Klout is a webservice that connects to the extensive social hubs, and through their algorithm, calculates a score describing how influential you are in the social hemisphere.
The social media measuring service looks at what your trending topics are, who you influence, who influences you, and what your reach on the internet actually is. They have an algorithm that analyzes your social media interactions on the various sites you plug into: Twitter, Facebook, etc. Celebrities top the charts, social media divas and popular bloggers rank high, and then it slowly trickles down to the rest of us.
Why Klout?
Primarily, who doesn’t want to have the highest score on the internet—I want to win the internet!
Having a high Klout score, and being influential towards any subject, makes you an “ambassador” to the world. If you rank high, people listen to you. If people listen to you, brands want you to talk about them, tying into Klout’s perks system.
Perks are offers to members who meet certain criteria. For example, say you have a decent Klout score (40ish or more), and you’ve been flagged by the system as being influential about the HBO show True Blood. Because of your high influence on the True Blood community, you may be selected to receive a free digital download of the complete 4th season.
Individuals with high scores can receive some other awesome Klout Perks such as coupons, swag, or automotive companies might even lend you a car for the weekend or exclusive events and concert venues might invite you to tag along, hoping your hashtags will follow.
Klout’s not just important for stroking your internet popularity peen and getting swag, or as a marketing tool for advertisers, but it’s growing, apparent importance in the job market :
The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low.
“They hired a guy whose score was 67.”
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/04/ff_klout/
– Seth Stevenson
Holy flying monkeys! A well qualified dude flies in for an interview, and ends up getting shut down because his internet popularity score is too low? Maybe as a VP of Marketing at a large advertising firm doesn’t have time to friend everyone and make sure people +1 his #hashtag.
Bottom line
Like it or not, your internet popularity is going to be something you need to keep track of, it’s like highschool all over again—crap.
Do you use Klout and how important has it been in your social world? Offline or online?
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