Online influence measurement and analytic services are all the rage in this hyper-social media aware age we find ourselves in, but should online influence be an exclusive club? Last week, Klout, the 800-pound gorilla in the online influence game, announced it was adding Instagram as an available service you can add to your connected accounts. I’ll get to why that puts my boxers in a bunch in just a minute. Upon logging into my Empire Avenue account, e(MULLETT), today I noticed that now they will be using it as a metric as well. What the heck?
Why is Instagram an issue, and does anybody else care? Instagram is an iOS-, iPhone-, iPod-, iPad-only service. You cannot use it via any other platform, and there is no web interface for it. This means that people who are part of the Apple mobile hardware ecosystem are granted exclusive opportunity to additional online influence. Again I ask: what the heck?
To be fair, I must admit that other services present encumbrances as well. For example, if you don’t have a smart phone, other mobile devices with a GPS, or a laptop and a mobile hot spot or wifi connection, you can’t very well check in to Foursquare, which is also used by both of the aforementioned services. Some people also do not want to check in via Foursquare due to privacy and safety concerns, though you choose who you let see alerts and which networks they go to. But I digress. Maybe you don’t take photos and don’t care about sharing photography. Clearly those who do and have a Flickr account and Instagram account have a leg up on others. The difference is choice.
To sum up, I believe that if you are going to measure online influence, it should be a reflection of signals that can be generated by the majority of the online population without being tied to a specific manufacturer’s ecosystem. Or you should at least separate those signals into a specific report.
What is your take? Put a quick comment together and let me know, or join me and @ScLoHo, @RoundPeg, and @RandyClarkTKO for a conversation about Klout tomorrow (8/16/2011) on BlogTalkRadio.