People are more important than Klout

Thank you for the discussion on Mack Collier’s blog and on Twitter regarding my Klout posts. I’m grateful and humbled so many joined in the conversation. Also greatly encouraged so many were totally offended by the four keys to increasing your Klout score. As you’ve discovered by now, I was not all suggesting you actually game Klout to increase your score. Instead, I was, hopefully, illustrating the absurdity of having a goal of increasing any artificial measure of influence.

Intuitively, it seems we all know no two-digit metric, or even a more elaborate metric like Twitalyzer, can truly measure influence. Too many factors go into defining, discerning, and describing influence. For instance, consider the influence of George W. Bush today, now compare that to his influence on September 12, 2001. Influence, in that case, was significantly affected by environmental conditions. So it is with you and I. (Even though Justin Bieber has a perfect Klout score of 100, I still have more influence on my 8, 10, and 13 year old children than he does! My Klout score is nowhere near his.)

As JC Penny showed us last week, any ranking system can be gamed, even one as disciplined and well funded as Google. So it is with Klout. There are specific strategies you can pursue to get a higher Klout score. If that’s your objective, no doubt you’ll succeed. You’ll find in my post four keys to increase your Klout score.

Many people recognized the humor and absurdity of my four keys. I’m glad. If you’ve heard me speak, read my blog, or engaged with me online, you know I cherish Zig Ziglar’s oft-quoted axiom, “You can have everything in life you want if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.” You’ve probably also heard me state and defend against all challenges the admonition, “Follow back every person who follows you on Twitter.” Even though that suggestion STILL ruffles some people’s feathers, I still advocate accepting another human being’s out-stretched hand.

Which brings us back to the real issue of increasing one’s influence. Is that a worthwhile goal? I wonder if influence, like corporate profits, is a by-product of rendering valuable service to others. Render enough valuable service to others, and you’ll have all the influence you need.

Even if increasing one’s influence is a worthwhile goal, it can’t be successfully pursued without attending to, acknowledging, and affirming other human beings around you.

Instead of increasing our Klout scores, we’d garner more clout by rendering more, more valuable service, to more people. When we’re doing that, we won’t need a third-party rating system to let us know we’ve succeed. (Just ask Warren Buffett, one of the most influential people in the world of business, who just happens to have a Klout score 1/3rd the ranking of Justin Bieber. Who would YOU rather spend a day with?)

Trey Pennington

Measuring Influence in the Social Media World #MMchat with Joe Fernandez of Klout

It was GREAT to have @JoeFernandez the CEO of @Klout on #MMchat last night so all of you could ask questions about this standard for measuring influence on Social Media.


The level of interaction on the chat was excellent and we learned a number of new things about Klout and where it is going when @JoeFernandez took the stage on #MMchat for a tweetchat with you all about Measuring Influence in the Social Media World. Who better to talk about measuring influence than the man leading Klout the standard indicator for measuring online influence?

Please take some time to review and the transcript from last night’s #MMchat with @JoeFernandez.

Thanks to all of you #MMchat tweeps and others for joining us last night and sharing your thoughts and questions on such an important topic, for it truly is all of you who make #MarketerMonday Chat matter!

Remember #MMchat makes Mondays MARVELOUS!!

Cheers

Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCMO

4 Keys to Increasing Your Klout Score

Now that the Wall Street Journal is writing about them, you probably already know about Klout. If you’re using Hootsuite, your Klout score, and the Klout score of your followers, is front-and-center. Here are four ways you can increase your Klout score.

  1. Get important people to talk about you. Klout measures the visible vestiges of influence. Getting people who already have Klout scores to retweet your tweets or in some other way mention you enables you to ride the draft of their influence. You can find these people by using Klout’s business service. You might check out HubSpot’s listing of Twitter Elite, too. Follow them on Twitter, retweet them, and if they don’t notice you, you can use a Twitter mention to ask them to retweet you. If you’ll get important people to talk about you, you can increase your Klout score.
  2. Read more