Have you ever heard of Kred and Klout?  No, they are not your long lost Norwegian relatives.  They are new online social networking sites that are attempting to measure a person’s online influence.

Both for these companies (and a few others as well) have created scoring systems that attempt to put a value on the combined online influence a person has on various online social networks.  The Klout scores work on a scale of 1 to 100, while the Kred scores range from 1 to 1,000.  In both cases, the higher the score, the more influence the person has established online. 

As I mentioned in our last discussion, marketers are very interested in finding and working with people who have a lot of online influence.  If you can get a highly influential person to support your product online, good things can happen…this has been the case for some time.

The idea of a hiring manager researching a person’s online activities is not a new or uncommon idea either.  Dr. John Sullivan makes this point in a recent ERE article:

“It is now quite common to find, assess, and do reference checks on candidates using Google searches, LinkedIn, and Facebook profiles, and the assessment of work samples that can be found online.  In fact, a Microsoft-sponsored survey conducted by Cross-Tab found that 79% of HR and recruiting professionals responded that they currently use online reputation information as part of their hiring process.”

What is new is an attempt to measure this online influence in a way that one person can be easily, quickly, and fairly compared to another person.  The jury is still out on whether such a comparison can truly be fair, but we’ll leave that for the HR technicians to debate.

What I do think is worth noting is a potential connection between an individual who has a high Klout or Kred score, and the skills and capabilities that can be very useful in the real world.  Dr. Sullivan catalogues some of these talents:

1. Communications – they have shown that they are effective and frequent communicators
2. Relationship building — they are successful at attracting and building relationships with others
3. Influencing – they have the ability to influence others and to get others to read and spread their messages
4. Reputation — their reputation, credibility, recommendations, and ability to produce “Liked” content means that they will be listened to
5. Reach – their extensive contacts, friends, followers, and subscribers means that any messages they send will reach thousands
6. Branding – individuals with high social media scores have demonstrated they know how to build a personal brand and that knowledge may be transferable to product branding
7. Crowdsource solutions — their extensive network means that they will be able to quickly “crowdsource” answers to problems that they encounter
8. Writing ability — individuals who have a long blog history have demonstrated both their writing style and ability
9. Knowledge of technology — they have demonstrated that they are on the leading edge of social media technology
10. Adaptable – they are capable of continually adapting to the rapidly changing social media environment (if they have maintained their scores over a period of time)

Are these the skills that you’d like in the next agent you hire?  I can’t say that I’ve seen a more complete list of the characteristics that would make someone successful as a real estate agent!  If an online social networking score reliably benchmarked these skills, then you may have just stumbled onto the Holy Grail of real estate recruiting!

Like most things that sound too good to be true, there are a few caveats worth noting.  First, these measurement systems are in their infancy.  Ask around the office and see how many people have a Klout score.  Probably none.  Now ask how many have Facebook pages.  Probably most.  Facebook became a lot more interesting and useful once everyone was using it.  

The same is true for a Klout score.  Until a majority of candidates standardize on a common scoring system, use the system, and are willing to reveal it during the recruiting process, the concept will have limited value.

Secondly, these scores can be manipulated.  By nature, each provider will have weaknesses in their approach to capturing and evaluating the data.  And, just as search engine optimization techniques are used to manipulate web page rankings, these weaknesses will be exploited by some candidates in an effort to increase their scores.

For now, have some fun with this concept.  Go to one of the sites, register, and find out how influential you are in the world of online social networking.  Then, keep your eyes on this concept… If it grows, it may become very useful.

Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

As many of you know, the Tidemark team is a little nutty when it comes to the concept of measuring things. It is our belief that if something can’t be measured (in the business world), it doesn’t have much value. Without metrics, it is not possible to reliably optimize any business process and consistently make improvements.

This is one of the reasons I’ve personally struggled with making a connection between social networking activities and recruitment sourcing. And yet this is the most common question we get from our clients: "When are you going to figure out how to source more candidates via social networking?" I wish I had an easy answer to that question, but there are still some complexities that cloud the issue.

Traditionally, candidate sourcing is a marketing activity that depends upon gaining access to a large number of people who are “congregating” online for a common purpose—i.e. improving their employment prospects.

Because candidates typically gather in common online locations (a job board, a career information site, a professional society, etc.), there are “media pipes” that allow marketers to get their recruitment messages to these individuals. Getting the right message to the right group at just the right time is the challenge of recruitment sourcing. To be successful in this environment, we’ve learned to tweak content…measure…tweak delivery…measure…tweak timing…measure, etc.

While this process is challenging, the constant in this equation is that people tend to congregate online around a topic of interest to the group. In the online social networking arena, different rules apply. In this framework, people congregate online around relationships. And these relationships are often very eclectic.

For example, what does my grandmother have in common with my college roommate? Probably not much, other than the fact that they both know me. You can probably see why crafting a marketing message that would be of interest to both individuals would be near impossible. In addition, how could someone measure something so disconnected and random?

I’m still not sure there is a great answer to that question, but there are some really smart folks in several start-up companies who are beginning to ask these questions. And, in the process of trying to find solutions, they are identifying and tracking metrics that may help harness the marketing potential of the social networking medium.

The metric that these companies are trying to track is “influence.” By influence they mean–the propensity that a large number of people listen to what a certain person has to say. Or, in some cases, it doesn’t have to be a large number of people. It can be a small number of people who very passionately listen (and in essence follow the direction of) to an influential individual (if you happen to remember the Hale-Bopp Comet cult in late ‘90s, you have the idea).

Of course, the first variety of influence has been going on in pop-culture for a long time. When Oprah tells her audience that she is enjoying some book by an obscure author, the sales of that book explode. When Tom Cruise orders a beer with a shot of Patron tequila in the movie Vanilla Sky, not only does this mixed drink become popular, but also Patron soon starts to outsell other tequila brands in the United State by an 8 to 1 margin.

Obviously, most normal people do not have this kind of influence. But with online social networks, even "normal people" do have some influence. In fact, it turns out that some normal people (i.e. non celebrities) have a lot of influence…so much influence that they are starting to attract the attention of marketers.

In my next post, I’ll tell you about the companies who are doing the pioneer work in this area. Also, we’ll discuss how people who have a lot of influence in the world of online social networking may be some of your best hires.

Until then, put some thought into this question: Of the agents in your office and/or those in your professional network, who do you believe has the most influence?

Once you have this person in your mind, ask yourself: Has this person influenced any of the decisions you’ve made about products you’ve purchased, activities in which you've participated, or other ways you’ve spent your time and resources? If so, how did they do it?

Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

I came across an article earlier this week in USA Today that really has me thinking.  Here is the basis of the data that was being reported:

“Men are claiming more than two-thirds of the private-sector jobs created as the economy recovers, reversing a long-running trend that came within a whisker of giving the USA its first-ever majority-female workforce.

In a wrinkle that puzzles economists, one important driver of the trend is that hundreds of thousands of men are showing up in retailing, once considered a source of jobs for women.

Nearly 1.28 million men gained jobs in the 12 months that ended in November, compared with 600,000 women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).  Although men have returned to work in greater numbers in goods-producing jobs and service-related businesses, they're not returning to still-stagnant construction industries.

Instead, retailers have added 216,900 men — about five times as many as have been added by traditionally male financial services companies — vs. about 9,000 women.  Also, manufacturers have added more than 250,000 men and cut 33,000 women.”

What do you make of this?  Honestly, it seems to have a lot of people puzzled.  The Bureau of Labor Statics (BLS) has no idea why this is happening (“We haven’t studied why jobs are skewing male”), and the plethora of consultants who weighed in on the topic have not come to consensus on the cause either.  The online commentary regarding this article is fairly interesting, if you care to dig into it further.

Maybe someone will figure this out in the weeks ahead.  For now, I would like to focus on one issue that was clear in the research:  Men are beginning to take jobs in fields that were traditionally dominated by women.  While the retail sector was primarily highlighted in this article, this is also happening in “service-related businesses” as well. 

For the real estate industry, I believe this trend could have a positive impact.  Why?  Because many real estate companies continue to be plagued by the “part-time” mentality that limits the people who consider working as a realtor.

Of course, this mentality has its roots in what the real estate pioneers often called “housewife hiring” back in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  While that stereotype has faded over the years, it left a legacy that being a real estate agent was often best suited for those (males or females) who were in a relationship where the other partner could provide a steady income and medical benefits.

If the real estate industry is going to leave behind the part-time agent legacy and become a career field that predominantly employs full-time workers, this employment trend may push things along more quickly.

In essence, the more people (male or female) are looking for employment outside the traditional gender-based paradigms, the more people will consider non-traditional employment.  This means more eyes on the real estate industry…the largest non-traditional employment sector in the economy.

In the world of recruitment sourcing, we call this “churn.”  And employment churn (regardless of the reason it’s happening) is a good thing for a candidate base that has been experiencing some stagnation over the last few years.

Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.