We had the privilege of speaking at Digital Atlanta this week. We met a bunch of amazing people, had a great audience and fielded some great questions.

Here's the slide deck from that presentation:

Engauge's Executive Chairman Rick Milenthal and his son, Josh, who works in Engauge's Atlanta office, had an interesting blog exchange observing the disconnect between Klout scores and real-world clout/influence.

Badgy has recently taken a deep dive into integrating Klout scores into our Social Dashboard so marketers can quickly identify the most influential people who have engaged with their brands. We've been looking at interesting things like the level of engagement, influence, and reach of college football rivalries, and finding some unexpectedly influential fans of different schools.

Klout runs on a 100 point scale, and is still heavily based on Twitter activity, though many other networks are now supported. Something like a score of 60 usually looks like a pretty good score. But a score of 60 doesn't always mean a good account. It can still mean a very annoying account. An account that thrives on replying to people and asking them to retweet.

Still, based on our observations so far, here's our subjective view of what Klout scores mean (get your own Klout score here):

10 or less: A new or highly infrequent user. Not well known

10-30: A casual Twitter user. Probably has more than 10 and less than 100 followers, mostly personal friends in real life.

31-40: A somebody. This person probably has a network beyond their personal friends, and has actual conversations on Twitter that others might see.

41-50: A local influencer. Local can mean geography or local to a specific industry, but this person knows something and can get other people to respond. Sometimes the "locality" of this can mean someone who chatters a lot with their friends.

51-60: An intentional influencer. One way or another, these people are very intentionally using Twitter as a tool to market themselves or a product. They're probably doing a good job.

61-70: A Pro. These people know how to get their message out there on Twitter, how to get reactions, how to get retweets. None of this means they aren't an annoying bot account. But annoying bot accounts also aren't likely to claim promotions that are based on Klout score.

71-80: Monsters and Machines. These accounts are hugely influential. The best of the bots make it into this category, but if you get someone at this level engaged in what you're doing, you should send them free product, hugs and kisses.

81+: The Stratosphere. It's pretty rarified air up here. Anyone in this score range is truly and absolutely influential on a global scale.

For more information on how to use Badgy and Klout to identify, motivate, engage, and measure your social media fans, contact rob@bad.gy.

How does this compare to your experience with Klout scores? Any suggested changes to this scale?

Saturday is Foursquare day, and Badgy is partnerting with @4sqATL to offer a very special Atlanta Foursquare Day 2011 Badge.

Folllow @4sqlATL on Twitter to find out how to unlock this limited edition Badgy badge when it is released.

You might wonder why fans should talk about Foursquare outside of that eco-system, and there are a number of good reasons that apply just as much to the companies we work with every day as they do to Foursquare.

• Huge Audience - not everybody knows about Foursquare, and not everyone who knows about Foursquare uses it. As people share their enthusiams for Foursquare on "Foursquare Day", it's an opportunity to recruit new people to use Foursquare as they see the enthusiasm across their Twitter and Facebook streams. Facebook is bigger than Twitter is bigger than Foursquare and most companies' web sites. Social campaigns help people discover how to engage with ideas, content, and products they already love or would love if they knew about them.
• Access - Foursquare is a pretty closed system - you can't create your own badge. If you partner with them at a VERY high level like Bravo or CNN, you can have some badges, but this level of partnership is only within reach for the very largest companies, and even then, location-based check-ins don't necessarily make sense for their brand, which brings us to:
• Non-location - Foursquare isn't a place. Atlanta is not a "place" on FourSquare, though it is a collection of places. Foursquare's solution for non-places is usually to either ask you to "shout" something with your check-in, or designate a few special places unaffiliated with the brand where you check in to earn the badge. Many companies we talk to aren't a "place", and Badgy can help by letting users "check in" by engaging with them on the much larger social networks they are already using - Facebook and Twitter.

We hope you'll enjoy Foursquare day as much as we will enjoy celebrating with you. Again, keep your eye on @4sqATL for details on how to earn your Atlanta Foursquare Day 2011 badge!

We've just launched a very basic API for Badgy.  It lets you tell us when you want to give someone a badge that you've created.

So you might ask why a simple service like Badgy would create an API so early in the life of our company?  It's because we believe badges, achievements, are a powerful motivator and reward.  Right now, we make it dead simple for you to give a badge to Twitter users who mention your hashtag, but we know there are countless other reasons you might want to give someone a badge.  We want to make all of those reasons dead simple, but until we can do that, we want to make it pretty darn simple for you to give someone a badge for any reason you can imagine.  So you can do that with our API.

We love feedback, so let us know if you have any questions about the API or any suggestions at support@bad.gy.

The Badgy beta is underway.  We've had a great initial response and some really creative badges created by our first beta users.

If you'd like to join the ranks of Badgy beta testers, just mention #badgyBetaSignup in a public tweet, follow @BadgyApp on Twitter, and we'll DM your beta access link when it's ready!