Kred debuts feature to improve social footprint

The new Kred Story layout brings a mapping visual tool to some deep analytics

Most people are struggling to stay on top of the latest social media trends and make sure that they are resulting with their desired audience. To help people and companies make the most of their online presence, companies have cropped up to not only let users see what people on the Web are responding most to, but also help them connect with influential people for various topics of conversation.

One company, PeopleBrowsr, built a site with a specialized algorithm to help those users. Kred displays how influential and interactive Twitter users are in their verticals.  

To help improve the experience of using this service, Kred updated its platform to help better visualize different influential people to see just how often they are responding to commenters, how often they are retweeted, where their content is coming from, the hashtags connected to them and many other organization and referenced elements.  This change and layout is called the Kred Story -- and it displays and tells a lot about a given user or hashtag in a readable format -- almost like Pinterest.

I got a chance to speak with CEO of Kred, Andrew Grill, to find out just why he thinks this new format is adding more value to its users.

“Kred Story really gives everyone access to social data in an intuitive form," Grill explained. ”People want to see all the components that make up a person's online presence and we wanted to give it to them in a format that was really an exploration."

Based on PeopleBrowsr’s four-years of social data collection and organization, Kred Story builds a rich visual history of people and hashtags so that you can see how conversations are expanding around the globe.

Just last week, Klout began pushing a major redesign based on users; “social resume” and now we have Kred Story moving in a similar direction. When I asked Grill how their service differs from Klout, he clarified that Kred uses a  real-time algorithm and feed to see the evolution of social conversations and places more emphasis on interaction rather than just being a megaphone.

As with any algorithm, Klout does have some faults, one of which is that it doesn't place as much value on the conversation that people have. Someone may have a high Klout score because they have a lot of followers, but, because of the issue of buying or creating bots, there is more to the social world than having a lot of followers. Kred put more emphasis on replying and having a lot of people dialogue together. 

“We wanted Kred to be more than just a number, we want it to be a way to better understand the social pulse of the people,” said Grill.

Kred has added also community categories such as advertising, technology and shopping to help with discovery in those specific areas of interest. The pitch to brands is that they can use Kred Story to see not only what people are saying around a given topic but who are the most influential people on that topic.

Powering Kred Story is Kred’s access to the Twitter firehose that lets it mine any and all tweets in real time. Kred's parent company has had access to the Twitter firehose since November 2008, and since that time has analyzed 100 billion tweets, said Grill. Kred also has access to Facebook—though Kred Story is very Twitter-centric—and Grill is eyeing LinkedIn and Google+ as the next social networks to integrate by the end of this year.

Kred is based on 1,200 days of social data and offers completely transparent score calculation that anyone can look at. Founded in 2011, the San Francisco company operates under the larger umbrella of PeopleBroswr. 

Kred also lets you incorporate your real-world accomplishments like degrees, honors, awards, and certificates. You will be able to send Kred a PDF proving an offline achievement, and they will add it to your Kred.

Similar to its competition, Kred provides a value to companies that want to resonate or speak to big influencers in specific areas and is continuing to pursue revenue opportunities with brands while offering its service for free to users.