In a pair of blog posts today, Bing and Klout are announcing a partnership, including a strategic investment in Klout by Microsoft, that will bring Klout scores and influential topics in the People Who Know section of the Bing Social Sidebar, and for the first time, will bring Bing highlights on some Klout users profiles. The Klout blog post explains:
As part of our partnership, Bing will provide additional data to Klout. Search data has long been one of the missing signals in our effort to fully recognize a person’s influence. Just as Wikipedia articles can reflect a person’s real world influence, search results for a person signal accomplishments achieved beyond social networks and serve to influence others. There will be two data points from Bing that will initially be highlighted as part of Klout moments. Experts who appear in Bing’s “People Who Know” section of the sidebar will be recognized on Klout. Influencers who have a Wikipedia account associated with their Klout profile will also be rewarded for the frequency that they are searched on Bing.
Klout, according to TechCrunch’s Crunchbase:
…measures influence based on the ability to drive action across the social web. Any person can connect their social network accounts and Klout will generate a score on a scale of 1-100 that represents their ability to engage other people and inspire social actions. Klout enables everyone to gain insights that help them better understand how they influence others. Klout also provides people with opportunities to shape and be recognized for their influence.
Bing and Klout are planning more interaction going forward, saying in the Bing blog post:
Klout brings a deep social DNA to the table having done some very cool and exciting work to help people understand social influence, find their voice and have an impact on the world. When we combine that expertise with the work our Bing team has done on the marriage of search and social, along with the big science challenges around relevance and ranking (especially people ranking), there are exciting possibilities for what we can do together for web users. Our engineering teams will work together to expand the scope or social search and influence.
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