Ashley: Welcome to the show, Susan. Thanks for joining me today.Susan: Thanks for asking me to be here, Ashley. This is fun.Ashley: It’s always great to meet someone new and have a chat about the things we love talking about, right?

Susan: Yes, absolutely.

Ashley: Just for everyone who doesn’t know you, can you give us a quick 2 minute spiel on your background?

Susan: Sure. My background is as an entrepreneur. I had a brick-and-mortar business in San Diego, California, and as a result of the growth that took place with that business, then I wrote a little gift book, and it’s really just inspirationally based, called The Land of I Can.

But then I did so well in the publishing world and did so well with it online that I started helping other authors and other publishers. So there came a point that I decided that I wanted to move to the Seattle, Washington area, which is where I am now, and I sold the business in San Diego – although I am the co-author of The Idiot’s Guide on how to operate and open a coffee bar, so that was my legacy.

Then moved up here and have been helping authors and entrepreneurs – because again, I’ve had a brick-and-mortar business and I can certainly help the solo entrepreneur. I had 55 employees when I had the five locations, so I’m not a Fortune 500 kind of gal. I really believe in paving your own path.

And then the topic we’re going to talk about here shortly is that I wrote a little Kindle book last summer on the topic of Klout, and I’m very passionate about that.

Ashley: And marketing, online marketing in general, you’re very active.

Susan: Yes, very, very active. Again, it comes as a result of I want to do it first and learn how to do it well, and then be able to help others. That’s what happened when I published The Land of I Can, and then on Walking the Talk.

I use social media and I use Klout because I’m always looking at how I can improve my own sphere of influence and what’s working and what’s not, and then I can bring that back home and help people, either through my coaching and consulting, done-for-you services, or in any books that I write.

Ashley: Okay, so on a daily basis, you’re working with a variety of people doing all these kinds of things.

Susan: Yes.

Ashley: We’re just getting onto the topic we’re jumping onto today, which is influence and Klout. Maybe we should first quickly just define what we’re talking about, for those people who don’t really understand this whole influence, influencers, powerful people online. Because it is, for many non-marketing people, quite a strange thing.

Susan: Here’s the way that I like to approach it, is that influence isn’t new. Influence has been around as long as human beings have been on the planet, and the official definition of influence is the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something or the effect itself.

To bring it into at least the 21st century kind of thing, think about Dale Carnegie, who was the grandfather of people skills and talking about the power of influence when he published How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1937. So influence isn’t new. The new spin is that we now can influence people online, where in the past our influence was more person-to-person.

Ashley: There’s sort of an amplification going on, really, and also an ease of reach. You can reach influencers very easily, too.

Susan: The world has become our oyster, because we don’t need to do – like when I had my brick-and-mortar business in San Diego, I could only reach those people who were within a sphere of the location that were willing to come in. But it would’ve been very hard to sell them coffee and muffins in Switzerland.

But when you’re online, everybody is a potential lead, a potential customer, a potential JV partner. We’re not limited anymore.

Ashley: I don’t know how to place this, but is there a specific time when you’d say somebody becomes an influencer? Or would you say we’re all influencers in some way?

Susan: I think we’re all influencers; it’s just the degree of. That’s one of the things that Klout, which is this third party social media measuring system – and it’s not perfect, and we’ll talk about that, but it does work.

So what I like to think of it as is when you’re in school and you get a “C” on a particular topic, you know you have some work to do, right? If you have an “A,” you say, “Okay, I’m doing pretty well. Maybe I need to go work on that topic where I’m failing.” Everybody who’s in school is getting a grade, and anybody who’s online – in particular, having a Twitter account – has an influence score.

The question is, how influential and where are they on that “A, B, C, D, E” scale, so to speak, if we think about it in terms of a school and how well we’re doing. In my opinion, we always want to be improving.

Ashley: That’s the hard part, right?

Susan: Exactly. We want to be improving in anything that we’re learning or doing, and in business, we always want to be improving. With your web work, we use Google Analytics, we use tracking so we can tell what’s working and what’s not. Because if we’re not testing and tracking, we can’t improve it.

So that’s what Klout allows us to do, is to be able to measure our influence and how well we’re doing, and it does work. When I started, because I’ve always been active in social media, I came into Klout with a relatively high score. It’s bantered about, but I think if you’re over 45, you’re influencing people. If you’ve got a score of 18, you have some work to do.

When American Airlines opened up their Admirals Club a year ago, I believe they were looking at anybody with a score of 50 or above. And when I published the Klout score book last year, my Klout score was 64, and today it’s 83. So it’s just constantly using the systems that are in place to see how well it’s working. I mean, how did you find me? You found me online, right?

Ashley: I think we’ve probably touched base – I’m not sure if it’s been through – Triberr, maybe? Are you on Triberr?

Susan: I am, but I’m not really very active there. I think we just met on Twitter.

Ashley: It’s funny how it happens, because sometimes I can’t remember where I find people. It’s just through certain retweets, through certain hashtags. And that’s an interes