thought my Nissan Leaf is a status symbol.

And let me say that I love treading more lightly on our battered planet, as evidenced by my conscious diet and walkable commute. I particularly love not delivering more wads of cash to problematic places to buy their petroleum.

It even extends to my business, which drives down data-center costs and emissions and measures dirty and clean power for eco-/cost-conscious clients, and to my related efforts with the Clinton Global Initiative (watch for new government initiatives we are driving.)

At the end of the day, watching out for corporate social responsibility

(CSR) saves my clients millions.

And finally, may I say that, at this point in my personal evolution, it was time to move on from my standard-issue, bachelor-dude Mercedes convertible.

All of which is to say that, when my friend Henry Unger offered me the Nissan Leaf electric car that he had ordered back in April 2010 and that had just arrived, I was ready. Boy, was I ready.

When I tell people I bought a plug-in car, they say, “Howz da Tesla?” But Tesla ain’t the ride for this mountain man, Patagonia Tony.  I needed to slow down, and Nissan helped me turn over a new, ahem, Leaf. Simply put, this car is wonderful.

“And God said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light, but the Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected.” —Spike Milligan

Let’s start with the bottom line. The Leaf retails for $37,250, fully loaded with the best Bluetooth, audio and other goodies. There’s even an iPhone app that checks the car’s charging status and remotely starts the climate control.

Even sweeter, the Leaf qualified for a $7,500 federal rebate and a $5,000 state break (basically a third off), to get Americans off oil and onto electric. There are even subsidies to retrofit my garage to a Level 2 charging system that “refuels” the car quicker.

And there are lots of other perks: free parking at LAX, Santa Monica, and other cities, and (legal) carpool-lane use without a companion. And my Handy-Dandy Wonder Nav* (*Not Its Official Name) helps me find the nearest charging stations. I blinged my LEAF for 5 bucks.

This all sounded great. Except…

Except that there’s one other thing I must say: I really value customer service. In my business, I kill myself to take care of my clients. And when I’m the customer, I expect companies to do the same. When they don’t, well, I make a lot of noise.

I’m about to make a lot of noise.

Remember that retrofit subsidy? This, it turns out, isn’t so simple. My 25-year-old townhouse would seem modern enough that it should be easy to upgrade. Except, it’s not. Getting my garage rewired actually requires getting my whole building rewired.

That process ping-ponged me endlessly between Southern California Edison and several vendors who would retrofit my garage/the building/western Santa Monica/the western United States, for $5,000 to $65,000* (*does not include full retrofit cost for western United States).

Ultimately, I couldn’t persuade my neighbors, even in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica, to rewire the building because some residents inexplicably still don’t have electric vehicles.

“Benjamin Franklin may have discovered electricity, but it was the man who invented the meter who made the money.”
—Earl Wilson

The only pleasant part of this rough process was meeting Paul Scott, the environmental activist turned auto impresario who founded Plug In America. Paul knows this space cold, even telling me where to park, plug in for free,

Paul plugged me in to the nuances of going electric, and he wasn’t even selling me anything. He’s the Real Deal.

“Electric-drive transportation is here to stay,” Paul says. “The efficiency gains going from internal combustion to electricity spinning a motor shaft are significant. Furthermore, the energy source is 100 percent domestic, so we (would) eliminate sending $400 billion out of the country every year for foreign oil.”

Through Paul, I came to understand how important adequate access to charging sites is. Gas stations are everywhere. Electric charging stations…not so much.

A Level 1 charging facility uses your standard house 110-volt system. It’s really slow, taking almost a day (20 hours) to recharge a Leaf. As the Supreme Court justice once put it*, “Juice delayed is Juice denied.” (*A very rough paraphrase).

A Level 2 system uses the same kind of juice that most electric ovens use, 220 Volts at 40 Amps, and charges the Leaf in about 7 hours. My ESVE Update will charge my daily use in less than an hour.

By contrast, a Level 3 charging facility is really fast, though not as fast as gas stations. It will charge a Leaf to 80 percent in about 30 minutes. But the Level 3′s real problem is they aren’t very common. Even green-savvy Los Angeles has only a handful of Level 3s, mostly for big government or commercial fleets.

The real secret, although Ecotality and Aerovironment who are simply wasting government funded programs, are forcing misinformation into the market. Fraud and misrepresentation prevail

As an alternate, try the handy dandy conversion kit from the geniuses at EVSE Upgrade, which will double charge through a dryer connection. They are a wonderful solution to bypassing the complicated crap being pawned off at Eco and Aero. Tell them Tony sent ya.

“Electricity can be dangerous. My nephew tried to stick a penny into a plug. Whoever said a penny doesn’t go far didn’t see him shoot across that floor. I told him he was grounded.”
—Tim Allen

Electric cars also have, ahem, modest range. When my Nissan dealer told me the Leaf has a 110-mile range, I thought, “Great! That’s enough to get around LA.”

A friend’s take was different: “Great! That means you can only drive 55 miles before you turn around!”

That’s because I still need to get home. Combine short range with scarce recharge stations and new electric-car owners invariably suffer from RangeAnxiety, though it eases after 90 days.

“It ain’t easy being an early adopter,” acknowledges Chris Paine, who with Paul helped make the seminal 2006 documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” “But then I’d add that it sure is worth it. The stakes couldn’t be higher and only if people like you make the effort, do we have any chance of getting the car companies to start making more and more of these.”

Despite the cheerleading and guidance from Chris and Paul, this whole learning curve was driving me nuts. I was a grumpy “Gran Torino” grampa, muttering under my breath as the complicated realities of electric-car ownership settled more firmly on my slumping shoulders.

“They were nothing like the French people I had imagined. If anything, they were too kind, too generous and too knowledgeable in the fields of plumbing and electricity.”
—David Sedaris

But my real devil was Miller Nissan, whose customer service rating speaks louder than I could. They took weeks to allow Henry to transfer his reservation to me, costing me that $5,000 state rebate. It took another month of ”encouragement,” and repeated broken commitments, for Miller to pay for that lost rebate.

I’m glad my dealer finally did the right thing. I just wish they did it without turning me into Angry Gran Torino Man. I vowed to do everything I could to force Miller to learn how to deliver a Leaf the right way or short of that, get every Leaf left in town allocated to Paul at Nissan at Downtown LA.  Paul loves to hook people up. He can be called at: 310-403-1303.

I still haven’t seen the process changes that will correct where they went awry with Terrible Tony* (*formerly known as Patagonia Tony). But perhaps Miller Nissan will get a clue, eventually.

“We believe that electricity exists, because the electric company keeps sending us bills for it, but we cannot figure out how it travels inside wires.”- Dave Barry

So, has this electrified ride down Bleeding Edge Drive been worth it? I do feel better about reducing my impacts on the planet, and doing it with what is simply the best car I’ve ever owned.

And the process has forced me, again, to think more carefully about how I live my life. What’s my part in all this? Am I an influencer or just a lunatic*? (*Don’t answer that.) Sometimes I think the response depends on my Klout score.

And I’ve had some novel experiences. When I posted to see who might temporarily trade cars when I have a long drive, just about every Tom, Dick, Mary and even Gran Torino Guy was game.

And I once again thought about what is essential. My life’s greatest pleasures are Dr. Bronners and Pressure cookers. My early adopter agonies probably are worth it if I’m helping humanity’s future, which I think I am, however modestly.

And here’s the funny part: I also may have found a new status symbol.

My yoga teacher friend told her father to stop shopping for a Bentley: “If you really want hot chicks, Dad, ditch the ego car and pick up a Leaf.”

Yeah, Dad. So, life is good. And it’s getting better.

“There are two great unknown forces today, electricity and woman, but men can reckon much better on electricity than they can on woman.”
—Josephine K. Henry