Before I start waxing lyrical on my thoughts on Klout, I should first stress that I do use Klout and check it a great deal — my reasons for this will be explained throughout this post.
There is no shortage of discussions surrounding Klout, which bills itself as 'The standard for influence' — notice 'the' not 'a', as far as Klout is concerned it is the only measure. This is important because if Klout can gain the monopoly in its field then it gains the coverage and measure needed to rank people more effectively. If half of people use Klout and the other half use PeerIndex, for example, then the measure is harder if they do not follow the same algorithm, which I assume they don't. This is a major flaw. Not everyone uses, or cares, about their score. Equally, people may use other measures. So the scores are not necessarily comparable, despite people's desire to make them as such — I have a higher score than the MD of one of the largest PR firms in the country, but I bet he's quite a bit more influential than I am! The score measures that I influence people (read 250 people) on social media more than he does, yet he is more influential than me. The score is within a niche area and not necessarily indicative or comparable to other people.
That's the fundamental flaw with Klout. That and the fact that it is a business, so has every need to maximise exposure and make more money by engaging more people.
But, I find Klout exceptionally useful for what I do, and here is my explanation. I am a job-seeker, looking to work in PR, in particular to work in digital. For this purpose I use Twitter a great deal to stay abreast of developments, discussions, topics, controversies, jobs, movements. And, more than that, I use Twitter to network and engage with the industry in a way I could not do any other way — see my previous entry on 'Tweeting you way to the Door'. I've even started taking a screen grab of my morning score to job interviews to show that I am aware of the ways in which the digital sector moves.
The reason that Klout is so useful for this is that I can see whether I'm doing it right. That is not to say my score reflects my successes, if it did I'd probably be writing this on a company blog as opposed to my own. But, it shows whether I'm using social media in the way I need to be using it: to network.
I know that to get noticed I need to be engaged, but engaged with the right people. If all I did was tweet about my lunch-time sandwich filling and was followed by fellow sandwich lovers then my score would potentially be huge but only within the specific area of sandwiches. As it is, my area is digital and I tweet about it. For that reason, Klout works for me because I can see that I am engaged in the digital world by looking at my digital score. If someone was influential about digital but had a woeful Klout score...well, I can't fathom it, it isn't possible. If you are genuinely engaged with something and are influential about it then, were there to be a measure, you would rank highly on it. Klout, then, is relevant to me because it is a measure of what I want to be measured by: my engagement with the digital world.
I don't go lauding my score around as a way of saying 'look how awesome I am, hows about we draw up a contract and I'll start on Monday', I use it as a way of saying 'I tweet, and I tweet relevant, engaging content that shows a passion and connection with what it is I am here to talk to you about'. Is that such a bad thing?
If my Klout score drops by a few points it isn't a huge deal (though my vanity suffers). If it rises, again it isn't a huge deal. What is more important is the consistency. I got Klout when my score was around the mid-twenties, it now sits in the high forties and has done for nearly 6 months. This means more to me than the score now: the consistency of my score. If I tweeted something that went viral and my Klout score shot up to 76 for a day before crashing back down to wherever, that isn't helpful as a measure, it just says you said something a lot of people thought was great. But, if your score stays level it means you're consistently delivering relevant and interesting content for people to engage with, which is surely the foundation of digital media; not to do one great thing, but to do it on the foundation of consistency and reputation.
On this basis I find Klout a useful tool because it measures what is relevant to me: digital media. If there was a sandwich equivalent for the sandwich networking site 'FaceWich' then that would be great if you were searching for a career in sandwiches. Make sense?
Whether or not Klout is applicable to PR, Marketing, SEO in general is not something I could argue for or against. But, whether Klout is good for digital media, I certainly think it serves a very specific and useful, if not necessarily comprehensive, purpose that I buy into and use to support my hunt for employment within than industry. The point is, if you're passionate about something you should know enough to be influential about it too; therefore a measure of influence is a great tool when it measures the right factors.
Got another take on Klout? Think I'm as wrong as the idea of a sandwich networking site? Leave a comment and we'll see if we can't get a discussion going.
