How do you measure up online? Part 1: Personal brand

When I started this August series of blogs, I talked about benchmarking your current digital footprint online, and assessing what you starting point was, or your current online temperature.

If you have done the work to airbrush any past online indiscretions or errors in judgement that you discovered, and you have been working hard on achieving online goals you set yourself, you will want to know how you are doing and what effect your online efforts are having on your hopefully improving online reputation.

There are multiple tools out there that will give you (and more importantly those that would do business with you) ‘social proof’ of your online reputation, and although this is an industry which is relatively primitive, the first attempts give an easy indicator for a generic audience as to how much impact and influence you display online.

Much has been said about tools such as Klout becoming an additional marker for recruiters to use when screening candidates, whether this is true and will or won’t follow to the UK is another debate, but what it does show is that people are eager for a short-cut way to categorize you and the value of your information in order to determine how much they should listen to you.

More sophisticated measurement tools will surely follow as this area develops, in the meantime here are four tools you could look at to test out what your online value is perceived to be, but without becoming too hung up about the results – if you continue to build targeted connections, create meaningful content and act authentically, then that is where the true value of your online experience lies.

1. Klout
   This is maybe the most popular online influence tool, and has the widest reach across a number of social media sites, actively adding new sites as it develops. Klout measures how many people you influence (True Reach), how much you influence them (Amplification), and how influential they are (Network Score), and gives you both a single number but also more detailed information on your style of interaction. It has been criticised for fluctuating scores, but over time it can give you a rough outline of your influence.
2. Peer Index
   PeerIndex ‘wants to become the standard that identifies, ranks, and scores these authorities — and help them benefit from the social capital they have built up.’ So it says on their website, similar to Klout they look at Authority, Reach and Audience, then come up with both a single score and also more detailed information about you and also about people that you interact with online. As well as this,both Klout and Peerindex have different ways of presenting back comparison data about your network and how you stack up next to your contacts.
3. Tweet Grader
   This is Hubspot’s tool which focuses on Twitter influence, which tries to measure the impact of your tweets. Like the other tools, it give a snapshot and a means of comparing yourself to other users in a way which isn’t based on simple follower count.
4. My Web Career
   This is maybe the most interesting of the tools listed here, giving a score based on your performance across several sites, and it has some very neat features which offer advice and action points on how to improve your score, and it also has a very funky way of looking at your combined LinkedIn and Facebook networks which can be useful for expanding your network and opportunities.

Which tools do you think can be most effective in this area, and which signals of online influence do you register when forming an opinion about new contacts? Let me know in the comments section below.

Next time I will look at how to measure your business effectiveness – sign up to my blog and be the first to read about it.