Klout revealed a beta version of its new topic pages today, which it hopes will turn the company into something more like a Nielsen-type rating service rather than a vanity metric for people using social media.
The pages are Klout’s way of scanning the Web looking for influential discussions and the people who are leading those discussions.
“This is a big step for us in turning Klout into more of a utility around search and discover,” says CEO Joe Fernandez. “This is a really early version of where we plan to take this but it speaks to our belief that every person who creates content has influence. Our goal is just to understand what they are influential about and who they influence.”
Klout uses its +K data – the measure of how influential a person is in social media – to show who in a person’s audience is voting them as influential about a particular topic.
The topic pages look a lot like the Klout interface and it’s really simple to just scan down a page after searching for a general topic. You can immediately find someone of influence. Then, Klout shows what content influencers on each specific topic are talking about.
Klout influence is more than just a single person’s focus on a single subject. It’s feasible now that someone can rank high in Klout in any manner of subjects, not just in the previous silos assigned to Klout users.
The aim is to provide more context about a topic. Klout says in a blog post today that they plan to add further analytics, trends and related content over the coming months.
