Social Search Substance Satire

There seem to be a lot of people out there who want to bash Klout. I’ve looked at it with a fairly open mind and tried to consider how useful it really is. As a general indicator it doesn’t seem to be too bad, although it undoubtedly is some way off on some stuff. Still, after years in the wilderness about ‘scoring’ influence, we’ve got something. I don’t think it really deserves the sort of Google Suggest box shown below:

There’s also some pretty dumb posts around (Klout does in fact take into account WHO ReTweets stuff) and I’m going to just explain the data I’ve received of late.

I’m a bit of a Twitter/blog/influencer noobie, most of it driven by having to speak at #BrightonSEO but having little Twitter or online content to back it up. I did, however, go into Twitter with a strategy. That strategy was to get influencers (those with 2k + followings) talking about my stuff and mentioning me as much as possible. With this in mind, I managed to game a Klout score of 55 within about six weeks of being active on Twitter. In the grand scheme of things, that’s pretty good, although it also suggests Klout is a little bit broken (I am not, for one minute, more influential than @patrickaltoft, but my Klout momentarily suggested I was). So here’s my data set:

Explaining the Score

So here’s my fairly rapid rise on Klout since August 22nd. initially, I was doing pretty well in creating content on my blog, but rarely was I getting it mentioned. Occasionally @kelvinnewman tweeted some things, but it didn’t get much traction. However, I’d yet to have a big break. I considered that hustle was a word used a lot by the people I followed at Distilled, and with that in mind I wrote A #winning 12 Stage Hustle Post for Link Building. This content was perfect for @tomcritchlow, and I mentioned him with the post asking if he could tweet it. He did, then I got a ton of other mentions – it’s by far the most widely read and succesful of the thirty or so posts on this blog so far. As you can see, the flurry of tweets that came in sent my Klout score shooting up to the mid 40s – and at this point I only had 90 or so followers.

I then bumbled along at a fairly mundane pace, contributing and hustling people, but not getting many ReTweets. I even felt pretty bored by it all at this stage because I wasn’t going anywhere. However, then I wrote A New Digital Structure, which was picked up by a few people who had started following me after Tom’s tweet. Then, along came #BrightonSEO where I had to speak in front of 300 online marketers. This was pretty well received, and I was away again. However, my ascent was much more rapid this time around (largely because my Twitter handle was linked to from a large number of decent agency blogs). It’s worth considering the rest of the data to see how this stacks up.

This makes some sense, although I’d say it leapt a little too highly after just one ReTweet, while I became far more mentioned on the days after #BrightonSEO. This one correlates very well. I made a big jump in followers after#BrightonSEO, but not a huge leap after Tom’s RT.

This one I’m most dubious about. I gained far more followers after #BrightonSEO and it’s hard to believe my network didn’t grow as strongly after this event as it did after Tom’s tweet.

Klout Shortcomings

A noticeable shortcoming for me is that your network doesn’t seem to correctly reflect your Klout unless you are active. Thus, if you are active for a sustained period and concentrate on being mentioned, your Klout will almost go up, if you are inactive, your Klout falls like a stone (think going on holiday, when I will certainly not be tweeting). A second shortcoming is in the upper echelons of the scoring system. I am 13 points behind Sam Crocker, yet he is only 20 behind Barack Obama. I can only think that the score is logarithmic, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to do this on a 100 point scale. Additionally, you can get above forty pretty easily – probably too easily. Inactive people with low followers really ought to be nearer the 0 mark.

Klout Benefits

Shortcomings aside, I definitely find postives in Klout scoring. Firstly, the score does correlate to some fairly major events, so it’s comprehensible, although not necessarilly accurate. Second, I feel it’s a good encourager. If I work with a team and we’re looking to increase our social footprint, then Klout is an indicative number of that performance and it encourages the team to improve through being mentioned or ReTweeted. You’d be nuts to take it alone and as gospel, but when used in conjunction with other data (followers, traffic etc) I think it’s really quite useful.