Last night I joined in on the #SocialChat weekly Twitter chat for the first time. I asked a question here and there but mostly lurked in on the conversation.
Led by Alan K’necht, #SocialChat takes place every Monday at 9 p.m. EDT.
Last night’s topic was on PeerIndex – ever heard of it? Similar to Klout, PeerIndex scores your social graph.
According to the website, a PeerIndex profile gives you:
- PeerIndex: a measure of your online social capital
- Topic fingerprint: a snapshot of what you talk about
- Topic resonance: how much other people find what you share valuable
- Comparisons: compare yourself to your friends and peers
Huh. But when asked last night what makes it different from Klout, PeerIndex founder Azeem Azhur said:
“PeerIndex is derived from what other people say about you, not what you do yourself.”
Thus it’s the quality of people who connect with you that counts…not just the quantity. PeerIndex identifies what topics you tweet, and how much interest your tweets garner by your followers.
The goal, from what I understand, is to help you better understand and leverage your status based on the interactions your tweets garner.
PeerIndex includes an Authority metric as well as an Audience (i.e. influence) metric. Your audience score isn’t just calculated by the number of people who follow you. It’s generated from the number of people who listen and are receptive to what you are saying.
You can also use PeerIndex to create groups – a collection of people you can track from a single page. The idea is to be able to compare influence of yourself over others you follow, etc.
Your Online Social Capital
Azeem shared this diagram during last’s night’s chat to help explain how PeerIndex measures your interest graph and your social graph:
Grain of Salt?
Another part of the #SocialChat discussion was about how accurately the score reflects your online activity over time. For example, if you go on vacation for two weeks and your tweeting drops off, how does that affect your score on Klout or PeerIndex?
Klout has been criticized for averaging your most recent activity when calculating your score. PeerIndex however, scores your influence based on an average of your activity over a longer period of time.
Again quoting Azeem:
“PeerIndex looks back over several sliding time windows – between 7 days and 120+ days & smooths out jiggles.”
Azeem also pointed to the PeerIndex Quora for more answers about how PeerIndex algorithm works.
Of course take the scores sites like Klout and PeerIndex give you with a grain of salt. These sites are good for giving you an indication of online influence – use it to look for trends – not as gospel truth of your social influence.
If you’re wondering, next Monday’s #SocialChat is about Twitter etiquette. 🙂