VCs with Klout
Klout – the developer of a social media reach measurement tool best known for declaring pop singer Justin Bieber more influential than Barack Obama – has just raised $8.5 million in a new funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. The three-year-old company will use the money to improve its algorithms, increasing the number of services used to crunch its scores. Currently, the site principally analyzes Twitter and Facebook data to come up with scores to measure the size of someone’s engaged audience, the likelihood their content will generate a response, and the level of influence of their followers. Who comes out on top? Recent Klout Scores, on a scale of 1 to 100, show 16-year-old tween heartthrob Bieber with the highest score at 100, well ahead of Barack Obama, at 87, who also trails Lady Gaga, at 91. Now, of course, that doesn’t mean Klout is saying Bieber and Gaga are more powerful. No one’s expecting them to hammer out the next nuclear disarmament treaty. But when it comes to Twitter followers, retweets, Facebook views and other measurements of social media clout, their status is indisputable.
