There has been a ton of talk recently about the changes in Klout and the uproar it has caused has been the hottest topic on Twitter.
Your Klout score is now determined by your level of activity across the various networks they score.
Klout said:
“Influence is the ability to drive action and is based on quality, not quantity. When someone engages with your content, we assess that action in the context of the person’s own activity. These principles form the basis of our PeopleRank algorithm which determines your Score based on how many people you influence, how much you influence them and how influential they are.
We analyze 2.7 billion pieces of content and connections daily. Reaching this scale, we’ve introduced significant upgrades to our platform, allowing us to handle this explosive growth. Now, we can add more networks and other sources of your influence much, much faster.”
The day that Klout changed its methods (October 27, 2011), every other tweet was bout Klout and why their scores dropped. Some were flabbergasted, worried about how their jobs might be affected.
Should we really put that much value into a Klout score? Is there really an accurate algorithm that can calculate our influence? Does it truly determine our level of influence?
According to some who work online, as bloggers for example, they believe that number is very important. @cecilyk responded to my tweet with a response that “people who hire us care”.
She made an interesting point. There are some PR agencies and brands who are looking to work with bloggers and they look at that Klout score first. Once they see that number, they then proceed to look at individual influence, ie. twitter followers and Facebook fans, etc.
However, some can argue that those agencies and brands who only look at Klout numbers to begin with, just don’t get social media at all. They obviously don’t understand how social media influence really works – it’s not the quantity, it’s the quality of fans/followers.
The presence of Klout causes people to treat Twitter strictly like a business – tweeting for the purpose of keeping up or increasing scores, following those who have a certain number of followers to increase your score, and even tweeting solely for the purpose of causing a reaction in RTs.
The problem is, many are forgetting that the joy of twitter is discovering new people and enjoying people’s words and thoughts. Twitter is meant to be social and engaging – Klout takes the fun away from that.
When you are constantly tweeting and promoting and now keeping in mind that those you follow also influence your score, it becomes overwhelming and exhausting – read my social media fatigue post.
All this noise on all of the social media platforms will eventually lead to a massive crash. This is my prediction anyway.
I’m not alone in my feelings. David Shing, the man who helps figure out future trends for AOL, is also fed up with Facebook and Twitter. He recently said that defriending and unfollowing are going to be the next big thing as users realise that the increasing “noise” on social networks is counterproductive.
Let’s just hope that Twitter doesn’t suffer because of Klout and that it ends up with a fate like MySpace.
What do you think?