Last week we declared that this report was going to change, retaining the @Klout rating, but that there would be new sources of information.
Since that declaration several interesting things have happened, so we're presenting the original report, some new data, and new information on our direction in this area.
We've been working for political campaigns since last fall and we've developed what we believe are a good set of tools and practices.
Any campaign we're handling will have an account for the candidate or elected official, an office staff account, and a press agent account. The candidate has to tweet where and when appropriate. The staff should engage voters via social media just as they would handle campaigning or constituent service. The press agent account runs the software we've developed, which can best be described as a melding of the work a communications director would do with press releases and radio ad flights coupled with the direct outreach a candidate would do to community leaders.
A more technical presentation on the tools we are integrating and the methods we employ can be found in Stranded Wind's recent diary entitled Open Source Intelligence. This piece is appropriate for the staffer tasked with handling new media, while the communications director may prefer to skip directly to Stranded Wind's NetVibes page.
The tabs on the NetVibes system are a set of prototypes showing Stranded Wind as a public personality, a mix of outreach and situational awareness for the Railroad ReModelers Club, and public situational awareness tabs for the Alaska, Arizona, and Illinois Senate races. We have a small group of people who will be doing the background research to populate sets of public/private situational awareness tabs like this for campaigns and legislative issues.
The changes this report are undergoing do not presage a move away from Klout as a rating method but rather a melding of their long term metrics with the more interactive tools and faster moving results of Twitalyzer. Based on discussions last weekend we now know that Klout does not have an internal research group capable of servicing political research requests and they've agreed to refer such work to us. We'll be using these two systems coupled with our own internal software and we're getting an assist from psychometrician Peter Flom on the statistical methods.
We're going to have a lot of work to do to integrate the Klout data with Twitalyzer, but here's a little taste of the sort of changes you'll be seeing. These are the top House members ranked by who gets retweeted the most, see through the week wide window Twitalyzer uses.
And here is the traditional Klout report we've been presenting.
House Democrats
Senate Democrats