Wait, bacon? What does yummy bacon have to do with Klout?
For those who don’t know, Klout is a service which supposedly measure a person’s influence on social media. Some have equated it to a social media “credit score”, if you will. Klout has this super-secret, if-we-told-you-we’d-have-to-kill-you algorithm which they use to monitor a person’s connected social media accounts (or public one’s if they don’t have any connected, but we’ll get to that in a minute.) Klout seems to be an increasingly polarizing topic amongst both people I know and blog articles I read.
Take for example, this one which was re-published by CNNMoney and written by John Scalzi who asserts why “Klout scores are possibly evil”, in which he states that “Klout exists to turn the entire Internet into a high school cafeteria, in which everyone is defined by the table at which they sit. And there you are, standing in the middle of the room with your lunch tray, looking for a seat, hoping to ingratiate yourself with the cool kids, trying desperately not to get funneled to the table in the corner where the kids with scoliosis braces and D&D manuals sit.” (It really is a hilarious read.)
Or this one, by Sharon Hayes, titles “10 Reasons Why I Opted Out of Klout”, In which she lists out the many reasons she chose to opt-out of their database…
I have friends who obsess about their Klout scores and I have friends who think Klout is a crock and a complete waste of time.
Here’s my take. I look at, and use Klout in 3 ways. Two of the ways are simple amusement and one is a business tool.
1. The primary way in which I use Klout is as a game, of sorts. When you give someone a +K on a topic (which is saying they influence you on that topic), it gives you the opportunity to tweet out the gift. The fun part comes in where you can alter the tweet so that instead of saying, “I gave @arnoldtijerina a +K about the Auto Industry on @klout..”, you can modify it to say “I gave @arnoldtijerina a +K about being the super-awesome guy that he is on @klout..” (which I am, thank you). I use this “modifying tweets” in 2 ways. The first is acknowledging people in a positive, reinforcing way (as shown above) and then there is a group of us that like to modify them in a…well, more fun way.. like “I gave @arnoldtijerina a +K for knowing when to hold them and when to fold them on @klout..” Either way, it’s fun and funny.
2. Klout Perks. This is a program in which Klout teams up with companies to offer freebies to influencers. I’ve received some cool freebies through this program so, if for no other reason, free stuff is a good reason in my book to keep your Klout score high.
3. Now, here is where people get polarized. Do I think Klout accurately measures a person’s influence? Sort of. While I know that there are topics in which I am not influential (uh.. like “bacon”.. yes, this is a REAL topic on Klout that I, apparently have some influence in, according to them. The real scoop is that it’s fun to give your friends +K in oddball topics.), I do believe that you can utilize Klout to assist in identifying influencers. Basically, if I were a business and I was looking to leverage my influencers to help spread the word about my service/product and if I were to take all of my Twitter followers and try to figure out which ones are active and influential in social media, it would take 1) time I don’t have and 2) the odds of actually pegging a true influencer would be low. Now, same scenario but I take all my Twitter followers with Klout scores above 50 and target them. While not everyone I target will be an influencer, I have a much higher probability of actually identifying influencers and it took me way less time.
The thing that seems to irk the most people is that Klout is an opt-out service. What that means is that if you have public social media accounts (like Twitter), Klout will have a profile on you whether you’ve signed up for their service or not. If you don’t want one, until recently, you were SOL but now they have created an option in which you can delete your profile. Do I agree with this? Meh. I don’t care. I kind of look at it like if you put it out there publicly, you can’t really get mad when someone monetizes that information. C’mon folks, Klout is a business. They make money by finding and selling lists of influencers to other companies.
However, the one thing that I do know, as Sharon Hayes pointed out in the blog article I referenced earlier in this post, is that as employers give a person’s Klout score more weight and use it in hiring decisions, you better start paying attention. Whether that’s by making sure you have a good score or deleting your profile altogether, you need to act.
As stupid as you may believe it to be I’m fairly confident that you don’t want it to affect your ability to get hired. You may not care what your credit score is either, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t.
