By Rich Baker

I was lucky enough to strike up a conversation with @joefernandez from Klout – the Twitter Influence Tool. I am really interested in measurement and analysis of Social Media – in particular Twitter. Klout.com is something that I recommend to people to try, and have talked about in earlier tweets. It just seems to be the best out there – and I’m not being paid to say that!

If you haven’t heard of it before – read the except below from their site. You can also read about how they calculate your twitter influence score.

‘The Klout Score is a numerical representation of the size and strength of a person’s sphere of influence on Twitter. The scores range from 1-100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. The size of this sphere is calculated by measuring true reach (engaged followers and friends vs. spam bots, dead accounts, etc.). Strength of influence is calculated by tracking interactions across your social graph to determine the likelihood of someone listening to or acting upon any specific message.

We believe that influence is the ability to drive people to action — “action” might be defined as a reply, a retweet or clicking on a link. We perform significant testing to ensure that the average click-through rate on links shared is highly correlated with a person’s Klout Score. The final Klout Score is a representation of how successful a person is at engaging their audience and how big of an impact their messages have on people. ‘

Could you start by telling us a bit more about yourself and your history?

JF: I am the cofounder and CEO of Klout. I’ve been in the data analysis business for about 8 years with several large companies before starting Klout.

When did you first get into social media?

JF: I’ve been starting (and abandoning) blogs since around 2001. I joined Twitter in April of 2007. In December 2007 I had jaw surgery and my mouth was wired shut for almost 3 months. During that time I couldn’t speak at all and even my mom couldn’t understand me. I pretty much only used Twitter, Facebook and my blog to communicate with the outside world and it gave me a whole new appreciation for the power of social media. As soon as my jaw was unwired I quit my job and started Klout.

Wow, that must have been tough. Can you tell us about Klout? What is it and what does it do?

JF: Klout measures influence across the social web. We track millions of people and analyze all of the content they create and how their network reacts to understand how influential a person is on any specific topic.

The million dollar question; How does it work?

JF: I will focus on Twitter here since that is main component of our functionality right now. We use the Twitter api to analyze a person’s social graph and all the content they create. When a person “tweets” we use semantic analysis to understand what they are talking about (we also analyze the links they share). We then look at how the person’s network reacts to the message. Do they reply, retweet, click links, etc. We also look at how influential the people are who perform those actions and compare it all to the normalized data from across Twitter. We generate a raw number representing a person’s influence which we then convert to a 1-100 normalized score.

How much traffic does it get? Or how many people’s influence has it calculated? stats would be great here!

JF: Klout has been growing like crazy (check out the chart below – Rich). We now have scores for more than 5 million Twitter users.

How important is it to measure influence do you think?

JF: We are entering a world where privacy no longer exists and attention is a sacred commodity. A person’s ability to drive actions and attention from others and their reputation on specific topics is very important.

Something that is very close to my heart Joe; is there room for the ‘little guys’ to have influence?

JF: Absolutely. We aren’t about figuring out who is on the “A-List”. We believe that every person who creates content online has influence. Our goal is to understand who that person influences and on what topics.

Brilliant. What tips have you got for people to increase their influence?

JF: The biggest mistake we see people make is confusing influence with follower count. Having a large number of followers is worthless if those followers are not engaged and paying attention to you. The only way to have an engaged audience is through creating compelling content and being yourself. There is no shortcut.

What are you working on at the moment?

JF: Adding more services to Klout. Increasing our ability to process more data. And a few big surprises.

What are you plans for the future?

JF: We want to help individuals understand their impact and influence and be able to leverage it as effectively as possible.

How do you think Twitter will change in 2010?

JF: I think Twitter is becoming more of a hub that all other tools publish into. Filtering is going to be a big deal (influence is a key component in filtering) and there are some really interesting tools coming out to help businesses mange their Twitter campaigns.

What impact will that have on business?

JF: To a lot of people social media is still a soft warm and fuzzy area where there are no hard metrics. The data Twitter and others are going to begin publishing is going to change this and I think it might actually hurt a lot of “social media gurus” in the short term when they have to prove their effectiveness. My main hope is to see the industry move beyond the gimmicks and scam like practices we see out there.

What advice do you have for people starting up a social media/tech business?

JF: Thinking about ways to drive real value to the people you are trying to serve. It’s not just about getting followers or fans. I recently spoke to a moving company that uses Twitter to reach out to folks talking about moving to NYC. This has actually worked well for them and they’ve converted a bunch of these leads but they were preoccupied with their follower count. There is no reason for anyone to follow an account like that. There are lots of instances where you can provide pin-point specific information to people in need and gain great value from doing it.

When you aren’t working, what do you like to do?

JF: Running a startup is kind of like being at work so enjoy boxing. I also hang out with my girlfriend and our dog.

Thanks go to Joe for taking time out to share with us his thoughts on influence.

What do you think? Continue the conversation at Conversational.ly.