Klout was a social media tool that helped online influencers measure their influence in the virtual world.  It was bought for $200 million by a company called Lithium in 2014.  It targeted the most popular social media platforms such as twitter, instagram, linkedin and youtube and provided you with an influencer score.  The higher the score, the more influential you were likely to be.

As of the 25th of May, Klout was retired.  This co-incided with the timing of the new European Union, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws.  These  came into force on the same date.  So why did Lithium retire Klout?

It really boils down to return on investment.  Lithium bought the people, intellectual property and the technology, to help them inprove their products.  They specialise in creating products that improve your business customer service, via social media channels.  Understanding the influence and pervasiveness of a brand, was crucial to their strategy, and Klout provided this service.  This allowed Lithium to acquire talent and knowledge. 

In addition, Klout does not provide an obvious or known revenue stream for Lithium, as it's a free tool.  It's a similar problem that Facebook and Twitter had faced in the past, until they utilised advertising and promotion as a means of making revenues.  

Finally GDPR is complex legislation with a heap of complexities associated with it.  Let's provide some real examples using Klout:

Klout is used by millions of social media users around the world.  A proportion of them live in the EU, which consists of 28 separate countries.  That means Lithium would need to comply with the GDPR legisation.  This would include some key investments in the Lithum business to comply with GDPR.  Here are some examples:

• To provide a means to report data breaches for any EU person, to their respective data authority.  There is 1 data authority in each member state.  So a breach of users that live in all 28 separate countries, would likely result in notification breaches to 28 separate authorities.  It's likely that each authority will insist on breach notifications for the users in their respective jurisdiction. The initial response to this, has to be done within 72 hours!
• Allowing customers the 'right to be erased' in the system.  This means erasing all the data associated with a user.  If you've ever worked with social media analytics, especially streaming services like twitter, you'll know that the potential data stored is both vast and complex.  So this is not an easy task and it's likely that evidence will need to be shown that the data has indeed been erased.

For more information on GDPR, check out my easy to read blog:

https://www.alctraining.com.au/blog/what-is-gdpr/​

I also really like the friendly introductory video on their site:

www.skorr.social/

The only downside, seems to be from a developer perspective, as the APIs are not available for general use.  This means it can't be used by 3rd parties.  You could argue that is a good thing, if you don't want your score to be used autonomously in an app.  Or a bad thing, if you want to see how you rate against other influencers in a 3rd party charting system.  Overall I believe in open APIs, so I see this as a downside for the world of influencing.

Interesting in learning more about social media scoring, GDPR or cloud security, please feel free to check out my portfolio of cloud training courses at ALC Training:

www.alctraining.com.au/courses/cloud-computing/

And don't forget to follow my social media adventures on twitter:

twitter.com/MusicComposer1

The European Union EU) adopted a new law in 2016.  It affects every company with customers residing in the EU.  It  comes into force on 25th May 2018, which is just over a week away.  It is called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR for short.  But what does it mean, and should companies be worried?

​Firstly it address a number of key areas around the privacy of data to EU citizens, in relation to the storage, processing and handling of personal data.  Personal data includes data that can identify the individual directly.  This can include the following:

• Name
• Address
• Contact Information
• Date of Birth
• Health Records
• Photographs
• Resumes
• Drivers Licence

Below is a very short and simple video introducting the GDPR legislation:

I've simplified and summarised the key points of the GDPR legislation below:​

• The customer has to give consent to the processing and usage of personal data.  This can affect businesses who record calls as a matter of practice.
• ​Each EU country will appoint an independent supervisor authority who will handle customer complaints relating to the storage and usage of their personal data.
• Storing of personal data must be done in a way that does not automatically identify the data subject. This means techniques like encryption, tokenisation and masking need to be understood and how they can be applied to the data.
• Companies have a maximum of 72 hours to declare that they have had a data breach.  
• Customers have the right to request erasure of their data.  This means that businesses, including cloud providers, need to ensure they are using the appropriate security controls to remove that data.  This can include using crypto-shredding, overwriting and encryption techniques.
• Customers are also able to transfer their personal data from one system to another.
• Automated decision-making, using techniques such as rules based scoring and artificial intellgience, is also under scrutiny.  Customers have the right to question and fight such decisions.

1 - Find some talented Social Media performers by using Google or Twitter that are relevant to your areas of interest, e.g. #Cloud and follow them. Learn how they use social media.

2 - When starting out...keep all posts optimistic, open, engaging and fun. Negativity will scare off followers. Especially when you are starting out, as it's difficult to establish a following initially.

3 - Be patient. Growing followers takes a lot of time of energy. Articles and marketeers that brag about how they have tips to allow you to gain 10,000 followers are month are b*ll**it. Humans take time to trust others in face to face relationships involving hours of interactions. Social media provides at most a few minutes of interaction per day or even per week.

4 - Focus on gaining engaged followers. You want people to follow you who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer the word...otherwise it's false and all meaningless. You wouldn't blindly make friends with just anyone in a party...so why would social media be any different.

5 - Be yourself...or at least there is no need to be completely false. Sure we all have different personas for different things, I,e. Work, family, friends, music, etc... but stay true to who you are, what you believe in and what you stand for. Be yourself, be original and create your own unique voice in the world.