Arlo Hemphill

Who has @Klout in the Ocean? The Top 10

Klout launches an official "Ocean" topic

Marina, California. Klout, the rising standard for influence in social media, has slowly been releasing access to its cross-platform lists of influence on specific topics. Eventually to be made fully accessible to the public, top lists have been leaking out on their blog for some time now, including one on “The Top Online Travel Influencers” released on November 9th of last year.  Since then, the company has slowly been allowing allowing select users to access the complete topical dataset on a trial basis.  I was granted this access for the first time this evening, and of course made a beeline for my favorite natural history and conservation topics.

Here’s who Klout lists as the top 10 influencers on their official topic of “Ocean” over the past 90 days:

1. Surfrider Foundation.  Klout Score: 64

2. NOAA Ocean Today.  Klout Score: 56

3. The Last Ocean. Klout Score 32

4. Protect Our Coral Sea. Klout Score 37

5. David Shiffman (@WhySharksMatter). Klout Score 58

6. The Cove / OPS. Klout Score 60

7. WDCS (Whales.org). Klout Score 60

8. Explorations (Scripps). Klout Score 39

9. Cherilyn Jose (@protectoceans). Klout Score 35

10. Georgia Aquarium. Klout Score 56

You may notice that the Klout scores do not coincide directly with their tier of influence on the topic of Ocean.  The San Francisco-based company applies a rating system of 1-100 on all social media users, based not on their total  “friends or followers” or level of activity, but rather how much they influence others through their posts.  This is measured through a combination of factors, including “True Reach” (the number of real people they influence), Amplification (how likely people are to respond, “retweet” or comment on a user’s posts), and the overall influence of their network.  These factors combine to give each user a total Klout score.

However, topical influence is another matter.  This is simply their influence on a singular topic alone and not necessarily reflective of their total influence online.  For instance “The Last Ocean” is the third most influential user of ocean-based social media, yet with a Klout score of 32 is relatively ineffective over the broader spectrum of such media. Meanwhile, the Georgia Aquarium is at the bottom of our “Top 10″ list, yet has the more impressive overall Klout of 56.  This means the Georgia Aquarium’s overall influence on a variety of topics – outside of Ocean – is much stronger than “The Last Ocean” and others with lower combined scores.  Pleasantly, our lead contender – the Surfrider Foundation – is both at the top of our Ocean influence list as well as the top overall influencer, with the group’s high score of 64,  This is truly appropriate to their good outreach work and I send my congrats to our friends at Surfrider!

• For those of you with trial access to Klout’s topic lists – the Ocean topic influencers list can be accessed here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 21st, 2011 at 2:00 am. It is filed under Blog and tagged with @WhySharksMatter, David Shiffman, Georgia Aquarium, Klout, NOAA, ocean, Scripps, Social Media, Surfrider Foundation, The Cove, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.