KloutVille

Klout is really a MMORPG

It struck me today, as I witnessed colleagues scrambling around to find out how they could repair their damaged Klout scores, that Klout has created the largest MMORPG on the planet. 

What do I mean by that?

Let’s take a look at some excerpts about MMORPG’s from Wikipedia to see the parallels:

“Although modern MMORPGs sometimes differ dramatically from their antecedents, many of them share some basic characteristics. These include several common themes: some form of progression, social interaction within the game, in-game culture…”

Now let’s apply these some of these feature definitions to KloutVille:

THEMES

“Often these elements are developed using similar tasks and scenarios involving quests… and loot.”

There are daily quests that all players in KloutVille can partake in: CombatRecommend, CombatShare and CombatCreate (RSC).  RSCing is how a player progresses to ever increasingly higher levels of Wealth in KloutVille.

Loot is a bounty that can be granted if the Game Master deems worthy the level of RSC activity and the total number of connections a player maintains.

PROGRESSION

“In nearly all MMORPGs, the development of the player’s character is a primary goal. Nearly all MMORPGs feature a character progression system in which players earn experience points for their actions and use those points to reach character “levels”, which makes them better at whatever they do.”

The goal in KloutVille is fundamentally to develop your online character.  As such, you’ll want to develop a plan around RSCing and you’re going to need a kingdom to elevate the impact of your efforts.  You’ll want to connect your character in KloutVille with as many other ‘worlds’ that you dwell in (Planet Facebook, Twittersphere, GooglePlusLand) thus enlarging your kingdom and your Wealth.  You may also be rewarded with combat-useful items such as the Influencer Potion.

“The accumulation of wealth (including combat-useful items) is also a way to progress in many MMORPGs, and again, this is traditionally best accomplished via combat. The cycle produced by these conditions, combat leading to new items allowing for more combat with no change in gameplay, is sometimes pejoratively referred to as the level treadmill, or ‘grinding’.”

Productive, daily RSCing can prove itself to be an extraordinarily difficult task.  A player needs to maintain a pace and velocity such that a one’s Wealth is not diminished due to atrophy.  This cycle has revealingly lead many players down the path of grinding.  Some of the more popular grinding RSCs: 

• Weather
• Airline Updates
• Song Lyrics
• Coffee quality
• #FF
• I can’t believe they arrested me for this again – check out this pic (Okay, used more infrequently but still grinding – no?)

“This sometimes forces players to change their real-world schedules in order to “keep up” within the game-world.”

I’ve seen players enter into a full-blown panic when they realize that they haven’t RSC’d for a day or two.  All real-world work efforts comes to a halt whilst they logon and care for their KloutVille character.  Take care to manage your time here wisely.

SOCIAL INTERACTION

“MMORPGs almost always have tools to facilitate communication between players. Many MMORPGs offer support for in-game guilds or clans (though these will usually form whether the game supports them or not).”

A foundational element of the KloutVille experience is the harnessing of social interaction from within the player worlds: replying or retweeting in Twittersphere, sharing in the magic Circles of GooglePlusLand and ascending the Walls on Planet Facebook.  Bring your clans together and gain strength.

ROLEPLAYING

“Most MMORPGs provide different types of classes that players can choose. Among those classes, players are encouraged to roleplay their characters, providing rules, functionality and content to this end.”

If you want to be able to roleplay as a particular Meme Magician, you are going to want to invoke the magic hashtag.  Given a particular success or frequency rate of your hashtag casting, the Game Master may decide that you have earned the right and will grant you the Influencer Potion for the Meme you seek.

CULTURE

“Since MMORPGs have so many elements in common, and those elements are experienced by so many people, this has led players of many games to expect “buffing” or “nerfing”, which describe the strengthening or weakening, respectively, of particular game elements. (“Buffing” also refers to in-game effects that temporarily enhance performance; both usages come from a core meaning of increasing power levels.)”

This week saw both buffing and nerfing take place.  It was kingdom wide. 

Those that were buffed, bonded together in song and jubilance.  They were the chosen ones. 

Those that were nerfed experienced the full wrath and might of the Game Master.  True it was that a portion of the nerfed were merely wounded, while others were cut cleanly in half.  They were now the downtrodden, the forgotten. 

Avoid the nerfing at all costs.

What’s In A Number

Ultimately I am looking for tools and information that can better instruct me on tangible efforts that I can undertake in order to improve my reach and better understand my audience.  Tools like HootSuite and bitly track the reach of the links I provide – knowing reach helps gauge the overall popularity of a particular message or blog post.  Understanding what’s popular can be prescriptive when approaching the next topic or post issued.

Crowdbooster provides some clever metrics including times of the day that you may want to post (as determined by the success of previous posts during that same time period).  If I not only understand what makes for a successful post but also when I should release it, I can be assured that I’m making the best effort for my audience to actually see it.

Google+ has Ripples which visually represents how a post spread and to whom.  This is really more for my entertainment purposes but seeing that something I posted made it to many groups of people that I don’t even know is, well, kinda cool.

The bottom line is that the measurements presented from the companies I mention above are very clear.  How they arrived at such results is not up for debate.  Why this data can be directive for future posts is self-evident.

I don’t get these kinds of practical questions answered by Klout, so until that day arrives Klout will be a fun game of strategy and intrigue where the goal is to outsmart the machine. 

But perhaps the kind of insight I describe above is not the end goal for Klout.  Perhaps what is being established is an enormous pool of opt-in users who can be micro-targeted by advertisers.  Interestingly, this same group of users can concomitantly market and propagate brand messages by means of social trust to their own personal circles.  Hmm.

It’s all speculation.  But I do know one thing; my KloutVille character needs help getting a KloutBFG to…

Just Say NOcial

Social Is The New Black

One of the most abused phrases I hear these days is Social + [insert any noun here].  Conventional wisdom appears to regard communication between people as a bold new concept.  This exciting new medium adds value to any business (check out the astronomical valuations of the privately held companies on SharesPost). 

Sarcasm aside -

so·cial (adjective) : offering opportunity for interaction; allowing people to meet and interact with others in a friendly way

The truth of the matter is that social is asked about whenever I discuss a recsys implementation with clients – no matter the vertical.  Some opportunities lend themselves well to an articulate social component plus a recsys while still others struggle to find social relativity.  Thus, I have proactively endeavored to find concrete strategies in which to use ‘social’ data in productive and meaningful ways, especially with respect to an implementation of a recsys.

Do I Really Want Recommendations From My Friends

We may have 500 friends on Facebook or Google Plus but do we really want each and every one of them driving recommendation decisions for us?  Imagine the experience you have every time you visit your wall, how it’s littered mostly with things that aren’t directly or immediately interesting to you.  Now imagine that same experience applied to music, books or TV.  Simply adding friends to the mix will not add value; more likely it will invoke churn from your service.

Hey friend, what do you like?

There are more informed approaches for incorporating the data from the social graph that can deliver a positive uptick in consumption.  One such approach is the representation of a user’s friend set in order to reinforce a recommendation.  This means we still rely on a user’s behavior within an ecosystem (supervised learning) to arrive at a recommendation decision but choose to complement the result with a list of friends that have also engaged with the recommended item.  In this way we benefit from both machine learning and the social graph – we just don’t use the social graph to drive the decision.  Cool.

Filter My Friends

Another interesting approach examines the relative usefulness (conversion percentage) of your friends’ recommendations to you.  Observing the success and failure of your friends’ recommendations to you effectively turns them into a channel from which statistical probabilities of success can be rendered.  

I like what you picked!

This success metric can be used to rank order future recommendations from ‘high quality’ friends and can cleanly winnow away the noise.

A beneficial side effect of using a qualified friend recommender is the possibility for more prolific experiences of serendipity.  The facility to surprise and delight a consumer cannot be underestimated.  While we are refining mathematical pathways to successfully discover interesting elements that fall outside the known model of the user, the incorporation of high quality external influencers is a welcome commodity.

Social DOES Have Value

When more than a hand wave toward social is given we can discover many influential uses for social data.  The overuse of the term will surely relax over time – I will just have to hold my tongue until the next big buzzword takes its place.

Photo credits: © 2011 Eric Wilson

Recommender System + OTT or STB = Personalized TV

What To Watch

There is so much good programmed content available today it has become a staggering proposition to sift through the morass and find things that are interesting, compelling or even stimulating.  This is both a good and bad thing for the end consumer.  The proliferation of content choices has made the position of consumer an arduous task – and search does not solve the challenge.  “We want to be entertained and don’t really want to work for it.”  It is this divide that has consumer businesses scrambling for a better mousetrap and more often than not these content megaliths are turning toward recommendation systems.

Understand Me Please

Consumers today are engaging with content and should be rewarded for it.  They are providing valuable insight into their interests simply by participating within the content ecosystem.  Each time a consumer sees a content element, they have the distinct opportunity to interact with it.  What they do and what they don’t do can shape the ongoing model of what that consumer should be presented with.  Time of day, device (i.e. tablet, mobile phone) or set top box provide more articulation of exposure and direction with respect to future interest probabilities.  Armed with user behavior, contents’ performance in a Darwinian ecosystem and meta-data, recsys solutions have a strong foundation from which to attack the burgeoning content discovery battle.

What will make this personalized TV movement fail, however, is by forcing the user to contribute meaningful information to the personalization model at every turn.  There is no way to realize the ‘lean back’ experience where content is magically presented in increasingly more accurate interest categories if the user has to proactively engage with the system.  This is where behavioral observation can play a lead role, allowing consumers to simply ‘be’ in the system.  The consumer can unassumingly go about her day by interacting with the things she finds appealing all the while a recsys is paying close attention and is learning about her interests and preferences in the background.

What about systems that allow consumers to rate things?  Cool – this is helpful information.  I would like to suggest that the star rating system and other incarnations like it be banned from use.  Consumers just don’t know what to do with stars in-between one and five.  The best rating approach is really ternary (i.e. thumbs-up, thumbs-down and neutral or no thumb).  It’s the clearest and most elegant way to allow consumers to express interest.  You can see this KISS principle in action at sites like YouTube.

“What about my privacy?”  This is one of the top questions that arise from discussions I have around recommendation system implementations.  My approach is always to let the consumer know up front what is trying to be accomplished by such an effort and to get the user excited and engaged with the experience.      Surreptitious gathering of user data has gotten some very large and well-known public companies into trouble.  There is no excuse for ‘spying’.  It’s not needed as long as the target goals have the consumer in mind.  Systems can be very successfully designed and implemented that do not require Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

The Road To Personalization

Keeping the aforementioned points in mind, the ideal of providing a compelling content experience is readily achievable.  Especially as a growing number of consumers employ the tablet as a second screen or even in some cases use it as the primary screen.  Terrific amounts of quality data can be gathered from these devices.  In turn this data will be digested by the recsys platforms, which will produce more targeted, relevant personalization experiences.

Personalization solutions will become table stakes in the new world of multi-device entertainment.  Those that realize this early will have a great advantage in the competitive marketplace of content and consumers.