Ah, Klout. My personal vicissitude on your legitimacy knows no bounds. If you’re unfamiliar, Klout is a site that calculates your overall social influence score. In its own terms, “People have always had the power to influence others, and that power is being democratized with new social media tools. Klout’s mission is to provide insights into everyone’s influence.”
Which, you know, works in the beginning because frankly who ISN’T narcissistic enough to want to know how they measure up against everyone else? Klout’s appeal acts upon the same impulse that inspires us to “Google ourselves,” or to constantly update Facebook or Instagram with new and fabulous pictures of our selves and our lives. It’s the basic human desire for amplified attention- ego.
When I first heard about Klout my initial reaction was one that I find quite common for tech startups. Sort of a “well, isn’t that an interesting concept (that no one will ever pick up on)”. To be honest, I have been miserably wrong on that front before. I thought that about Twitter. Boy was I wrong on that one.
Right away, I thought to myself that Klout was/is a pretty interesting proposition, at least academically, on a few different levels:
1) The gall required to introduce a new “score” into our lives that will assess how powerful we are. I mean, really, think about it: How many different numbers can we really each be weighed against? Tax bracket, credit score, Facebook friends, LinkedIn contacts, Twitter followers, etc. To introduce a whole new metric that will encapsulate our worth to society takes some cojones. Klout came in swinging and made a strong argument that their score was not only powerful, it was accurate and useful for evaluating people.
2) Klout capitalizes on social graph theory which assesses interactions and relative positioning of nodes (people) in networks and attempts to assign a value to our networked interactions for commercial benefit. But Klout was initially only measuring the relative values of our networked connections on social, web-based networks, which can be inherently artificial.
But then I came upon an article in Wired that began by positing a future in which each of us will have to proffer our Klout scores as part of the standard candidate evaluation when applying for a job. In other words, how influential we are in Klout’s eyes could help determine how hirable we are. I felt that was a frightening proposition, but in the end it’s neither here nor there because the Wired article ended by concluding that, in general, most people feel that one correlation still holds true: the higher the Klout score, the more unbearable the person.
At that point, I thought we could all rest easily and watch Klout disappear down the startup drain while we get on with our lives. However, now Klout has changed how it calculates its score to include aspects of our offline lives in their influence scores. As a recent Mashable article pointed out,
“Klout also now takes into account more of your real-world influence, and takes into account how important you are at your company -– the CEO will earn more Klout than the mail guy –- and if you’re important enough to have your own Wikipedia page. ‘We had to figure out how to balance the real-world influence with the online influence,’ says (Klout CEO Joe) Fernandez. ‘We still lean more toward the online influence but now your real-world influence is coming more and more into play.’”
So now Klout is not only measuring how few people actually listen to or care about a word I say online, but they’re also realizing that my official work title isn’t very awe-inspiring. The hits just keep on coming.
More specifically, “We went from about 100 variables that we were looking at to over 400,” Joe Fernandez, founder and CEO of Klout told Mashable. “We’re looking at a bunch of new stuff.”
That Mashable article lists that “The service is looking at 12 billion data points per day across the seven social networks it looks at — 12 times more than it did previously.” So you’d think that everyone Klout scores may have been artificially inflated before, and as a result of that, after this new change our scores may all take a hit.
Not so. Mine increased 10 points out of nowhere. Can’t account for that at all, but then my math skills have never been overly strong. I guess we’ll just have to see how this develops! In the mean time, go out there, make friends, and above all- INFLUENCE PEOPLE.
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