The Story of Klout and Me

After weeks and weeks of being haunted about Klout by friends like Cristian Gonzales, Tom Moradpour, Chase Adams, and Maya Paveza, I decided that maybe I should give the thing a fair look with a wide open mind. I thought I would do so in a public venue so that I could share my experiences with you. I hope to hear your thoughts too!

4 comments

  1. Margie,

    Interesting. I’d heard of Brainshark, but not seen one in action.

    Klout is all fine and dandy, but its all to be taken with a healthy dose of salt

    The Twittersphere shares an idea of what’s deemed to be good behavior. What makes you a good citizen. These loose social rules first got quantified by Twitter.grader.com by Hubspot. They took their eye off the ball and new players came along.

    It was too easy to get to 100 on Twitter.Grader, but it helped me learn the ropes. Yes people do play the game to push their score, but these scores are simply measure of what’s believed to be good. If that changes, then I guess the rules will change

    Favoriting is a good example of new stuff – A new metric that can get factored into the score.

    If you don’t know the rules of whats good and bad these tools help you.

    I wish the score was more public. Like when view a profile. I’d like to see their various scores. It simply helps me make faster decisions.

    You quickly learn that its being social that counts. That’s the good thing.

    It doesn’t matter that Tweetlevel, Peerindex, Twitalyzer vary. The best thing would be to average them out. An uber score.

    I use Pg Rank and Alexa/Compete to judge is a site is valuable. This is not different.

    Twitter also has their own score in the works. I’d thought Klout would be an acquisition target, but apparently not. They rolled their own.

    All good for me. Like a Margarita. Better with salt

    1. Those are some great points, Nick. I feel like there is still a lot of gaming that can be done, and based on watching Google over the years, I’m always suspicious of “algorithms.” Still there are some things about Klout that I think could be good. It is like any tool. If you use it in the best way possible, it could be really good for you. It could also really lead you off into directions that will not benefit you in the long run. Isn’t that how it always goes? 🙂

      Thanks for your comment!

  2. Margie, Thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts. Being a bit of a flower child myself, I’ve been conflicted about putting any stock into a Klout score. In many ways, it “messed with my head” and got me off my own purpose, which was to engage authentically, become part of a community, make a contribution to that community and then see what would come of it. I was also there to learn rather than have influence, at this point, so getting my ego wrapped up into my level of influence seemed like it was cross-purpose. Perhaps the only valid aspect of the Klout score for me lied in the fact that a lower Klout score did mean that others were less likely to engage with me. They wouldn’t see me as an essential “respond to”. So in that case, I hunted around for conversations that I was interested in, people that I could genuinely acknowledge for their output and began a process of finding my “essential place” in their follower list. Your talk has helped me make sense of it’s role while I continue on a parallel path of wanting a social community to engage with and a group of people that I can learn from. You are certainly one of those people! I have warm memories of the day that you told me I was adorable! (Which for a 48 year old, isn’t a common reference – it made me feel like a little girl who just had a senior classwoman “enjoy” me.) And I don’t begin to delude myself that every part of myself feels “something” while engaging on twitter. Thanks again, like it and learned alot!

    1. Yeah, I like the fact that Klout measures your @ responses. To me, that’s a symbol that people are asking your opinion or are wanting to engage you in conversation. I think it’s odd that for me, the RTs are higher than the mentions. I’m not really sure that’s a good thing – it’s definitely not what i’m aiming for.

      You are adorable! I stand by that 🙂 Happy to have met you!

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