PageRank for People

Last night on the HR Happy Hour Show we had an interesting discussion with Megan Berry from Klout, Jennifer McClure, and Dawn Hrdlica-Burke about online or digital influence, and its potential effect and use in the recruiting and hiring process. We also talked about some of the implications that relying on these kinds of new algorithms might have in the future. It was a fascinating conversation, and I encourage you to check out the replay of the show here, (or drop it into your fancy iPad, just search the iTunes store for 'HR Happy Hour').

My favorite line of the night was from Megan, when she described one of Klout's goals is to have the Klout score be perceived as the 'PageRank for people', a comparison to the famous search breakthrough invented at Stanford by the founders of Google, which sorted and presented web search results not simply by the amount and location of keywords in web page content, but rather by an evaluation of the number and quality of other sites that linked to the site in question. More simply put, if lots of other sites on the web, that were judged to be of good quality linked back to a particular site, then that destination site was assessed at a higher relative quality, and thus its 'PageRank' would improve.  

It is a concept as simple and as fundamental to any evaluation we'd make of the quality, reliability, and trustworthiness of any person, business, or service - if enough (or even just one if it is the 'right' person), people that we respect and value their judgment indicate that Candidate 'X' would make a good hire for a specific role, or that Jimbo's Plumbing Service can be trusted not to rip you off, then we are far more likely to heed that advice than we would from simply doing a cursory analysis of online 'presence' or marketing material.

So when Megan from Klout told us on the show last night that Klout's new '+K' feature, where users can log in to Klout.com to 'award' other users a '+K' to indicate their explicit agreement to the Klout assessment of topical influence, did not directly factor into the person's actual score due to concerns about potential gaming of this process, I was a little surprised. Because to me, at least once Klout can sort out the correct way to control to remove the element of potential gaming the system, then the +K component would stand to be a fundamental aspect that would support the 'PageRank for People' idea. 

It's really not that not different from Angie's List, or Amazon book reviews, or the consumer product ratings that pop up on pretty much every electronics retailer website.  For some reason we don't seem to worry too much about Jimbo the plumber 'gaming' the system, but when we get to discussing Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and such, the conversation about 'influence' starts to get a little funky.

Again, I am not sure Klout has the answer to all this yet, or if some one else will figure out a better way to come up with that just right blend of algorithm, evaluation, and personal touch that will result in a measurement or score that will become more universally accepted, but I am fairly confident someone will.

And I am also fairly confident that soon after some other disruptive technology will emerge that will make us reconsider 'influence' once again.

Anyway, I am done talking/writing about this for a while, unless my Klout score keeps tanking!

Have a great weekend!

Comments

[@nga_anita]

Hi Steve, nice write-up. There's a lot to say about Klout - and you can find some posts on my blog - but their ranking algorithm is not sophisticated enough right now to accurately measure social influence. The +K is already flawed, just do a search on Twitter for people exchanigng +K's or begging for them. Klout made the right decision not to let that influence Klout score yet.

[Steve]

Thanks Anita - I must confess to not knowing enough about the details of the Klout algorithm to know how to evaluate it properly - but it does seem like for the time being it is carving a place as the best available quantitative metric for online influence. It will be interesting to see how this develops in the future. Thanks for reading and for your comments.

[wuting]

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[ting]

I am not sure Klout has the answer to all this yet, or if some one else will figure out a better way to come up with that just right blend of algorithm, evaluation, and personal touch that will result in a measurement or score that will become more universally accepted, but I am fairly confident someone will.wow gold

[Jay Rivera]

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