Kred is a social scoring tool, that monitors how effectively people reach out to their followers on social media. It is similar to Klout and Peer Index, although the latter takes into account more of users social accounts.

While it is very easy, and quite reasonable, to be sceptical about such services, Kred claims to “value engagement and interaction over follower count”. Ultimately it all boils down to crude follower numbers though.

Kred are trying to innovate social analytics with their new tool, Kred story. The new service is going to allow users to see a wordcloud of hashtags and conversations involving a user, and scroll the stories they have previously posted in order to see the specific areas a user is influential in and discussing. In addition, users will also be able to scroll through stories relating to specific hashtags, not just users.

Kred are also going to break up certain topics such as Advertising and Tech, as well as sub-categories relating specific products. In this way it is becoming a bit more of a Net Vibes style service, which allows you to crawl the social web for content on a specific subject.

CEO Andrew Grill explains: ”Kred Story gives everyone access to social data in an intuitive format that enhances their social media experience. It makes influence metrics useful for all of us.”

While he statement obviously assumes that the ‘influence metric’ has some actual meaning in the first place, Kred are at least trying to look at a broad spectrums of content and conversation online, and makie social analytics more accessible and useful.

This service is though clearly dependent on the Twitter API. As AdWeek explain:
“Powering Kred Story is Kred’s access to the Twitter firehose that lets it mine any and all tweets in real time.”

The recent changes to the Twitter API could potentially have a detrimental effect on Kred story.

However, potential brand partners seem optimistic for the moment: Lee Hammond, VP Digital, Interscope Records, described it as “a big stept forwards”, while Dan Maloney, Global Vice President, eChannel Mobile & Cloud Sales, SAP , said “Kred Story is an amazing way to look at a brands social media presence from a 50,000 feet view and then zero in on the most interesting details.”

Indeed, it is brands that are mostly likely going to benefit from such a service. It will be another tool in their armory to monitor conversations online about their field, and find influential people discussing topics pertinent to their business. Apart from a few vanity searches, it is hard to see how regular individuals could make use of such a service.

Kred have plave to intergrate services such as LinkedIn and Google+ into Kred story.