It’s a week since I started my Klout experiment and I thought I would give you a very quick update.
My Klout ‘influence’ numbers
When I set up my Klout account 7 days ago, my initial score was 10.- Then, after 3 days the score jumped to 60. Apparently, it takes around 48/72 hours for all your signals to reach Klout and contribute to your score.
- Now, 4 days later my Klout score is 62.
My feelings, 7 days after setting up and monitoring my account, are mixed.
Klout: The good and the bad
I was impressed that Klout was able to quickly identify that I had a larger than average social network. Following my initial post, one of my readers, Mike Masin, decided to resurrect his Klout account to see how his experience differed from mine. Mike explained that he had a much smaller network than mine and that it would be interesting to compare the way Klout scores us. At the time of writing this, Mike’s Klout score is 28.
Sadly, there are 2 significant downsides to Klout, which become very apparent, very quickly:
- It’s extremely easy for anyone with enough spare time, to boost their score so that it seems they have influence. The whole point of Klout is to provide a way to identify people who have influence. Your score is, supposedly, an influence score – how influential you are on a scale of 1 to 100. I have seen people with scores in the high 70′s, who simply spend hours every day, playing around with social media. As a result, the number of signals they produce are huge (retweets, likes, +1′s etc), simply because they pump so much content into their social networks. They may only get a tiny number of retweets, likes and +1′s per share, but they share so much, that it totally fools Klout.
- Klout’s software seems incapable of understanding that there are days or weeks, where people are too busy to use social media regularly. When this happens, the person’s Klout score drops like a stone, because the software doesn’t detect as many of those all-important social media signals. In other words, when you are most in demand, you are scored as least influential!
My thoughts after a week
A week into my experiment, I believe Klout has some serious flaws, which it will need to fix quickly if it wants people to take it seriously.
Most importantly, it needs to figure out how to tell the difference between people with influence (and busy work schedules), and those with nothing to do all day but chat to buddies on social networks. Currently, the latter group often rank far higher than the former!
What are your thoughts?
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Bingo! You’ve called Klout out on two key points. In a related vein, Klout doesn’t appear able to distinguish between quality of content, only quantity. It works on the premise that all of the ‘chatter’ of social media must mean it’s good content. BTW, in the US 62 is a great score. More and more, Klout scores are being added to the list of factors considered (along with work experience, references, an interview, etc.) for job applicants. For senior jobs, anything less than 50 can be troublesome. I’m not saying that because Klout is being used more heavily in the US (and in business there) that makes it important and everyone else has to use it, just that it is being used there more than elsewhere.
Hi Linda. I agree, Klout can’t tell quality. It can only count how often something is reshared, liked, retweeted or +1′d. Often, that can be a funny picture or gif, that’s nothing to do with you or your business.
Thanks for the feedback, Linda.
I am not against your point that Klout need to know how influence offline work, but it’s only an algorithm. You are asking way too much of Klout. It would need everybody to fill out form about their influencers in real life. The real problem is how people are using it. It should be only a tool amongst other to determine influence, not the only one. If people are dumb enough to categorize you only with your Klout score, they are missing some points in social media 101.
Hi Thoma. Where did you see me saying Klout need to measure offline work? I never recall ever writing it – To suggest they could, would be crazy.
Maybe you are referring to my point about Klout lowering your score when you’re offline? That’s totally different. I’m saying they should allow you to maintain your score for longer – Not that Klout should magically know how to score your influence in your office, with your clients or when you’re on vacation.
Jim;
I think it’s a little harder to game than you think… It’s not just about quantity of posts, but about quantity of responses, reshares, etc. So you do need quality content in order to boost your Klout score.
I do agree that when I’m busy and not active my score drops too fast, but that seems to even out over time – there might be some kind of trailing 90 day average that needs to catch up with you.
I’ve chosen to opt out of Facebook (I don’t have an account there) and not being active on that network negatively affects my score. Instead I’m active on G+. But it seems like the algorithm weights FB higher than G+.
Hey Brad,
If you don’t believe how easy it is to game a klout score, just google it & you’ll see thousands of results with tricks you can use. Anyone with enough time can do it.
Hi Brad. Thanks for the feedback and for sharing your experiences. Regarding ‘gaming’ Klout, even their CEO gives ‘tips’ on how to boost your score if you’ve been inactive and it’s dropped. Equally, there are klout share groups, who reshare each other and gain higher rankings. It’s like the old days of SEO.
Another common way to game Klout, and artificially boost your Klout score, is to follow trending topics and then share links to them – none of which make you more influential, but will boost your Klout score because you get more retweets / likes / +1′s etc. Even if that trending topic is a video of a fat kid body-popping
What would be nice, is if they had some way to split good quality content, from crap. Now, all they use is share numbers, likes, +1′s etc. This means a kid sharing videos of skateboarding dogs all day will score higher than the CEO who shares less often, but has true influence.
Sounds like the issues they had in the beginning of the site have never been fixed. I think this is because to Klout they aren’t issues – it’s how the site works. As many (including myself) have argued Klout doesn’t measure influence at all, it measures activity. However it really depends on how you define “online influence” which Mark Schaefer in his book “Return on Influence” says is measured in likes, +1′s and retweets.
Is that actual influence? Not in my opinion. I don’t stray from the widely used definition:
“the capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of others”
Many of these “social signals” that Klout is measuring can tell us if someone likes our content enough to share it with one click of their mouse. However, does it tell us if what we wrote helped change their mind about something? Did their retweet help someone else change his or her mind? Not likely.
I find it interesting that Klout changed the tagline on their homepage to “Klout measures your influence on your social networks.” from “The standard of online influence.” though it’s still in the title tag of their site. Legal issues perhaps? Blatant lying about your company perhaps?
If one accepts that “influence” on social networks is to get people to share your content then I’d say they can do that to a fair degree. However if you’re talking about one’s ability to change the minds of others or drive them to action that takes more than clicking a mouse, I’d say they’re far from that. And to be fair, so is everyone else.
Robert, your thoughts on influence are the same as my own – It’s not influence being measured by Klout.
You and I both know people, who have high Klout scores, who you would never go to for help or advice, because they are clueless. Equally, I know many very savvy marketing pros, who have very low Klout scores, because they don’t play the Klout game.
I don’t expect my score to increase much, yet I believe that my influence will. That, in a nutshell, is one of the problems I believe Klout needs to address.
Thanks for sharing such a well thought out comment. I truly appreciate it.
We’re on the same page here Jim. Just to be sure I understand this part of your comment: “I don’t expect my score to increase much, yet I believe that my influence will” – are you saying that because of your Klout score you believe your influence will increase?
Thanks for clarifying and helping my understanding.
LOL – No.
I’m saying that even though I (hope) to become more influential with my work, I do not believe my Klout score will get much higher.
In other words, I don’t think Klout will notice how I develop as a professional.
Since I started paying attention to my score (the scum in the Klout pond), I’ve also been looking at streams with high Klout. Some of those folks have justifiably high scores but others have streams loaded with “retweet for more followers” spam. Clearly the algorithm is measuring traffic and response without any regard for influence.
At least my cat thinks I have Klout
That’s my point, Mike.
I have found countless examples of what you say – People with high Klout scores, who just play around with it all day.
I think you and your cat have Klout!
I found this blog post because I googled “can my cat have klout?” According to Jim’s critique of the service’s algorithms, it appears that , my cat can have a klout score.
My cat, “Birdie,” already has her own Facebook profile. I’ve considered making her a twitter feed as well. (Given her name, I suppose twitter would be a more appropriate platform for her musings).
If you’d like to see Birdie’s page, visit facebook.com/Birdie.Meow
I’m off to start building her klout now…
>^o^<
[until Klout can prevent silly abuse of their system by users like me, any success they find will be laughable... yet, that might not slow their success. theirs is a brilliant marketing idea] should
I LOVE that, Gabe!
Let me know how you get on.
Wow, you’re very popular Jim
lol
My expectation is that people will wise-up and realise what an ‘appropriate’ score is, for who you are.
If you are a celebrity and say contentious stuff, can say from the platform ‘ask questions via @message over Twitter’, and have assistants to manage your accounts then you’d expect a high score.
Regular working professionals can’t maintain that level, so either they have too much time, or have found a way to game the system, or maybe they choose to live life in chat, rather than by phone or email, in which case their ‘influence is lost in all the noise.
Klout of 50 or just above seems like a good threshold. Mine’s 44 so a bit to do, just wish multiple twitter accounts were allowed.
If you genuinely want a higher Klout score, Google it.
There are thousands of results, which show how to build your score – Making everyone’s Klout score pretty-much meaningless. That includes those, who deservedly have those high scores.
Thanks for the feedback, sir.
My thoughts are that everything is geared to Klout perks. If you or I were in the US our scores would be much bigger. Because we are not, we are penalized.
I do not feel that Klout does a good job of measuring at all. The more you tweet and the more you rt , the higher your Klout score. Really good content should matter more.
The simple fact everything is skewed to the USa only, means it’s useless.
Rob / Owen.
Do Klout say they are USA biased or is it anecdotal?
Jim Klout will never admit to anything. The reality is their main business is selling Klout Perks and information. If you look at the perks they are almost all in the US. What Klout fails to get is the Internet is a global market.
Hi Rob. I only reconnected with Klout and started following what they do with interest, just over a week ago.
If their perks and scoring is that heavily biased, it’s insane.
I shall keep an eye on it, Rob. Thanks for the heads-up.
Your welcome Jim. It is just an interesting part of this entire experiment you are doing. Thank you for sharing with us:)
I make my comment based on how often I try to do business through some of these networks only to find out I am not in the USA of I can’t participate or buy. Most of the networks do this, even Amazon did until they open a Canadian .ca site, hell we can’t even watch some video’s on Youtube because of it.
Anyway, it’s a level playing field yet, some day it will be and we will have Utopia
Talk to you soon.
Agree with your thoughts on influence. My Klout score during a three week holiday (and therefore low activity on my part) went from 52 to 45. That to me was a pretty significant drop in perceived influence despite the fact it was almost purely related to a temporary drop in activity.
How did this become ok? Our society is going in a really, really bad direction when we allow ourselves to be judged in this way. We need to stop this madness now. It’s a pathology that’s really dangerous and has serious negative consequences. A senior marketing executive with 15 years of experience lost a job because of a low Klout score. His interview was cut short when the interviewer saw his score. Does anyone else but me see the insanity of that? We’re literally being forced to reveal a ton of information about ourselves on social networks, and fritter away our valuable time on them, no matter if we want to or not. Anyone who doesn’t participate will be penalized, it seems. It’s just astounding how low we have sunk as a society. Sickening.