Klout is an online tool for measuring social influence. It measures how many people you reach through your online, social media driven communications. In the last week, Klout made a few changes to it’s free service and it has made a lot of people unhappy because their Klout scores have dropped.
Here are some thoughts on why I don’t think it matters.
Better things to measure when it comes to social media activity:
- The number of conversation that you had with potential clients as a result of social media activity.
- The number of face-to-face meetings that resulted from social media activity.
- The number of proposals that resulted as a result of social media activity.
- The number of new clients won as result on social media activity.
- The increase in revenue as a result of social media activity.
- The number of people who referred business to you as a result of social media activity.
- The number of opportunities uncovered as a result of social media activity.
Maybe I am wrong. Maybe Klout is the new measure of influence and we need to pay more attention to what it says. However, a better approach might be to continue to add value to your online activity by sharing relevant information with your target market. It might be better to help other people with their business objectives by sharing their content. It might be better to spend time cultivating relationships and having real conversations. Or you can just watch your Klout score everyday and see what happens.
Please share your thoughts on Klout, how you are using it and how much it matters.
Delphia Consulting, LLC
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I think the point of Klout’s changes was to try to make the score reflect interactions, as opposed to simply how many times one got retweeted. The value might be in using it to see how your interactions improved over time. Of course, Klout can’t measure face-to-face or phone conversations, or whether an interaction resulted in something really meaningful, but as a measurement of JUST ONE ASPECT, it has some value. I do think that if people are using your Klout score to judge you in some way, it may be worth keeping an eye on it.
Jessica:
I think there are valid complaints here. It’s about customer service for people who use their product regularly. I also know associations that are using Klout as a way to measure performance of their employees and to measure if they should choose a speaker or not. So they’ve become more than scores in some circles. I don’t agree with what they’ve done though.
And, now Klout is taking heat for privacy issues. Seems they are now creating profiles for people who have not opted in so they can measure these folks influence. Seems there is no way to delete a profile once created either.
IMO, this are all symptoms of a larger issue of management and customer service.
Jeff – you mention customer service which really brings up a bigger issue. Klout is a free service who makes money through offering perks (a form of advertising). Their website says beta. So are you really a customer? You use their service, but would you pay for it? Don’t they have a right to tweak their product in the hopes of making it more accurate. Do companies who offer free services need to have good customer service? Facebook has 800 million users with little to no customer support. Even when people complain that Facebook changed something they still use it.
As far as associations using such a tool, I wouldn’t recommend it. People who spend a lot of time online may have a really high score, but it doesn’t measure their ability as a speaker. It may, to some degree, uncover their subject matter knowledge, but even then I am not comfortable. For example, Klout thinks that I am influential about Ryan Reynolds. I am a fan of Ryan, but certainly not an expert or influential in anyway. So I wouldn’t use this tool to make real life decision – it’s not ready for prime time yet.
Thanks for your comments, always appreciated.
I suspect that if you are hawking your services to companies as a “social media expert,” consultant or whatever, many companies will look at your Klout score as a measure of your effectiveness. Right or wrong.
Jessica: I could not agree more, today we and our clients are faced with the same age old marketing problem. Those who ”
Talk it -vs- those who Walk it”, too many agencies have been founded on “Brain Trust”. We are bright and intelligent people there for we must be right, these same posers have never spent one day on the front line of the business that they are Consulting or Advising. They use stats and graphs to impress, bewilder and enslave their clients. It is the masterful art of creating artificial dependency. Stats are great as a barometer, but the ultimate monitor of any program or campaign is the cash register. Everything in business starts with accounting and ends with accounting, all things in between are just a means to the end.
Art & Copy is one of my very favorite documentaries about advertising. Legendary marketing guru Hal Riney said it best, “There are a lot of people in this business, but damb few really good ones!” This statement rings as true in Website & Social Media marketing today as it did in conventional Outbound Marketing.
Thank you Rich for the insight. I just rented the video and look forward to watching it. Perhaps it will be another blog post!
GG – I agree about social media types, but social media is for more than social media experts. I think that’s where the breakdown occurs. Social Media peeps marketing to their peers rather than to clients who need their services.
Thanks for stimulating a great discussion, Jessica.
I think the fundamental issue comes down to how people think of influence.
Influence is the ability to cause desirable actions and outcomes. So, although Klout has been trying to improve their algorithms to more accurately score influence, it is, and will always be, impossible for them to measure ‘desirable actions’.
Influence is contextual. Even though Oprah may be seen as a very influential celebrity (i.e. the Oprah effect), if you were looking for advice on a great AV expert to hire for your event she’s not the right expert. So, when we look at a definitive influence score we’re missing context.
There are very big flaws with using Klout to measure influence. But, at the end of the day, it’s easier and more fun to look at a score than it is to understand the data (or lack thereof) behind the number.
I fully agree with you that there are more accurate ways of measuring your ability to cause desirable actions and outcomes.