Have you stumbled upon Klout.com yet? It’s a quantitative value analysis of your online influence. Every facebook “like,” every tweet, every published blog, every status update, and photo comment adds to your value as an online influencer. A higher score means you have more influence with others in the virtual realm.
Recently, I read an article on Mashable entitled, “7 Surefire Ways to Increase Your Klout Score.” Here are the 7:
- Build a network.The key to increasing a Klout score is similar to finding success on the social web in general: Build a targeted, engaged network of people who would be legitimately interested in you and your content.
- Create meaningful content. Adopt a strategy to create or aggregate meaningful content that your network loves to share with others. Provide links!
- Engage. Actively engage with others in a helpful and authentic way. Ask questions, answer questions and create a dialogue with your followers.
- Don’t scheme. Any gaming behaviors that fall outside the basic strategies will eventually catch up to you. For example, specifically targeting conversations with high Klout influencers will probably be more annoying than successful. If you keep focused on your network strategy and your content strategy, you’ll succeed.
- Interact with everyone. Don’t be afraid to interact with Klout users with lower scores – it won’t hurt your own score. In fact, it helps build their score and in turn makes you more of an influencer.
- Publish. Remember, you don’t have to make a movie or be elected to office to have power now. All you need to do is publish. Access to free publishing tools such as blogs, video and Twitter have provided users with an opportunity to have a real voice, so take advantage of these many platforms.
- Keep at it. Don’t be discouraged by your score. It’s more important to just enjoy your social media experience and let the chips fall where they may.
Here’s an interesting development take on the above: Look at the list again. Change the title to, “7 Surefire Ways to Increase Success with Donors,” and replace the concept of “publish” with the idea of “communicate” – in which you use all available vehicles to communicate with your donors.
Now, instead of thinking only about social media and the online world, think about working with donors in the flesh-and-blood world of human-to-human contact. Each of the above steps will make you a more influential development professional in the “real” world!
Here’s the reality: Whether we use face-to-face visits, phone calls, emails, text messages, Twitter, facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, videos, letters, cards, sign language, or smoke signals — engaging humans and encouraging them to act with generosity involves a similar process.
The communication platforms and environments may change. But the human need to be heard, understood, and valued do not. The ways to become more influential online don’t differ much from the ways to become more influential offline.
Now, go gain more klout (in both your virtual life and your real one)!