It was only a few centuries ago when influence could be measured by the size of the stick you carried around.
With the advent of law, social institutions, and improved communications, rating a person’s sway over others became much more difficult. But does the continuing development of new media allow the human race once again to measure and quantify one another’s clout?
Klout is a relatively new online service that attempts to determine how influential people are by measuring their own reach into their respective online social networks. Klout utilizes information from your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and 35 other inputs to crank out a score (between 1 and 100) ranking “your ability to drive action.”
Some have debated whether Klout’s algorithm is actually that accurate, others have complained that Klout overreached into networks like Facebook to extract information, and still others have simply dismissed Klout saying nobody cares what your score is.
I must admit, I was kind of curious about what my score was. I won’t disclose such personally embarrassing information in this post, but I will say that there’s nothing wrong with single digits… More importantly though, beyond simple curiosity, why would anyone care enough to actively try to increase their score? If Klout means nothing, then why was it ranked by TIME 35th of the top 50 Best Websites and why are similar services like Social Mention, TwitterCounter, and TweetLevel popping up?
Many online and small businesses are using Klout to determine their reach into markets. Currently Klout only focuses on social media, but they are close to releasing the ability to measure the Klout scores of blogs as well. With 13% of the blogosphere comprised of entrepreneurs and 8% comprised of corporate blogs (for over a fifth of total blogs), business models are increasingly incorporating influence via social media and blogs to get their brand out there. Services like Klout offer them a measure of how effective those efforts really are.
And don’t kid yourself: government officials use these same tools. Politicians and hopeful candidates alike can use Klout to see how often their tweets are retweeted, how often people like their Facebook posts, and if those people are also influential. Soon perhaps blogs will become more prevalent and instead of hiring expensive consultants to do polling for messaging, representatives can simply try some new language on their blog and see how popular the words are and how far they go.
This is an interesting trend in the new media that deserves some attention. It’s implications for business and marketing models as well as politics deserve more than to be ignored.
But at the very least, it’s just fun to see how much power you wield over your friends!
Like Nate, I have no desire to hand over my Facebook login to Klout. (I’m already paranoid enough after learning too much about myself on Spokeo–check at your own risk!) The first thing that came to mind when I heard about Klout is that it seemed a lot like Google Analytics, but for the individual. Yet, unless you are a business or a public figure, what does your “True Reach” or “Amplification” (to use Klout’s terminology) really matter?
Although, I just admit in cases like this, Klout seems like a pretty nifty tool.
I’ll admit that I didn’t check my Klout score after reading this- not because I don’t want to know it, but because I’m way too paranoid about giving anyone access to my Facebook login. My privacy-related phobias aside, I think it’s very interesting to think about how Klout and tools like it will help shape social media and business. If users are given a quantifiable and widely-used metric to determine their influence online, then that metric will likely eventually serve as the basis on which people judge brand value, a la Alexa or Google PageRank. Given the criticism of the Klout algorithm (that it’s unduly biased toward certain forms of social media, that you can game the rankings, etc.), we might want to hesitate before embracing something like it, because if it becomes entrenched in the market, it will have a lot of power to determine if online enterprises succeed or fail. Sure, any metric like this will necessarily be imperfect, but maybe that’s less reason to try and find a new one and more reason to be skeptical of them altogether.
I must say out of vanity I was inclined to check out my score on the site; I know it won’t effect how I will act on social networks in the future, but it was interesting to see how Klout’s algorithm judged my “influence” on other people. According to Klout’s scale, I am “effectively using social media to influence your network across a variety of topics.” This sounds like a pretty good Klout score, until I looked at the number and saw that it was a 39 on a 1-100 scale, which makes me genuinely wonder what it would take to earn a 99, and what their comment would be about their social influences. I also wonder if my score just means I go on Facebook way too much.
Another aspect I found a bit strange was that it said I was especially influential in the topic of television. The reason I think it’s strange is because I don’t actually own a television. Nor did I own one last semester while I was in Italy. I only keep up with one television show and watch it on the internet, but I don’t recall ever posting anything on my Newsfeed about it. It makes me question what means they use to weigh my clout, and whether or not these sources are actually legitimate.