Early this past summer I read about someone who had flunked out of a job interview because his Klout.com score wasn’t high enough (and here’s one about a teacher using Klout in a course). It was the first that I had heard about Klout and decided to check it out. Klout claims to provide “a representation of your overall social media influence” based on “more than 400 variables on multiple social networks beyond your number of followers and friends.” What I found was that Klout has little to do with measuring one’s social influence and more to do with stroking one’s ego. But, maybe that’s precisely what social media is about for a lot of people – less about influencing others and more about influencing our own perceptions of our self-worth. Whatever the case, my conclusion was that Klout provides no meaningful measure of what I wanted to know about my social influence. Au contraire, I think it’s more a measure of how much I let social media noise influence me. Here’s how I came to that conclusion…
After learning about Klout and what it purported to do I was intrigued. I signed up and linked what I could; my Twitter account, Facebook account and Google+ account (the last of which I never use). I was rather frustrated that I had no way of linking the media that I actually do use to try to influence, my personal websites. But, I do use both Twitter and Facebook to publicize the websites so I figured I’d see what would happen.
On joining, I was immediately notified that I had a score which, while not fantastic, was not bad either. Apparently, I’m a little bit of a mover and shaker. Over the next couple of weeks I get a few mentions on Twitter, some likes on Facebook and my score starts going up, albeit rather slowly. Then there’s a bit of lull and my score takes a hit; drops down a few notches. Not to worry – Klout revamps their scoring algorithm and my score shoots up a whole 15-20 points! Whoa! Now I’m really getting my message out. Alas, my fame is shortlived and soon my score is declining again.
While my Klout score is rollercoastering all over the place, I write and publish on my websites between 20-30 articles. My websites get between 10-15 thousand visits. I have roughly 5-6 hundred subscribers to my RSS feeds. Some of my stuff is Tweeted, Facebooked, Scooped, Paper.li-ed and what have you. But very little of this action is in any way linked to my Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts and, thus, is not tallied by Klout. When early fall rolls around, my Klout score is on a rapid downward spiral. The one thing that saves me from a devastating crash and burn is a picture of myself enjoying “Summit Beer on stick” at the Minnesota State Fair that I posted to Facebook. Apparently, it’s one of the most influential things that I’ve done since signing up for Klout.
So, what does Klout do? Well, based on my experience, it certainly doesn’t provide any meaningful representation of one’s influence on the Internet. What I think it does do is provide an opportunity for continuous self-gratification; a potentially constant stroking hand on the ego. If you play the Klout game and focus on increasing your score, you can certainly do so. If I had really wanted to increase my score, I might’ve moved my websites to WordPress.com’s free blogging service, which Klout can link to. That would’ve meant sacrificing my personal domains, and hence my personal brands, disrupting service to my loyal readers, along with various other annoyances. Sorry Klout, I just wasn’t willing to make that sacrifice for a meaningless measure of self-worth.
Let’s face it, a lot of social media use has to do with gaining self-recognition and it’s perfectly natural to be satisfied when it works. I do it. That’s one of the reasons that I write on my websites. I want to get my knowledge and opinions into the public domain but I also want others to know what I’m about – what my personal brand is. In this sense it matters to me who reads my stuff, how often I’m read and what results from others’ reading my stuff. I would love to have an accurate picture of how I influence my readers. However, the method used by Klout doesn’t come near to painting that sort of picture. As far as I have been able to tell, Klout comes closest to providing a way to satisfy the curiousity of those who fall, fall again, and fall once more, for the “App to see who’s checking out your Facebook page” scams that repeatedly proliferate on Facebook. So, for now I’ll do without the Klout score.
