How to Measure Influence for Social CRM

By Kyle Lacy, Stephanie Diamond, and Jon Ferrara from Social CRM For Dummies

Influence is a topic that every online business wants to know more about and, thus, is useful for Social CRM. Robert Cialdini, a psychologist, has written a classic book on the topic called Influence: Science and Practice. In it, he outlines several ways that people are persuaded. They include things like reciprocity (you give something and get something in return) and social proof.

Influence has taken on new importance for social media users because people who write blogs and communicate to large groups online now wield influence. Several tools measure influence, but it’s hardly an exact science. There has been much debate about whether these tools really measure influence or just social media activity. Following are some free tools you may want to use to check your company’s (or your own) influence score:

Klout: This was the first of the influence ranking tools, launched in 2009. It measures your activity and influence across social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Kred: This company’s tagline is, “We all have kred somewhere.” With this as a starting point, this tool shows you your kred score (the highest is 1,000) and your outreach level (the highest is 12) based on your activity on Twitter.
PeerIndex: This tool gives you a visual display of your areas of influence that it calls topic footprints. It also gives you a score that can be compared to others on the site.