We took last week off from ratings due to a variety of issues in the fast moving social media world, mostly programming changes we needed to make in some of our production stuff due to Twitter's changing authorization rules. We also got a bit distracted by all the cool new stuff in the SalsaMarket. We already have an internal Salsa training program and we've asked some of these vendors for demonstration accounts to use with our test Senate campaign site.
We encourage those who do not yet have a Klout account to sign up and have a look at the detailed account analysis, which has changed much in the last few weeks.
What you see here are a hotlink to the politician's Twitter ID, their real name, their district or state, a hot link to their @Klout, their friends (mutual follower/following), their followers, and their True Reach. Klout is a computationally complex, slow to change, hard to game set of metrics and we believe it to be the best publicly available measure of a Twitter account's effectiveness.
We don't provide all of the Klout metrics in tabular form, just the ones we believe to be most relevant for political figures. The relationship between follower count and True Reach is the key to understanding how effective a public figure actually is. There are many, many junk followers on Twitter – accounts driven not by engaged humans but by software. These systems hunt for key words or phrases and then follow those using them – these are often subtle sales pitches.
True Reach measures not followers, but followers who are actually paying attention. Watching those who retweet, or respond, or ask a question of a given account is a far better metric of how well the account is interacting with constituents than a simple raw follower count. If True Reach is zero, per Klout founder @JoeFernandez this indicates that the account is too thinly engaged to have a score. This lack of engagement is, in our opinion, a hazard to the Democratic majority.
Senate Democrats
House Democrats