Get Social. Be Social. Live Social.

The Fox IT Awards

This was a great night to honor the hard work of students and hear some of the success stories of the professionals who were the recipients of the awards.  This event was a great way to network with others outside of the classroom, and was an overall great time.  The ceremony was held in Mitten Hall, and everything was great from the food and drinks, to the desserts and honorary speakers.  Events like this always create a good environment because the students and teachers can take a little break from their hard work during the semester to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of others.  For me, this was my first year experiencing the Fox IT Awards, and I thought it was a very nice event for student and teachers of the Management Information Systems department to attend.  The ceremony at Mitten Hall, followed by Pub Webb, and then a final pit stop at Maxis   to end the night helped contribute to an overall successful night for my first time at the Fox IT Awards, and if I have the chance to do it all again next year I would recommend it to any student!

To be honest I did not know what either Klout or Kred was before this class, and both of them had a very interesting layout.  When it comes down to picking one over the other, I would say that I would choose Klout because the layout is less chaotic and easier to understand.  The navigation of Klout makes it easy to find your Facebook friends as well as those you follow on Twitter.  I think the whole concept of Influences on Klout is pretty cool too.  Kred just seemed like too much stuff thrown at you at once.  Overall, I think Klout gives a more accurate storyline.

So I’m posting this a little late, but I was interested to get the class’s thoughts on Twitter going public sometime in the not too distant future. The social media giant has a market valuation that exceeds $10 billion and is expected to be a publically traded stock within the next two years. Do you think Twitter’s IPO will be less problematic than Facebook’s was just a year ago? Also, any thoughts on how you think the company will do run publically as opposed to privately?

Social Influence, a great concept to actually measure your influence across various social media networks, I was unaware of such a measurement system until this activity was posted. And I must say, it is pretty impressive. I signed up with Klout and Kred using my Twitter account and it was interesting to see my score. At first, I was lost with navigating through the apps, but gradually understood the essence of both the apps. Below is a brief comparison of both the apps.

Photo Credit: Forbes

Kred: It was interesting to see the different metrics of influence. It shows the total community score, total kred score, your follower count, your outreach count and also a breakdown of your influence in the top communities. The levels of metrics here are much more evident compared to Klout. Also the dashboard is more interactive as it shows all your retweets posted as well. It gives a great snapshot of your activity in the last 30 days and also gives a view of your influence globally. It is visually more appealing and a lot more transparent to use than Klout.

Klout: With this app too, you can integrate most of your social media networks-Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. However, it fails to give me a snapshot of my activity and influence across all these platforms in a way Kred does- very simple and straight forward. In terms of navigating through the site, I found Klout less interactive and does not get doesn’t to the same granularity as Kred does with respect to your social influence (breakdown of your influence in different communities).

For me, Kred was the winner, and I will certainly go back to explore it more.

We have an app or social media platform for nearly everything these days but is there something we don’t have that you would like to see come to fruition? If you could create a new social media platform, what would it be and why? Or, would you chose to take over an existing site and make changes to that social media platform? What would those changes entail?

The video is fairly short (1 minute and 27 seconds), therefore, it was not too long for people to watch. In fact, most of the people that said they watched it said they watched it a few times. They also mentioned that their reasoning for watching it repeatedly was due to the catchy background song (“It’s Time” by Imagine Dragons).

I promoted the video via two forms of social media – Facebook and Twitter. I first asked my friends to watch the video through a Facebook status and a Tweet on both my personal Twitter and my WhatSERP account.  When those numbers began to plateau I started asking people individually for views and/or likes and to share it with a friend.  I reached 10 likes and 100 views in no time thanks to persistent posts and requests.

I have been using Klout for about a year now after one of my roommates told me to sign up for it. At the time I never saw anything like it: an application that measures your influence across a variety of social media sites. Because I was already on Klout, I never felt the need to sign up for a similar application. For this achievement, I choose to sign up for Kred and to compare it with Klout. Here’s what I came up with:

Kred: The biggest strength of Kred is that it is really easy to see what accounts you interacted. It’s format is like a timeline and is really easy to navigate and determine what interactions happened when. I like that you can see how much Kred  points you gained from each specific interaction. The negative aspect of Kred is that there seems to be way too much going on your profile/ home page. All of the interactions are really put tight together and are in very small font that makes it difficult to read. I dont really understand why things that I retweet add to my Kred. Nobody is really interacting with me if I retweet a major news source. This I think makes Kred slightly inaccurate.

Klout: Klout’s biggest strength is its simplicity. Though, my opinion may be skewed because I am already familiar with Klout. The layout is perfect, you score is easily visible along with your 90 day Klout score history and a pie chart showing which social media sites most of your influence comes from. All of your interactions are listed below. The biggest advantage Klout has over Kred is that you can add many more social media platforms (as opposed to only Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for Kred). The shortcoming of Klout is that it is too simple when showing your interactions, and that there seems to be some interactions omitted.

The biggest shortcoming of both Klout and Kred is that they don’t include Twitter ‘favorites’ as influence. Even if it’s not a direct tweet or a retweet, I feel like if a favorite still adds a little influence; you are still making a user engage with your content on social media. This omission makes both of these applications somewhat inaccurate. Because Kred takes my retweets into account, I feel like Klout has the better application.

Winner: Klout

In particular on social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook, do you think there is more of a positive or negative atmosphere?

A negative example would be teens getting bullied on Facebook, and a positive example is one that is a current event in the sports world of some star players and political figures giving support to Jason Collins who recently came out as gay.