I've written extensively on the topic of creating relationships instead of just hoarding your social connections. At times I wonder if anybody is listening? I do understand that it takes time to build relationships, time to create a truly engaged social graph and time to see profit from those interactions but it's time well spent. Don't you agree?
Which is why I was super excited when I came across Cloze a few days ago. Sure, I've seen it around but wasn't all that interested into diving into yet another social tool. I'm sure you can feel me on that, it seems like something new comes along every hour to divide our attention even more.
What is Cloze? While it can be described many different ways I like to think of it as a relationship building tool. It connects with your email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and assigns a "relationship" score based on 6 different parameters, they are:
- Dormancy is all about the last time you spoke with a particular person. The more recent, the higher the score.
- Frequency will measure how often you communicate, the more frequently, the higher the score.
- Responsiveness measures how often and how fast you respond to each other.
- Privacy measures how many people are included in the conversation, for instance if you're always clicking reply-all and aren't having a one-on-one conversation then your score won't be as high.
- Freshness measures how well your relationship is evolving. If you are always talking about the same topic then the relationship isn't as strong if you were talking about a broad number of different topics.
- Balance is all about the flow of information between two people. If it's even and each part if giving as much as they are taking then your score will go up.
To better explain this think of Close as a Klout score between two different people. Where Klout is your measure of online influence, Cloze is the measure of your relationship between you and another person. While I've been using it only two days I can already see that I am going to be using it every day.
I can log in, see who my top 25 people are (by default), sorted by my Cloze score. I can pin other people to my targets, giving me the ability to see how my relationship builds over time. For instance, If I want to ensure that I am building a relationship with a particular person, important to me, I will make sure that they are pined and that I am following them. As time progresses I can see the overall score between the two of us increase or decrease.
On top of the individual scores between yourself and your connection, you have an overall Cloze score. It lets you know your overall relationship score with all of the people you are connected with. This is great because it lets you know if you are trending up or down with your overall relationship building tactics.
Here is a snap shot of one of my connections
By taking a look at this snapshop I can see what I need to do to increase my score, even though it is very high. What does Cloze say a good score is?
"A good Cloze Score indicates a strong relationship over a long period of time. The strongest relationships typically have scores over 70. Good relationships range from 30 to 70. Weaker or developing relationships will have a score below 30." - Cloze
Below this snapshop is all of our recent connection. I can see the email we've sent back and forth so it's a great "social inbox" tool, which is what most people would call it, but it is so much more than that. I can also see our interactions on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
While I am still playing around with this and Cloze is still in BETA I am already hooked. I highly suggest you do the same, because if you use it, while keeping an eye on both your individual Cloze scores and your overall score you are well on your way to tapping into the gold in your social graph, the relationships your have with other people.