Who Has the Most Clout in Rhode Island?
Nate Holterman, GoLocalProv Contributor
Who Has the Most Clout in Rhode Island?
Are you influential? Do you have power? How much clout do you have?
In a competitive society, few things matter as much as one’s clout. Clout inspires others to listen to your opinions with trust and confidence. It leads to respect. Before the technology revolution, one gained clout through personal interaction: hand shaking, baby kissing, public speaking. Today, clout is gained via virtual avenues, most notably through Twitter and Facebook. Public officials, celebrities, businessmen, even average Average Joes embrace these new means to broadcast their messages to the world in the hopes that someone out there will listen... and be influenced.
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Clout... and Klout
In a new-media, technology-driven age, how much clout do Rhode Islanders have? And who in Rhode Island has the most? To assess this, we took advantage of a new social media site devoted to just this task: Klout.com.
Klout.com is an online power calculator that doles out scores to every Twitter and Facebook user, assessing the influence they have based on their number of followers and the quantity of content engaged with. A Klout score ranges from 1 to 100, with a higher score representing a larger spectrum of influence.
A person’s overall Klout score is built from three measures, True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.
True Reach represents the size of your engaged audience - the volume of your followers and friends who actively listen and engage with your messages. Amplification Probability signifies the likelihood that your content will be acted upon. Will your messages inspire others to like, comment, @message, or retweet? The Network Score is taken by registering the influence level of your engaged audience. Getting influential people to respond to your information is difficult, and this score determines how prominent the people are who react to your content.
These scores combine to give you one number that either solidifies you as a person with clout, or as one who may need to back to the platform-building drawing board.
Klout.com not only serves as a Web site that identifies the influence people have, it also evinces the benefits for those who use social media. Individuals and businesses who tweet more often or are more involved with their Facebook accounts reach more people and are thus heard more often. One downside to Klout.com is that it doesn’t include Facebook business or fan pages. Therefore, businesses’ Klout scores are only taken from their activity on Twitter. Klout.com says that the incorporation of Facebook business and fan pages is something they “are working on for the future.”
So who in Rhode Island has embraced the social media wave and is riding it to a shore of influence and power? Who has the most clout? GoLocalProv ran the numbers for more than 50 of Rhode Island’s top tweeters and Facebook users and here is what we found.
It’s time to be clouted.
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