Close En­counter With Klout Experts

Have you heard about Klout Ex­perts? It’s a new fea­ture on the con­tro­ver­sial in­flu­ence scor­ing plat­form, Klout.

It’s the first Klout ‘use­­ful-for-every­­body’ fea­ture pro­vid­ing an ac­tual value to peo­ple (how cool is that!), and I be­lieve it will be big.

I’m a sucker for every­thing new (tech­ni­cal term: early adopter), so I was ea­gerly wait­ing for Klout Ex­perts to ap­pear in my Klout profile.

Wait­ing. And wait­ing. And waiting.

I’m still on the Klout Ex­perts wait­list to get in, but to­day I got a sur­prise sneak peak and an­swered my first 3 questions.

What is Klout Ex­perts? And why is it good for your business?

Klout Ex­perts is a new ques­tion and an­swer fea­ture. Through their dash­board Klout users will be able to sub­mit their an­swers to ques­tions. You may know the con­cept from sites like Ya­hoo! An­swers or Quora.

For ex­am­ple, these are the 3 ques­tions I an­swered today:

• What is the most im­por­tant char­ac­ter­is­tic of a suc­cess­ful en­tre­pre­neur and why?

• What is the best way to brand your­self on the in­ter­net and why?

• What makes for a strong brand name? Why?

What’s dif­fer­ent with Klout is that each an­swer seems to stand on its own, while Ya­hoo, Quora, and oth­ers dis­play all an­swers from all users on the same page.

The next thing that’s dif­fer­ent - mar­ket­ing awe­some­ness! - is that an­swers won’t be quar­an­tined within Klout’s web site, but they will show up on other web sites, most no­tably in Bing search results.

This is where the mar­ket­ing as­pect comes in.

Think about it.

An­swer­ing a sim­ple ques­tion  with 300 char­ac­ters or less gives you a shot at show­ing up at the top of Bing’s search re­sults. Be­ing fea­tured as an ex­pert, in­clud­ing your pic­ture, which means get­ting more at­ten­tion than the other search re­sults on the page.

Here’s what Klout says about ex­po­sure for your answers:

„Through our part­ner­ships with Bing and oth­ers, peo­ple search­ing for help will be able to find your re­sponses, then look at your Klout Mo­ments to un­der­stand your per­spec­tive, and even con­nect with you on so­cial me­dia for fol­low-up conversations.”

Your con­tent in search re­sults with your pic fea­tured is rem­i­nis­cent of Google au­thor­ship, but at the same time it’s very dif­fer­ent, be­cause it’s dri­ven by top­ics, not by people.

Klout Ex­perts is for … Experts!

It’s not a brand­ing tool for every­one, but it’s an es­pe­cially per­fect brand­ing tool for every­one who wants to brand him­self as an ex­pert for a cer­tain topic.

• Book au­thors
• Con­sul­tants
• Speak­ers
• Info prod­uct creators
• Niche Blog­gers

Klout al­ready at­taches top­ics of ex­per­tise to your pro­file, now you can strengthen that by an­swer­ing re­lated ques­tions. And prob­a­bly be fea­tured as ex­pert on Bing and other sites.

Amaz­ing!

It’s an in­trigu­ing ques­tion, by the way, what other joint ven­tures Klout might be work­ing on, be­sides Bing.

So, how does Klout Ex­perts look like?

While I can’t find di­rect ac­cess through my Klout pro­file, to­day I stum­bled upon a link to an an­swer some­one else gave to a brand­ing ques­tion. Right be­low her an­swer I had a chance to add my own 2 cents.

Each an­swer seems to get its own page.

• The ques­tion sits on top.
• Fol­lowed by the answer.
• Fol­lowed by a form where you can sub­mit your own answer.
• On the right hand side you will find links to re­lated questions.

How can you get started with Klout Experts?

• First, make sure you have a Klout pro­file.
• Sec­ond, add your­self to the wait­ing list.
• Third, go to Klout’s Twit­ter pro­file, visit one of the many links to Klout An­swer ques­tions, and add your own answer.

Be­ing or not be­ing on the wait­ing list does­n’t seem to make any dif­fer­ence, it seems as long as you have a Klout pro­file, you can an­swer questions.

My guess is that the wait­ing list is re­lated to fea­tures that will dis­play ques­tions to you di­rectly in­side your Klout dash­board. We’ll find out once I leave the wait­ing list behind.

What say Bing and Google?

Just for fun, I en­tered an ex­act quote of this ques­tion to Bing and Google. Both find the ques­tion, but in en­tirely dif­fer­ent ways. :-)

Please note: Bing’s re­sult in this screen shot does NOT show a fea­tured an­swer, but a tra­di­tional list of sites re­lated to the search phrase, and that’s per­fectly normal.

This is how an­swers will be fea­tured on Bing search re­sult pages

I think it looks neat and will cer­tainly get peo­ple’s attention.

An­swers and your on­line in­flu­ence score

An­swer­ing ques­tions will clearly add to your Klout score. In Klout’s own words:

„Klout Ex­perts helps you grow your in­flu­ence by an­swer­ing ques­tions about your in­flu­en­tial topics. 

You are your friends’ go-to per­son on a topic. Now you can be the go-to per­son for an en­tire Klout topic.”

Read­ers can en­dorse your an­swer by giv­ing K+ to your an­swer, and they can share it on Twit­ter and Facebook.

Your Klout Dash­board will dis­play the en­gage­ment on your ques­tions, see screen shot on the right.

While I did­n’t find any in­for­ma­tion on that, I’d guess that you’ll get some ba­sic points for each an­swer, plus points for each K+ en­dorse­ment and each share. To make things more com­pli­cated, the ra­tio of views / K+ and shares will prob­a­bly make a dif­fer­ence, too.

When 10 out of 20 read­ers give you a K+ plus, it might lead to a stronger boost for your Klout score than 10 out of 100 read­ers giv­ing you K+.

From all an­swers given to a ques­tion, those with the most en­dorse­ments and shares prob­a­bly are more likely to show up at Bing.

But I would­n’t count on all your friends Kplussing you will cat­a­plut your an­swer to the top. I’m sure anti spam mea­sures are in place.

I like the concept. 

1. I’m ex­cited to see Klout grow into some­thing more com­plex and more meaningful.

2. I’m thrilled by the ex­pert brand­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties. Who knows what the fu­ture might bring!

3. I en­joy the chal­lenge to pro­vide a pro­found, no-fluff an­swer in 300 characters.

Let’s dis­cuss in the com­ments below.

What’s the fu­ture of Klout Ex­perts? Do you like it?