online influence Archive

It seems like you can’t load Twitter these days without seeing someone talking about Klout. Apparently the company rolled out some updates to their “algorithm” which made a lot of scores drop and my sources tell me that appointments to psychiatrists have risen 23% since the update. Klout claims to pull together a number of factors from how you use social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Google+ to come up with a score. This score is apparently your “influence.”

God only knows how they compute the score and how they figure out what profiles go with which users. I assume if I make an account (I haven’t and don’t plan to) then I can associate that on twitter I am centernetworks, on Facebook and Google+ I am Allen Stern. I also don’t use Foursquare so I guess I can kiss those points goodbye. But since I have no account, I assume my score (I have no idea what it is) is impacted negatively because they can’t pull in all of my accounts and see how truly influential I am. I also wonder how they deal with the suggested user default lists which have given millions of free followers to accounts for celebrities and some select bloggers.

If you are interested in the earliest days for Klout, check out the video I recorded when they presented at the NY Tech Meetup in January 2009.

Should I care more about my customers who have a higher Klout score? Should I perk them more than the others? That will absolutely never happen, every customer of mine will be treated the same. Alexia from Techcrunch posted yesterday with the title, “Nobody Gives A Damn About Your Klout Score.”

But for a while now, I’ve started to wonder if Klout is really just another advertising play/network wrapped up in a score which is wrapped up in a game? A year ago the Twitter game was to tell people via Foursquare where you are. Now the new Twitter game is apparently to “+k” someone for something. Or to shill for a product you were given for free. And who knows what, if anything, happens with those tweets. In any case, it’s a brilliant marketing play by Klout because it infects a stream on a regular basis. I see more of these than I do of the,  “Top Stories of the Day” posts that no one clicks on. I assume people click on these Klout freebie tweets because they too will want a free subway sammich or umbrella or Windows phone.

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