Is the score that measures your popularity and influence through the social networks, popular enough to convince its worth?
Omg, Vivienne’s score increased to 69! That’s like almost celebrity range! What did she do to get her online influence so skyrocketing?” Sounds familiar? You bet. To notify you when someone new adds you, there’s Facebook. To inform you that your follower count has increased, there’s Twitter. But how do you know whether these people are actually listening to what you have to say? That’s when Klout makes its grand entrance. If you haven’t heard of Klout, you will be astonished at the significance that this company provides to social media marketers. It generates a score, called the Klout Score, Which measures your influence in driving action on social networks.
So what exactly is this ‘Klout’? Brought into life by Joe Fernandez (CEO) and Binh Tran (Co-founder), Klout is a San Francisco based company that provides social media analytics to measures a user’s influence across their social network. Befriending the slogan “the Standard for Influence”, the free website analyzes data from sites as Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn and rates you from 1 to 100 on your “overall online influence.”
Individuals who sign up for Klout, or are linked to those who do, are each given a “Klout score”. The Klout Score is not based solely on number of friends or followers. Rather, their People Rank algorithm is based on actions that people on social networks take due to the influence that an individual provides – actions such as replying to or sharing posts. Scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores equivalent to a higher assessment by Klout of the breadth and potency of their online influence.
The Klout score is made up of three variables
TRUE REACH
This is based on the size of a person’s “engaged audience” of followers and friends who actively listen and react to their online messages. True reach is a raw number and the only score not based on a 1-to-100 scale.
AMPLIFICATION
This considers how much people are influenced by measuring the actions they undertake. In simple terms, this is the likelihood that your messages will retweeted, receive @ reply in Twitter, or receive a “like” or comment on Facebook.
NETWORK IMPACT
The Network score looks at your engaged audience (the same people from True Reach) and then considers how influential they are.
Klout assesses influence by using data points from Twitter, such as: following count, follower count, retweets, list memberships, how many spam/dead accounts are following you, how influential the people that retweet you are, and unique mentions. This knowledge is intermingled with Facebook data such as comment, likes, and the number of friends in your network to create a “Klout Score” that calculates a user’s online manipulation.
The most revealing information Klout provides is: “[The] variables used to generate scores for each of these categories are normalized across the whole data set and run through our analytics engine. After the first pass of analytics, we apply a specific weight to each data points. We then run the factors through our machine-learning analysis and calculate the final Klout Score.”
If you thought Klout is just for entertainment uses, then think again. Gone are the days where social networking sites are assumed to be ‘just for fun’; they have proved over the years that they ARE capable of providing so much more. Klout is no exception. Klout Scores can be used to gauge the collision that your social marketing campaign has on the public that you are targeting. High scores designate that your messages are getting out. Low scores connote that your social marketing efforts need some concentration.
Some social critics argue that the Klout score devalues authentic online communication and endorses social ranking and stratification by trying to quantify human interaction.
The scoring system is based on 100 point scale. In general, scores of 30 or above show social media expertise and higher scores define you as a leader in social media. If your score is less than 30, perhaps you’re targeting the wrong market. Klout Scores are even being used on resumes. Klout makes it simple for businesses to analyze a person’s ability to sway people in regard to marketing a brand from side to side social media. It is becoming the “standard of influence” on the internet. In future, it may even become the standard for employing people in the internet marketing sector. Right now, though, there are many who don’t like the new changes, as it has resulted in a huge drop in some users’ Klout scores. With time however, may be they will come to realize the worth in having a more accurate score.
Companies have paid to get in contact with individuals with Klout scores in hopes that free commodities and other perks will persuade them to spread positive publicity for them. According to Joe Fernandez, about 50 of these partnerships have been established as of November 2011.
Amit Agrawal, Director, Sparrow SMS, says “Frankly speaking, I have not used it. I’ve been trying to find some information on it. I’ve heard it for the first time.” When asked about the assumption of Nepalese people being aware of Klout, he replied “Very few”.
In terms of social uses, it is for fun. Good news for Internet addicts: Klout is an entertaining model to brag about your influence to your friends and enemies. You can spend the whole evening tweeting, liking, commenting – and the reward? An upgrade in your Klout score. The more influential you are, the more Klout Perks will be available to you. You can get Klout perks by achieving a certain score or by being influential about a specific topic. Who knows? Your influence can determine where you are in the world. We all have influence over our friends and family and that weight is a part of our Klout.
I personally think Klout is only good for business purposes. The influence/reputation that Klout entries to, has colossal potential for individual businesses and large advertisers. I understand how difficult it must be to rank millions of professionals themselves. However, I think Klout isn’t a good measure of individual quality. It’s a measure of how much a person is heard. A person could be completely wrong all the time but still be popular.
In context of Nepal, Klout is not that popular – yet. Nepal Telecom, Maiti Nepal and Nepal TV have Klout accounts. However, Maiti Nepal has said that they don’t possess a Klout account as they are “unfamiliar with it and that it might be a fake account.”
There is a lot of support for Klout scores but it is not without controversy. Klout has been praised and criticized for their system. Human resources departments, often with little understanding are literally hiring and firing based on Klout scores. The Klout algorithm has been called into question and Klout perks that give free perks to users is often under fire for people manipulating their numbers (running scripts to gain followers, gain the system, etc.). More problematic for Klout is their scoring of people who have not signed up for the service and a massive issue which discovered that a woman’s underage child had a Klout score without signing up, and there was no way to select out or disable Klout for someone who hadn’t signed up.
Critics have pointed out that Klout scores are not commissioners of the manipulation a person really has, stressing on the fact that President Obama has a lower influence score than a number of bloggers including Robert Scoble. Furthermore, some social critics argue that the Klout score devalues authentic online communication and endorses social ranking and stratification by trying to quantify human interaction. The site has also been disparaged for violating the privacy of minors, and for taking advantage of users for their own profit.
Be that as it may, Klout has it’s pros as well. It puts effectiveness of social media strategy into perspective. Every one of us gets involved in social media to some degree to improve our influence through social engagement. Klout is the most ambitious undertaking to date of such a large analysis of data across multiple social networks.
For individuals, Klout largely tells you what you already know about yourself and your social networking habits. For business users, especially teams who are managing one account, it’s a different story, giving a very general snapshot of activity and success rate day-by-day over a month. For tips and tricks to improve, through, users will have to turn to other sources for advice.
Klout has merit; if people take the time to read how they are actually scoring you, they may learn some valuable information. Knowledge is power. Like it or not, Klout is here to stay!
To Cite This:
Shakya, Krisha. ‘The Klout Craze.’ Vivacity
Magazine, 15 Feb. – 14 Mar. 2012, 70-71.
