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!