PKB

May 9

Launching Klout Experts

Yesterday Klout launched Experts, a brand new way for influencers to share their expertise and help others along the way. Our CEO and co-founder Joe Fernandez has much more to say about the significance of the Experts launch as a marker along the path of Klout’s growth.

For me, it’s been gratifying to see how serious Joe and the rest of Klout are about extending the definition of influence to encompass the sharing of the knowledge each one of us has about specific topics. While the Klout Score has been an effective initial basis for introducing Klout and the concept of influence to the world, Experts massively expands the scope of influence. For the first time, our influencers now have the ability to directly share their knowledge and passions on Klout — the taste and wisdom they have built up about the things they care about in life.

Here’s a sample answer from PR insider Peter Shankman on pursuing a career in public relations:

And another answer from Circa founder and mobile entrepreneur Matt Galligan on the qualities of a great app:

These contributions will meaningfully help other people through our partnerships with Bing and others to come, by delivering high quality answers to everyday questions at the point of need, all backed by the trust and topical authority the Klout Score provides.

The initial press coverage for the announcement yesterday has been strong:

Wired: Beyond Scorekeeping: Klout’s New Plan to Become a Social Network
PandoDaily: Klout Experts: Has Klout finally come up with something users will love?
Mashable: Increase Your Klout Score By Sharing Your Expertise
All Things D: With “Experts,” Klout Wants to Make Influence Matter in Online Q&A
GigaOm: Klout dips into Q&A and local commerce with launch of new questions feature
TechCrunch: Klout Gets Into The Q&A Business By Launching Klout Experts (With Help From Bing)
Search Engine Land: Klout Integration Pushes Human Powered ‘Expert’ Answers Atop Bing’s Search Results
The Verge: Under the influence: Bing lifts Klout to the top of search results

We also launched a redesign of Klout.com (which looks just beautiful, thanks to our amazing creative team). The brief for the redesign was to humanize and warm up both the voice and the look of the site and I think they nailed both.

Sarah Lacy very clearly surfaces the potential for Klout Experts and its future impact when she writes:

Rather than just bragging about a score, they can actually show off how influential they are and get pretty massive distribution if they answer a question well … Klout Experts helps put more content and value around influence, allowing people who truly possess influence around a certain topic to share it. But it’s a big step in an algorithm-centric company becoming more human powered. A tacit admission that not everything can be boiled down to a number.

Launching is just the first step on this next phase of Klout’s journey. Experts is a great opportunity for us to follow through on achieving our mission of helping everyone realize their influence — and it will be exciting to see how our influencers respond to this with their answers, passion and creativity.

Nov 11

Building Klout

The official job description and application is here.

These are some of the people you’ll be working with. They are this lovely IRL.

This is us. And this is also us, on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube.

Jul 27

2 Comments

Inside Klout

It’s been an awesome first two months for me here at Klout. Since I started I’ve had the opportunity to get to know people from across the company, and I’m struck by the blend of intelligence, passion, hard work and humor my colleagues bring every day. This is a special group that is working to create not just a long-lasting company but a whole new way for everyone to benefit from the rise of social media.

Just to illustrate my point and show how much I love the folks here — some personal impressions since starting in May:

Our engineers are up there with the best that I’ve worked with, and they celebrate wins in style. First startup I’ve worked at where API status is routinely reported as “SEXY!“
Our copywriter runs to and from the office every day as part of his training regimen for the SF Marathon. In fact, marathon training has gone viral and there is a weekly class.
Two-year anniversaries can be dangerous. We reenacted The Hunger Games for a recent two-year celebration. Complete with Hillbilly Margaritas.
Members Only jackets are back. It took 30 years, but they’re a thing again now. Separately, I’ve been introduced to summer denim colors but will need to work my way up to pink jeans.
The marketing team started and runs a program for nonprofits called Klout for Good that’s helped connect thousands of people with causes from UNICEF to the SF AIDS Walk.
People are serious about their food. It’s a tossup but I’m going to say that our finance team wins for the greatest number of delicious looking restaurants visited.
Our new COO loves to engage in thoughtful and complex discussions about the world. Not only is he a successful startup guru (at tellme.com), he also served as a White House fellow doing some very high-level international policy work.

These vignettes are just a glimpse of what the people and life at Klout are like. The consistent thread across my interactions is that this team is genuinely motivated to follow through on our mission of democratizing influence. And to do it Klout-style, which means with fun and a lot of swagger.

Great culture comes from great people. It’s a credit to our humble (and wicked smart ) founder and original Kloutlaw, Joe Fernandez, that the people here built this culture alongside a company and technology platform.

The bigger picture is that we’re on the cusp of introducing something new on the product side that I’m very excited to see go live. All totally exhilarating, which wears on my not so young anymore body, but I couldn’t imagine a better place to be than Klout as we roll these updates out later this year and start to really fulfill the vision.

Jun 6

How Do You Harness Your Klout?

There was a torrential downpour in Austin that March evening as we hustled from our hotel to a friend’s party. In line for wristbands, we amused ourselves by sending our first tweets together, only appreciating in retrospect, thousands of miles away and weeks later, the beginnings of something vibrant and new.

Five years later, the torrent’s a flood. The proclamations of the move to a web of people, not pages, have come to pass. Everyone’s got a profile, a camera, and a filter, and I’m sharing this because I just started working for a company that has a vision for helping people ride this flow in a new way.

I joined Klout because of the mission: to empower everyone by unlocking their influence. When Joe Fernandez first shared the vision for Klout with me, what stood out for me was that what most people love about Klout — being able to up your visibility on the social web, connecting with like-minded people, and all the awesome free stuff — were just the most obvious benefits. And at the core, Klout is about the power every individual now has to impact the world just by sharing their knowledge, passion and inspiration. How great is that?

It’s an optimistic perspective that recognizes each one of us has an important voice that can bring positive changes into the world. And it’s profoundly democratic because it embodies the belief that everyone can meaningfully participate. (Our Klout for Good program puts this belief into action for projects like UNICEF and (RED).)

Don’t misunderstand. I still love the great perks Klout provides, and I’d love to tap my Klout to share some lovely backstage passes with you or, at the minimum, a free pizza. But I believe what’s even more awesome will be working with everyone here to help you realize and share your own personal influence, and to connect with others to amplify that positive impact in the world.

What you see with Klout now is just the beginning of what Klout will become, as we build more tools to help everyone experience the web of people.

Feel free to check Klout out here.

May 19

Jonathan Harris at PSFK

Fantastic talk given this May on humanizing the web by artist Jonathan Harris.

May 1

“Like a Ship”

Shazamed while driving to SF and listening to KALX (tangentially: Shazam’s consistently stayed on the first screen of my phone since first install years ago — so handy, so many times if you listen to music on the radio for any length of time). T.L. Barrett recorded this album in 1971.

Long revered by record collectors, this album remains one of the holy grails of gospel soul. Self-released in 1971, Like A Ship was the result of Barrett channeling his passion for music, a determination to keep children off the streets, and his charismatic preaching (which attracted the likes of Earth, Wind & Fire and Donny Hathaway to his sermons at Mount Zion Baptist Church) into the production of the album, a project bolstered by the saxophonist and arranger Gene Barge of the famed Chess Records, and backed by a cast of players that included Richard Evans, Phil Upchurch and the rapturous vocals of the Youth For Christ Choir.
– Light in the Attic Records

T.L. Barrett, Bill Russell, Isaac Hayes, and Jesse Jackson

Apr 19

1 Comment

Kvelertak Reviewed

Definitely the best blog review of a Norwegian metal band I’ve ever read.

I have a confession to make. I work for a church. I do. Music blogging is not exactly a cash cow so in order to buy food and stuff I work for a church (I am being a touch flippant, I love my job).
…
[Kvelertak] came on and they sang in Norwegian. This gave me the opportunity to interpret the lyrics in what ever way I wanted. I am pretty convinced that they singing about their desire to settle down, have a family, open a pet store and become upstanding members of there local community. Yeah. Absolutely.
–Tim Simmonds, Accidental Black Metal

H/T: Ian Rogers

Apr 17

Valve’s No Management Culture

Loved this essay.

Valve is one of the most successful independent game developers, and they’ve consistently pushed the form out to the edges, right to the point where you can feel a new art emerging. (See 1998′s release Half-Life for the origins of this approach.)

If most of the value is now in the initial creative act, there’s little benefit to traditional hierarchical organization that’s designed to deliver the same thing over and over, making only incremental changes over time. What matters is being first and bootstrapping your product into a positive feedback spiral with a constant stream of creative innovation. Hierarchical management doesn’t help with that, because it bottlenecks innovation through the people at the top of the hierarchy, and there’s no reason to expect that those people would be particularly creative about coming up with new products that are dramatically different from existing ones – quite the opposite, in fact. So Valve was designed as a company that would attract the sort of people capable of taking the initial creative step, leave them free to do creative work, and make them want to stay. Consequently, Valve has no formal management or hierarchy at all.
– Michael Abrash, Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing

In my own experience, the best work outcomes have happened in just these kinds of environments, ones where teams of creative people (across disciplines) are entrusted to do what they do best, and where management mainly works to support the playing field for the team. These situations are only possible when there’s massive trust in the capabilities and judgment of every person on the team, which Abrash also writes about.

Hardest of all to believe is the level of trust. Trust is pervasive. All of Valve’s source code is available to anyone in Perforce, and anyone at Valve can sync up and modify anything. Anyone can just up and work on whatever they think is worth doing; Steam Workshop is a recent instance of someone doing exactly that. Any employee can know almost anything about how the company works and what it’s doing; the company is transparent to its employees. Unlike many organizations, Valve doesn’t build organizational barriers to its employees by default; it just trusts them and gets out of their way so they can create value.

I think this perspective only works in practice if the leadership of a company operates from a view that every employee in their organization merits this kind of trust and respect — and this perspective itself presumes a baseline positive orientation towards human possibility that I see emerging in many new companies.

That’s huge, and exciting.

Sep 30