It’s week number 3 of my Klout experiment and I have already seen enough, to be able to form some solid conclusions regarding Klout and how it scores people.

I have invested many hours of my time digging into Klout, monitoring not only my own account, but also the accounts of people I know. I have also studied some ‘Klout Superstars,’ people with very high scores. I wanted to see what Klout was rewarding. I wanted to see what they ‘thought’ was influential.

Here’s what I found

The good:

• Klout can tell if someone has lots of social media connections. Within days I had a Klout score of 62, which is apparently a good score, though it looks uninspiring.
• Your Klout score is regularly updated. The number changes slightly every day.
• Klout was able to see lots of people sharing my Google+, Twitter and Facebook updates.
• A new Klout button may soon allow content providers to have the popularity of their content included in their score. This could be helpful, if implemented correctly.

The bad:

• The Klout algorithm can’t seem to tell the difference between an influential person who posts 1 update, which is shared 20 times, and someone with little influence who posts 20 updates, which are each shared 1 time. I’m basing this on my own results and monitoring those with high Klout scores, who posted all day long with very few people resharing them.
• Klout is too easily fooled. There are thousands of web pages dedicated to showing you how to easily game the algorithm. This needs to improve as anyone with enough spare time can get a high score.
• Anyone who really cares about their Klout score, needs to be careful about taking a holiday! Your 2 weeks in the sun can hit your score hard and take you weeks of over-sharing, to get back to where you were. I spent just 1 day where I hardly used social media and my score dropped from 63 to 62!
• Currently, even though my blog posts reach thousands of people every day, this has zero impact on my influence, according to Klout.
• The Klout scoring method encourages people to post masses of updates, if they want to get a higher score. This can damage your reputation with your followers, who may not want a constant barrage of updates from you all day.
• Klout can’t see how influential Ron Conway is. More on that in a moment!

Klout has potential

Overall, I believe Klout has a huge amount of potential if it makes the improvements required. The core idea is valuable to individuals and brands. It also seems like the problem of gaming it should be solvable or at least, that the algorithm can be vastly improved. Just as Google constantly works hard to try and stop black hat SEO from ruining their search results, Klout must up its game and do the same.

Otherwise a high Klout score will cease to mean anything.

Klout doesn’t know how influential Ron Conway is

The example of multimillionaire businessman, Ron Conway, exposes the current problems with Klout scoring.

Mr Conway is not someone who spends most of his days sharing information with his buddies on Facebook. He’s a busy guy. Ron is what’s known as a super angel investor. He invests millions into companies you may have heard of, such as Google, Paypal, Facebook etc and has built a fortune in the process. This extremely influential person is a business associate of; Henry Kissinger, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tiger Woods and Shaquille O’Neal.

Ron Conway’s Klout score is just 48. That’s a lower score than many of my readers have. It’s also an indication of the challenge ahead for Klout, as it strives to accurately reflect influence.

What did I learn about Klout?

The key lesson for me has been that the Klout score is currently too easy to game, for it to live up to its self-proclaimed ‘standard for influence’ title. It also seems unable to score people who have huge influence, but who are too busy to spend huge amounts of time on social networking sites. I see the latter as their main challenge.

Overall, I am optimistic that Klout will improve. No matter how much love Klout gets from its powerful friends in the media, it has no choice other than to improve if it wants to truly become the standard of influence, which it NEEDS to be, for it to succeed in the longer term. With so many people voicing their concerns at the accuracy of Klout and others very publicly deleting their accounts, Klout CEO Joe Fernandez will be very aware of the need to improve their scoring. And fast!

FYI: Joe Fernandez has a Klout score that is almost 50% higher, than Ron Conway!

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:

1. 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.
2. 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!

If you want to increase your sales, revenues AND profits, you will love this post. It shows 2 areas of your business you need to focus on and provides a link to dozens of practical ideas you can use.

1. You need to focus on increasing the value of your work

We live in an age where someone can go to Google and in a few minutes, find providers in your industry, claiming to offer what you offer, for less money. You don’t want to have to compete by being cheapest, so the alternative is to focus on value.

If you pump enough value into what you do and lift your service is head and shoulders above the average providers in your industry, you are no longer competing with them. Prices or fees are no longer the same factor they were.

For example, the most expensive restaurant in your city isn’t competing with the local fast food joints on price. The reason people will pay hundreds for a meal in a top restaurant, is that they are not paying for the calories. They can buy the calories at Burger King for pennies! They are paying for the experience. They are paying for the value.

The answer? I suggest you stop doing what 99% of your competitors do. Instead, be different. Not different just for the sake of it, but different because you are offering a uniquely valuable experience. The starting point for me and many others I know, came when we stopped doing work that paid and started doing work that mattered.

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Earning people’s attention is harder today than ever before, because your prospective clients have never had so much information to navigate through every day. Your marketing is trying to get noticed, in a non-stop deluge of messages. Your prospective clients are being bombarded with everything from radio / TV commercials, email marketing, text messages and social media updates, to direct mail, websites, cold callers and newspaper ads. It’s non-stop and somehow, you need to get noticed.

The answer? If you are serious about getting your message heard above all those other people trying to do the same, you need to be significantly better then they are, at earning the attention of your marketplace. Some of those guys are very good, others are good and others are just very noisy. A great place to start, is to understand that the more you pester people, the less likely it is that they will listen to you. People hate being pestered or pursued.

Small business marketing 2012 style

The kind of marketing you need, is marketing that earns people’s attention and then earns their consideration. This blog post is a great example. You are reading this now, because you either subscribe to the blog or visited the blog and read it. Below this free information, there’s a short note letting people know that if they want me to show them how to get great marketing results, they just need to get in touch. This week, around a hundred thousand people will see that message below my posts, without me needing to pay for ads, attend networking events or pester anyone.

Some free help

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Klout, the controversial service that claims to be able to measure our influence, say that their algorithm has become more accurate, since I ditched the service last year. Like many users, I was amazed how inaccurate Klout scores were and asked for my account to be deleted.

Today, there are well qualified people being refused jobs because their Klout score is too low. That’s how highly some people regard a persons Klout score. It’s also claimed in Wired Magazine that some airlines are offering free upgrades to Klout users with high scores and restaurants are offering better service.

I needed to know if these Klout-based decisions stack up now or of Klout is still as unreliable and easy to fool as it was when I last used it.

So, I had an idea…

I decided to set up a Klout account today, to see what my Klout score will be by simply connecting it to my active social networking accounts and using them as normal – Rather than playing the Klout game.

In other words, I want to find out what Klout score I will get, with me refusing to use Twitter, Google+ and Facebook the way Klout suggest users should, which is pretty much to use social networks non-stop, never stray off-topic and to tweet about Klout every time their pop-up boxes tell me to!

My Klout score on day one of the experiment is (drum roll please) 10 out of 100!

Klout V Clout

A common belief is that Klout is easily fooled into giving influential status, to people who have no real world clout or influence, so long as they spend huge amounts of time doing what Klout says is important. This is why we see kids and long term unemployed people, who play with social networks all day, with a higher Klout score than self made millionaires and business leaders. I want to know if this is still true or if the boffins at Klout have managed to tweak their service, so that it now knows the difference between someone with zero influence who RT’s links non-stop on Twitter and someone with real influence. I recall a year or so ago that Bill Gates had a lower Klout score, than the unemployed son of a friend of mine!

I have no idea how Klout will score me over the coming months. For those of you who don’t know me, here are some of my influence metrics, so you can get a handle on how they might score me:

• This blog was mentioned in The Guardian newspaper recently, for being the most influential marketing blog in the UK and the second most influential UK blog.
• My work is read by over 100,000 people a week (often a lot more).
• My Google+ account is in the top 1%, with over 13,100 people circling me.
• My Twitter account has around 6,500 followers, including Robert Scoble, Mitch Joel, Brand Republic and the Editor in Chief of Mashable, Lance Ulanoff. (Apparently, Klout takes the influence of those who follow us into account.)

I will keep you updated regarding my progress. It will certainly be interesting to see how Klout decide to score me; as someone with some real world influence, who isn’t trying to game their algorithm!