There’s a new way to track who’s hot and who’s not in politics — Klout — which is behind a project spearheaded by political technology firm Activist Manager designed to track Twitter accounts and levels of engagement between account holders and their followers – measuring re-tweets and mentions to come up with a composite score to weigh users’ “network influence” and “amplification probability.”
Klout posts a scorecard nightly for presidential candidates, members of Congress, commentators and political or advocacy organizations – and the latest results show President Obama leading the pack with a score of 87.51, followed by House Speaker John Boehner (80.72) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (78.90). Politico tops the media ranks with a score of 78.06, followed by media personalities like MSNBC anchor/commentator Rachel Maddow (76.21) and former Ala. Gov. Sarah Palin (75.96).
The Political Social Media Scorecard is sortable, with pull-down filters and an option to download the data as an Excel .csv file. And figuring in the fact that Twitter accounts aren’t always manned by the personalities they represent, the Scorecard also includes a category for the managers of the Twitter accounts – like Dan Kotman, the man behind Newt Gingrich‘s account.
