As these things often do, this project came about as I was searching for the solution to a problem. I couldn't find anything that worked so I decided to try and solve it myself.

The Use Case
I was working with one of our clients on a Salesforce implementation and since they're very active on Twitter they naturally wanted to take advantage of the Salesforce For Twitter app by ForceDotCom Labs. We decided to incorporate a Twitter Username field into most of their web forms and after a short time they had begun to capture a large number of twitter usernames for their Leads and Contacts. We'd also been discussing the idea of the emerging new science around measuring an individual's social influence. Tracking and understanding someone's social influence has broad applications for businesses and non-profits alike. For marketers wanting to spread information about a new product, to non-profit fundraisers wanting to disseminate information about an upcoming event, knowing who your most socially influential contacts are might be a handy piece of information to have. But how do you track this information?

The Solution
It seemed obvious to start with utilizing Klout for their influence scoring. Klout seems to be the gold standard when it comes to social influence measuring tools. I first looked on the AppExchange to see if there was an existing tool that connected Salesforce with Klout. No such luck. Next, I googled and searched my way around the Salesforce community looking for something that would accomplish the task at hand. Hmmm...no luck again. Long story short, I ended up with a tool that lets you pull Klout directly into Salesforce based on a Lead or Contact's Twitter username. This is available in an unmanaged package and I also submitted it to the Salesforce Code Share in case anyone wants to improve upon it. You can view the video below for an overview and install the package here.

Demo

For anyone interested in the source code there is a Google Code Project here.

As always, I look forward to any feedback and comments.