Klout + Salesforce = Identify Your Social Influencers

An open source project

May. 21, 2011 02:00 PM

As these things often do, this project came about as I was searching for the solution to a problem. I couldn't find anything that worked so I decided to try and solve it myself.

The Use Case
I was working with one of our clients on a Salesforce implementation and since they're very active on Twitter they naturally wanted to take advantage of the Salesforce For Twitter app by ForceDotCom Labs. We decided to incorporate a Twitter Username field into most of their web forms and after a short time they had begun to capture a large number of twitter usernames for their Leads and Contacts. We'd also been discussing the idea of the emerging new science around measuring an individual's social influence. Tracking and understanding someone's social influence has broad applications for businesses and non-profits alike. For marketers wanting to spread information about a new product, to non-profit fundraisers wanting to disseminate information about an upcoming event, knowing who your most socially influential contacts are might be a handy piece of information to have. But how do you track this information?

The Solution
It seemed obvious to start with utilizing Klout for their influence scoring. Klout seems to be the gold standard when it comes to social influence measuring tools. I first looked on the AppExchange to see if there was an existing tool that connected Salesforce with Klout. No such luck. Next, I googled and searched my way around the Salesforce community looking for something that would accomplish the task at hand. Hmmm...no luck again. Long story short, I ended up with a tool that lets you pull Klout directly into Salesforce based on a Lead or Contact's Twitter username. This is available in an unmanaged package and I also submitted it to the Salesforce Code Share in case anyone wants to improve upon it. You can view the video below for an overview and install the package here.

Demo

For anyone interested in the source code there is a Google Code Project here.

As always, I look forward to any feedback and comments.

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About Clint Lee
Clint is a Principal and Founder of The Flywheel Group, a premier provider of innovative solutions to the franchise industry. The FranchiseFlywheel™ application was developed out of the industry's need for a cutting-edge and affordable franchise management tool for franchisors. Spending several years in the franchise industry directing daily activities related to franchise and business development processes, marketing, lead-generation, and contract administration, and an understanding of the needs of peers and colleagues, led to the development of the application. The Flywheel Group is focused on improving best practices and driving change in the franchise industry by introducing industry-leading solutions and working with its clients to re-engineer business processes that will ultimately enhance revenue and improve bottom line efficiency. Clint actively writes and shares his thoughts on the Flywheel Blog.