Ever since Social Media became main stream people have discovered the principle of “influentials’. Probably not realizing that the influentials have always been there. Even in the stone ages people did stuff because other people influenced them. And that hasn’t changed. What has changed is that we can now measure these influences. Or at least, we think we can.
A good example of that is Klout. The service which looks at how people interact on Social Media. The good thing about Klout was (yes, was) that it didn’t just look at number of followers or number of likes. It looked at the conversation. Or so it said. Recently Klout decided to change some of their algorithm.
The change meant that many people suddenly lost a lot of their Klout-scores. They dropped like crazy, yes mine did too (not the reason for this post). And the drop meant outrage: people didn’t, and still, don’t understand. “Why did my Klout score drop?” People actually think Klout is broken:
It is not broken. It is changed. And it is useless.
I have played with Klout for a while, I even found a way to get my scores up. But it also meant that when I would stop doing that my scores would drop like crazy.
I just want to do a bit of a call out to everybody: stop focussing on services like Klout. It is useless, because it will never be an accurate measurement tool. My dad is not on Klout, still he is very influential in his area. But because he doesn’t have a Klout score, does that make him less valuable?
Go out there and look for the actual influentials. By checking people, by actually looking at what they are doing and figuring out whether or not they can be useful to you and your target audience. Find those who work hard and make a difference, not those who simply have the loudest voice. Klout is for the lazy people.
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LOVE that video, haha, brilliant! People get so obsessed about these things, I’m going to start a SelfobsessedDouch Score, what do you think, will it take off?
Hehe I’ve had a similar talk with people about some kind of score like that. It would I guess
Hilarious. Just another tool to inflate the egos of “influencers”. Some twitter accounts that I know for a fact are fully automated have high klout scores. Their algo is flawed.
[...] Oh My Klout has Dropped! Who cares, Klout is for the Lazy People, State of Search [...]
Thank goodness a post that talks some sense!
Rather than spending time researching your Klout score, spend the time picking up the phone and talking to influential people in your target market. No-one phones any more – which makes it more personal and effective!
The best option is to ignore it as I think the Klout score says more about how much you engage on the social platforms they cover i.e quantity . Hence Klout is more about engagement and less about authority.
But when it comes to the search engines it is more about authority and less about the no. of posts or people with whom you interact.
An authority account will surely reflect a narrower cirlcle and engagements but the quality of the posts will be of value which is very difficult to measure as a metric.
Just like Matt Cutts mentioned at #pubcon (for inbound links) that it is not about the no. of links but the quality of links one editorial link can be equal to 5000 not so important links.
Similarly just because one engages on Twitter and other social media platforms the whole day does not make that account an authority account.
I think a high klout score usually implies an active social media persona but of course some exceptions maybe there when it comes to celebrities.
Had read an article on these lines sometime back on http://andrewgelman.com/2011/06/why_your_klout/
[...] Oh My Klout has Dropped! Who cares, Klout is for the Lazy People, State of Search [...]
I said it once and I’ll say it again:
If you hire someone because of their Klout score, then you deserve them.
I posted once on Twitter when the US Open tennis was on that Nadal should stop adjusting his underwear every shot and ever since then I’ve been an authority on Tennis and the US Open and had to disable them from showing up as my expertise to allow the things I would expect to see me for….drinking shots, being overweight (just kidding).
To me Klout is a by-product of what you do, where you choose to do it. Trying to sculpt a decent Klout score will yield the same results some people got trying to sculpt page rank.
Klout lists make for interesting activity before a major trade show. I did one for Pubcon recently, taking all the speakers and putting them into a list, it got a few mentions, was fun to collate but there wasn’t any major reason for people to pay much attention other than having a list with all the profiles in some order (even if the methodology is unclear).
I’m going to do the same thing for Affiliate Summit, just to get a flavour of who is active, but no more than that really.
ROFL! I really am just about rolling on the floor. <3 this post!
As I've been in the midst of months of intense work and projects, I often experience "dark" periods on Twitter. During those times, I get Klout email notifications that someone gave me +K is something or other, but I rarely read these emails. Ummmm… why do they come in when I'm not even tweeting? I don't get it.
I then pondered, via Twitter nonetheless, that I believe Klout scores have an inverse relationship to one's bank account.
So now i know I can delete all those +K notifications and consider myself not lazy!
Great video!
But I must say, some people (clients and advertisers) actually think Klout scores matter. And that means I have to care about Klout just because some others use it as a measurement. I wish they’d see this video….
Couldn’t agree more! I really have a problem with many of these measures of social influence for all of the reasons you mentioned. But more importantly, I can’t take a scoring system that penalizes people for being social with people with a low Klout seriously. Too narrowly focused to be of any real value and just perpetuates an already flawed algorithm.
I have been thinking the same thing about Klout recently too, you log in one day and see a crazy increase of like 14 points, you log out and you go down 10.
One day your influence rate increase, they need to fine tune all the bugs imo..
[...] is Worth Money January 27, 2012 News, Strategy No Comments Bas van den Beld As you may know I am not a big fan of Klout or the services like Klout. Simply because it in most cases gives people the wrong impression of [...]
[...] Oh My Klout has Dropped! Who cares, Klout is for the Lazy People [...]