Life’s Too Short to Hate on Klout

Posted in Inbox Influencer, Influence, Social CRM, Social Media Metrics by Chris Selland on November 25th, 2011
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Klout seems to have entered that small circle of companies including Microsoft and (more recently) Netflix & Google that people truly love to hate.

This is perhaps understandable, since social (network) status is increasingly being tied to overall social status, and there is a distinct vanity element to a Klout score that impacts self- and external perception, awareness of which has been recently heightened since the recent refactoring of the Klout algorithm caused many Klout scores to decrease significantly.

Since I’ve been writing about Klout and the broader topic of social influence for some time now, I get asked for my opinion and cc’d on a lot of anti-Klout tweets and posts, and the volume has picked up significantly in the last few weeks.

Much of this stems from Klout’s proclamation of itself as ‘The Standard for Influence’ – to which many strenuously (and understandably) object. While there’s nothing preventing an independent company from proclaiming itself ‘The Standard’ for a ‘metric’ as nebulous and undefined as ‘influence’, the problem with this proclamation is that there is no single standard.

Rather influence, at least in the context of a business, is a relative metric. Justin Beiber & Lady Gaga have very high Klout scores but their ‘influence’ is negligible (at best) to a prospective purchaser of a CRM system. For a business decision-maker, the term ‘influence’ needs to be put in the relevant context of the specific decision being influenced.

At the same time, influence is directly related to customer value - would a less influential customer than Peter Shankman have had a steak hand-delivered to the airport? (unlikely) Was delivering that steak a very smart move by Morton’s? (absolutely)

Which begs questions such as:

  • Should your customer service and marketing operations place more focus on your more Influential customers?
  • Should Influence be considered alongside of traditional metrics such as Customer Lifetime Value in determining how to most effectively manage your customer base?
  • Should Social Metrics such as Influence be considered alongside and integrated with traditional CRM metrics – and systems?
  • Do we need some quantative measure of Influence, even if it’s imperfect?

The answer to all of the above questions is ‘yes’ – so even if you are among the many Klout-haters, you still need to measure some proxy for influence, and also to pay attention to the debate.

Whether you accept the validity of the Klout score or not (and if you don’t, the answer is simple – don’t use it), the idea of measuring and managing Influence is not going away.  There are many emerging alternatives – many of which, including, of course, our own Inbox Influencer and Optimizer for Twitter products, focus on providing more industry-relevant and specific influence measures.

These alternatives are absolutely worth evaluating, since the topic of influence is only going to become even more critical as the worlds of ‘Social’ and ‘CRM’ continue to converge.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 25th, 2011 at 11:00 AM by cselland and is filed under Inbox Influencer, Influence, Social CRM, Social Media Metrics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Nice article and good points. I guess once you DO social media, blogging and true product influence (get people to buy that "no-name" CRM / I do Dr. Seuss for CRM :)  --  you realize that most of what you need to sell CRM is more complex than calculating connections and number of re-tweets. Still, it's a good way to see who in your business niche does what. It is really interesting to see how people use all the new social media applications. It is even more interesting to see what they say and supposedly what they are trying to get out of the work they are putting into it. It seems to me from speaking to real business customers how vague this whole field of social media and real business value is all about. It's the story of blogging all over again. Keep on writing, good topic and good insight from your perch ...

  • Klout is the modern day version of Googling yourself.  Everyone, even Grandma, has Googled herself to see who is talking about her.  Klout is the first attempt (or near the first) to take various platforms, merge the data together, and try to come up with an algorithm for deciding who is trending and who isn't. 

    Of course, there is a hitch - not only can you see if you are influential or not (regardless of what algorithm is used -- let's just assume its a black box for our purposes), but everyone else can as well.  There is this reality check that hits all of us when we think we are the "king of the hill" and we find out that we are just a lonely farmer at the bottom of it.

    If I'm ranking high, I'm going to tell my friends, share it with others and brag about how great a platform Klout is.  The moment I fall into the "also ran" category I'm going to curse its very existence; take my toys and go home.

    Klout may be one of the first, but it certainly won't be the last.  The pond, where we were the only fish, has all of a sudden gotten very crowded.

  • I think you may have missed the point a little on the "Hate algorithm". As many bloggers pointed out, notably  Danny Brown and Tonia Reis, it wasn't the change in the scoring, or the "THE Standard"- it was the privacy issues that has tens of thousands opting out of Klout altogether. It is still unclear at this point whether or not all the mea culpas spouted by Klout are sincere in terms of the privacy search changes.

  • I'd argue that it's a combination of reasons including privacy for some, vanity for others - and this post was primarily addressing the latter. As I responded to Danny below, Klout has now produced an opt-out so they are at least taking steps to address those concerns.

    In any case, my primary point wasn't so much to defend Klout but to suggest that influence scoring is a critical issue and is only going to become more so. You may opt out of and reject Klout's approach - as many are - but other alternatives are emerging and will continue to.

  • OK- let's say that you were only pointing to the importance of some measure of influence- and it is your Blog- but if that was the case, I believe you might have sighted a few of the other services in the space other than your own. Also, just to be clear, the Klout opt-out continues to be a moving target on their site. Clearly by design. And Joe has yet to fess up to the exact numbers that have, at least not that I have seen.

  • So let's get this right. You bypass the real reason people are questioning and leaving Klout - their dubious opt-out policy versus opt-in and the legal questions surrounding their invasion of privacy - to focus on egos and vanity just to build up to pushing your own product? Bravo....

  • Privacy may well be your 'real reason' - and it's entirely valid - but I was primarily responding to those (many) who question the validity of their scoring algorithm. In any case, Klout has now provided an opt-out, albeit belatedly, so anyone who objects on privacy grounds can do so.

    As for 'pushing' our own product(s) - it is our blog, and our products are (loosely) in the same space, so it would have been a bit silly to NOT mention them, but obviously it's up to the reader to decide whether I am 'pushing' them too hard.

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