Cardinals Fly High with Klout

Who's got Klout?

When I started thinking about this week’s discussion, I thought – Wow, what a great opportunity to share something that is special to me. The first person that came to mind was Pope Francis. The organization I work for once received a tweet from him. I’m Catholic. It made sense to write about the Pope.  Surely he has a high Klout score, right? I was wrong!  Pope Francis’ Klout score is a whopping 14.    

So from religion, I turned to sports and found the St. Louis Cardinals score 93. I’m Texas girl, so obviously a Rangers fan, but I live with a die-hard Cardinals fan. Actually, I’ve come to learn over the years that all Cardinals fans are die-hard fans. That’s likely the reason their Klout score is so good to begin with.  “Certain super connectors ignite epidemics and are the epicenter of word-of-mouth influence. Combine them with these technological enablers, and a new era of powerful Citizen Influencers has begun” (Schaefer, 2012, p. 95).

So, I took a peek into what made them as successful on-line as they are on the ball field.  They encouraged the use of hash tags, their Likes on Facebook alone reach 2,265,655 and they have 594K Followers on Twitter.  These numbers along with other elements +Mark Schaefer  (2012) described as factors that effect measurement of the true reach component include “mutual follows, retweets, unique comments, likes and tweets, follower/follow ratio, number of mentions” and more (p. 154). 

                                       Facebook.com/cardinals

Oh, make that one more follower on Twitter! I found they have great images and great content. Schaefer stated, “The ability to produce and/or aggregate compelling, meaningful, and entertaining content and move it virally through an engaged network is a means of establishing influence that is unique to the Internet” (p. 96).  

Schaefer on building Klout stated, “You want to find people who have an affinity for you and what you do” (p. 159). Well Cardinals, I think with Klout – you’ve hit it out of the park. #STLCards

As for me...

I started this semester with a Klout score of 11, which unfortunately was probably very accurate. Today, my Klout score is 45.41 with an all time high of 47.96.

I’ve been working hard to build my online influence. My goal is to reach 50 before this class is complete.  There’s still time to implement Schaefer’s three steps to raise my score.  I’ll continue to “build a relevant network,” create “a strategy to provide compelling content,” and “systematically engage influencers” to distribute it (p. 158). 

Let’s face it… what I really want are the Perks.  So now that you’ve read my blog, feel free to share it, let’s be friends or follow me on Twitter! 

Schaefer, M. (2012). Return on influence the revolutionary power of Klout, social scoring, and influence marketing. New York: McGraw-Hill.