Things are heating up in the social influence measurement space with yesterday’s re-launch of Kred as Kred Story.

Kred is one of three companies I see as the primary ones that, broadly, offer measurement and analytics services in the emerging field of social influence measurement (the other two companies are Klout and PeerIndex).

Each offers its own ways and means of calculating what your presence and activities across the social web mean in terms of the potential influence your presence and activities have on others. Each also has a “vanity marketing” aspect where you might get offered or have access to goods and services because of your score or rank.

It’s an interesting market, not the least reason being the lack of transparency that’s been apparent in the case of Klout and how its marketing works – the prime reason why I quit Klout last year – and the more interesting development in recent months of the role influence scoring will play in recruitment in the future.

In looking at Kred Story, from the individual user perspective, its dashboard approach to content display and interaction offers you a very attractive and compelling method of seeing what you’re doing on the social web and understanding what it all means. I find it far easier to understand in this regard than the other services (although I can’t really tell regarding the Klout relaunch last week).

Kred CEO Andrew Grill explains:

[…] Our mission in creating Kred Story is to give everyone access to social data in way that is intuitive, meaningful and fun. Kred Story moves the conversation about influence away from numbers and data to bring it back to the best thing about social media: the ability to connect with people who have things in common and shared passions.

[…] You can also explore social streams from friends, favorite brands and popular publications. Entering an @name like @CNN, @Wired or @BoingBoing produces a scannable overview of their most influential content.   You can also enter any hashtag to see who’s talking about an event, TV show, movie or any trending topic.  The most popular posts that people have interacted with most float to the top.

Kred Story makes it easy to find like-minded people that share your interests. Click on any box – like Frequently Used Hashtags or an interesting tweet – to view Twitter bios of people who have tweeted that content and follow people straight from there.

That last bit is what I find most interesting about Kred Story: looking at it from the perspective of seeing the activities and scoring of others rather than my own account. It’s something you would do when, for example, you’re researching on the social web. It enables you to construct snapshot perspectives of people’s online activities with depth, quickly and easily.

And if you’re a recruiter, things are now a lot easier when you’re researching about that job candidate – Kred Story is another arrow in your quiver, as it were, in social profiling which, in my view, will be an activity that’s an integral part of our social presences in the very near future.

Here are some initial reviews of Kred Story I’ve been reading this morning:

• Kred Story Tracks Social Influence ‘Beyond being just a number’: AdWeek
• Kred evolves into Kred Story, a dashboard for digestible social analytics: Digital Trends
• Check Out Kred Story: A Visual History Of Your Social Media Influence: Media Bistro
• Kred vs. Klout: Is There Room For Two, Or Even One?: Pando Daily

Take a look at your own Kred Story.

Related post:

• The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #664: August 13, 2012 – discussion topic: “Online influence scoring is about the context not a single metric says Kred’s Andrew Grill.”