Interview With Jonathan Chua, Co-Founder Of Klout

With the much awaited unConference 2009 happening this Saturday, SGEntrepreneurs catches up with one of the startups presenting at the event, Klout. We interview one of its co-founders, Jonathan Chua.

Hi Jonathan, tell us, what is Klout all about?

At Klout we believe that every person who creates content online has influence. Our goal is to understand how big the audience is that a person influences and on what topics they are influential.

Influence is a tricky term, how do you measure a person’s influence?

Unfortunately there is no simple influence calculation but there are a lot of clear signals of influence we are able to identify out of the Twitter stream. An example might be if a high percentage of my tweets about video games were retweeted then there is a good chance that I have some level of influence on the subject. Our engine focuses on identifying these signals like this that might indicate influence in the 25+ variables that we track. Knowing that influence is subjective we also allow customers to customize how the factors in the calculation are weighted. If your company is looking to drive conversation you could weight @ messages higher and find the people who really know how to keep a conversation going.

Essentially a Twitter influencer measurement tool, can Klout be said to be tracking influence “across the social web”?

Our engine works on most social sites (Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, etc) but thus far we have focused on collecting data and proving our methodology on Twitter. Most social sites are connected to Twitter in some way so do have a fair sense of how influential someone is across the social web. For example, most people will share links to their blog posts or new videos on Twitter. We are able to measure how people react to these link to understand how influential they are on these on other sites. It’s not perfect but our analysis has shown that it gives us a good starting point.

Can you give us a few examples of who influencers are and how they behave online?

Go to search.twitter.com and look for “rt @guykawasaki” and you will get a sense of the power influencers have to spread information. Influencers seem to have a unique ability to surface interesting data (links) and package it in a way that makes people want to not just click through but co-opt the information and make it their own through retweets. The influencer seems to be at the top of the pyramid of knowledge dissemination.

What is Klout’s main competitive advantage?

Our proprietary analytics engine performs semantic analysis on tweets and utilizes machine learning to measure influence between social graph nodes. Creating actionable data like we do is a non-trivial task that will cost any company a lot of money and time.

Who makes up your team?