Obama Finally Beats Bieber Fever According To Klout

Thanks to a change in the way their algorithm works, Klout says that President Obama is finally more influential the Justin Bieber. The company now examines more "real world" factors such as the information in your LinkedIn profile and data from Wikipedia entries. From the article: "The overhaul, which began in January, was part of the company's effort to address critics who pointed to Bieber as a prime example of why quantifying online influence was, at best, irrelevant. The teenage pop singer, with his army of 26 million Twitter followers who retweet his every word, had a Klout score that dwarfed that of the U.S. president."

Comments

Missing audience profiles

[mozumder]

A generic number is a horrible measure.

Ultimately, the information Klout is trying to analyze all comes down to marketing, and for that, Klout needs a specific audience to measure influence with.

If I was running a fashion magazine targeted towards females, I would want to tell advertisers I have influence among women ages 24-45, with a certain amount of income, who are interested in shoes and bags. That's going to be different than the influence I have among male libertarian tech nerds, but unfortunately, Klout doesn't know the influence specific separate audiences (probably a billion combinations of different audience profiles), which is important now that marketers are targeting more specific niches.

Statistics

[mestar]

Looks like they already knew the result they wanted, then they changed the algorithm until they got that result.

Re:Statistics

[Theophany]

Well, in fairness having a millions of tweens hanging on your every word is hardly 'influence' compared to, oh I don't know, being POTUS.

Influence is as much to do with the nature of your 'followers' as the influential person themselves.

This story is bad and you should feel bad.

[icebraining]

I can understand posting important political stories. But Obama vs Bieber on Klout? Are you serious?

Klout is a terrible company, nothing more than a money machine from extending high school style popularity to the web, based on idiotic metrics and raking profiles without people's consent.

Charlie Stross called them "the Internet equivalent of herpes" and that's exactly what they are. Lets not extend their influence further.

WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel like I am an alien from another planet trying to understand this strange human society.
1. I had no idea who "Bieber" was until I read this article. (He seems only to be popular in primarily English speaking Countries, I guess mainly only the US. This is supposed to be an international site, I thought, so they should at least put his first and last name together.)
2. I never heard of Klout, and I guess even most people in the US never have, even slashdot visitors, so maybe perhaps someone should explain that in the summary.
3. I know who Obama is, but I don't know how or why he would beat "Bieber" and since I didn't know what Klout was, I didn't know if "According to" meant "as announced by..." or "following the rules of...", etc. Assuming it was sports, I would assume the second one and be wrong.
4. Trying to sound cool by using words like "fever" in the headline just makes it more confusing. "Beiber Fever" could be a disease, for all I know. It sounds like it is. But Obama beat it, so I guess he's in recovery now.

So at best, this header read to me as:
Obama finally beats xxxxxx Fever according to yyyyyy.

Jesus christ. Back to Slashdot.jp for me! At least the headers make sense...

Re:WTF

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

This is supposed to be an international site, I thought, so they should at least put his first and last name together
Just b/c they dropped this from the faq "Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. " Doesn't mean this site is all of the sudden an international site.