After Klout users learned this week that Foursquare activity would now affect Klout scores, many of them — particularly people who aren’t on Foursquare or who don’t regularly use the location-based service — were unsure about how the Foursquare integration would work.
That’s partly because the folks at Klout aren’t yet sure exactly how Foursquare will factor into the hush-hush Klout algorithm, which already considers Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to measure the online influence of social media users.
“We are still figuring this out,” Klout CEO Joe Fernandez told Mashable. “Obviously things like tips that turn into to-dos are interesting as is the ripple effect of a checkin through a network. In the next few weeks we’ll be testing and perfecting the algorithm.”
One thing Fernandez knows for certain, though, is Klout users’ scores will only go up once they add Foursquare to their Klout dashboards. “We use the network you are most influential on as the foundation for your score and then other networks are additive,” he said.
Fernandez added Foursquare to the scoring system because it has been a huge request from users and because “Foursquare is blowing up.”
For example, Foursquare recently teamed up with American Express to reward users with loyalty card-like credit when they check in. “The deals they are doing with AmEx and others show their impact is being felt wide by consumers and businesses,” he said.
Foursquare also just reached 10 million users, surpassed 500,000 merchant accounts, raised another $50 million and added targeted daily deals from LivingSocial, Gilt City, AT&T Interactive, BuyWithMe and Zozi.
“[Foursquare integration] is the start of an aggressive process from Klout to add more data sources and granularity to the Klout scores,” Fernandez said.
Does this mean we will see more services — maybe even Google+ — added to Klout’s scoring system? Only time will tell.
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