The enthusiasm and hatred people have created around Klout is interesting to me. I personally don’t care about my Klout score and in general I am kind of ambivalent about its existence*. At the same time, Convertiv has taken advantage or Klout perks for clients in the past and garnered good results. But that still doesn’t mean we turn to Klout whenever determining which influencers we want to reach out to. So the bottom line remains, Klout is simply another service we use if it makes sense for our client, and if my Klout score drops, it’s not equivalent to someone pooping in my Cheerios.
In the last few months there have been a lot of blog posts in the social media space where people are trying to hammer out the true value and impact of Klout. Simultaneously there have been a lot of posts on how horrible the BCS is and why college football needs a playoff. While absorbing these disparate pieces of information it occurred to me that people dislike the BCS and Klout for the same reason, both are trying to rank things that are highly objective.
Trying to determine the best football team in America based off polls, computer programs, and formulas isn’t the way to determine a National Champion. That can really only be decided on the field by a playoff. Klout is trying to determine influence based on a proprietary formula that bypasses equal comparison and instead seems to consider pretty superficial data points like the sheer amount of posts a user puts up.
The problem with Klout is everyone is always going to have a slightly different view of how to measure influence. And unlike the BCS there is no head to head solution that can determine a clear “winner.” So unless you have two influencers invite their social circles to the Catalina Wine Mixer and then compare what sort of impact their opinions had on the crowd, we are all still going to need to rely on some sort of formula to rank influence.
Ultimately, the debate surrounding the BCS playoff has potential to go away with the creation of a playoff while the debate around influence and how to measure it is going to rage on with no clear solution.
What are your thoughts on Klout?
*(Note: I wrote this before I was selected to a promotion by Klout called Two Days in Seattle which I am participating in. This might change my ambivalence but I wanted to make sure I was transparent about this.)