Jay Leonard
Does Your Klout Score Determine Your Online Value?
Get ready to hear a lot more about Klout in the next few months.
What is Klout? In basic terms, Klout measures your online influence and your ability to drive interaction on the web.
My good friend Drew McLellen wrote this excellent overview of Klout, but the power can be summed up in this paragraph:
There are a wealth of tools that count what you do. The number of tweets, how many comments your Facebook status update receives, and the quantity of thumbs up you get on your YouTube videos. But there are very few that allow us to see how the sum total of our interactions are perceived and what actions they inspire.
That’s what Klout does…everything that you do on the web can be summed up with one little number…your Klout score.
Start Paying Attention to Your Klout Score
At the Exact Target conference a few weeks back, I had the pleasure of listening to Matt Thomson from Klout. Sometimes at events I have the terrible habit of multi-tasking during presentations. For this one, I was intently listening.
Matt discussed the future according to Klout, and you know what, I believe him. He gave this example:
When you check in at the Marriott after your long trip, your Klout score is immediately visible to the Marriott employee. While you may not have enough Marriott reward points to make a difference, your Klout score says that you are influential in travel, specifically hotels. You are immediately upgraded to a poolside suite AND you received a complimentary breakfast.
Matt says this is not fantasy. That it is starting to happen now.
Klout for Business & Your Career
Although you may start to see perks within the consumer space, like travel discounts and friendlier service when you call AT&T, businesses will start using Klout for situations like:
- Accepting speakers for an event that have a minimum Klout score.
- Creating a short-list of candidates for a job that have a certain Klout score.
- Invitations to be a guest blogger or published in your trade magazine because you have a higher Klout score.
Making Klout Work for You
First off, make sure you sign into Klout and work your profile by linking your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other accounts so that Klout can see your full online influence.
Second, Klout can be a very important part of your influencer strategy. For example, if you are working a short list of influencers, you can rank them by Klout and see which topics, related to your business, in which they are influential. Your blog commenting strategy can be dictated, in part, by using the Klout score as an indication of where you should be spending your time.
Finally, you can look at the topics in which you are influential, so see if what Klout sees matches your intentions. If your goal as a business person is to be influential in small business marketing, but Klout doesn’t recognize that in your list of topics, then you have a bit of work to do in that area.
From a content marketing perspective, you can use Klout to tweak your content strategy. Drew gives this great advice on that topic:
You may see yourself as a thought leader but discover that the world sees you as a dabbler or activist. Your Klout score refreshes every day – so you can experiment with different blends of content on the various social media tools to see how your new behaviors are perceived. This allows you to learn and change.
So, for now, own you account and start experimenting. Klout, like other online services, is just a tool, but businesses are starting to pay attention. So should you.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
Learn how to publish your content on B2C
Join our Telegram channel to stay up to date on breaking news coverage
Add B2C to your Google News Feed
VERY Interesting article. I hadn’t realized some of the implications. The statement about Marriott is extremely thought provoking! I wonder if the topics you have klout in would be a differentiating factor? (ie, what if I had a klout score of 70, but it was in Wyndham Hotels)
Like I said, thought provoking. Thank you!!
I’ve always cared. They seem to have a good algorithm for measuring influence. Wish they would give more weight to Google+ activity though.
Very interesting. On the Google+ comment. It’s a new social media thing & I’m sure in time when more business’s use it as part of their social media strategy, it will carry more Klout (bad joke, sorry) but I think it needs to grow before it’s taken into account.
I’ll take real world experience and business acumen over some imperfect, limited “influence” score any time.
Choice: You can bring me sales leads and profits, or you can bring me 10,000 Twitter followers and 60,000 YouTube views.
I know which I’ll go for. Every time.
Hey Joe:
Just want to say thanks for the kind words. Was a fun talk at the ET conference.
While I admire the Klout team and what they are pursuing? (And yes, I really do, solid people there.) I pity the business that tells a truly influential person in the ‘offline’ world that they are being denied something because of a low Klout score. Expect legislation, regulation, and class-action suits to follow. See: credit bureaus history for reference.
I hate Klout and the fact that it’s tricking businesses who don’t understand influence into thinking a score can solve that and shortcut true community building and relationship building. But even if you’ve never been to Klout.com in your life, you have a score and you can’t delete yourself from it, so you basically have no choice but to go in and at least optimize your account. Evil.
Great article. I have been watching Klout for a while. It is interesting how it picks what people are experts in. I write a lot about marketing topics, but listed by skype as I tend to add my address to my posts. I think it has it’s drawbacks, but you can definitely see if someone is a good follow, or if they just got lucky with an interesting post.
I check my Klout score regularly, but I admit that my score (or anyone else’s) is not an accurate indicator of influence simply because it cannot track offline influence–columns I’ve written in print media, TV shows I’m on, radio interviews I’ve done, etc.
If I go on vacation for 2 weeks and don’t tweet, my score goes down. But that doesn’t make me any less influential.
Thank you for providing a great example of what a Klout score can do!
I have been following Klout for awhile and it’s been good. Thanks for the tip on how to use tool better. but I don’t see how it benefit me aside the fact it just help me know how influential I am online.