What is your Klout score?
Are you obsessed with it?
Are you checking it each day, and when you find that is has dropped, are you devastated? Before I go further, let me share –
I feel like I bear some responsibility for this.
It was just last year that I spoke about Klout in my Digital Dealer 11 review. I even went so far as to share the current Klout scores of several folks in the automotive industry. As I look back today, it seems that Klout has developed a whole new group of automotive folks that are the “most influential” according to the Klout scoring system – but something seems wrong with this.
Great influencers? Or great gamers?
If I log into Klout and look at the list of the “top influencers” in my screen, I have to ask myself – “Are these folks really influencers to me?” – and the answer is that many of them are not. The brutal truth is I consider many of the folks on the list to be great “gamers” with the Klout scoring system, but not necessarily real influencers in the industry.
While they do a great job placing lots of posts, tweets, pics, check-ins, and more, they aren’t necessarily the experts that Klout might portray them to be.
Am I saying that you can “game” your Klout score?
Yes! I find that figuring out how Klout calculates your score is in many ways similar to what I do with my SEO efforts each day – and just like I utilize keywords, back-linking, and more in search engine optimization, one can create multiple tweets, Facebook posts, four square check-ins, and Google+ posts to run up their Klout score.
Don’t believe me? Learn how to hack your Klout score here.
Guilty Guilty Guilty!
I am guilty of looking at my Klout score as well. As I work to promote my upcoming session at Digital Dealer, I can see my score has improved as a result of the posts and tweets that I have put out (HootSuite is a useful tool to do this!). However, as a working eCommerce Director of a very large group, I have a lot of work to complete each day, and if I was really worried about having a high Klout score, I could spend the better part of every day working the system to keep my Klout score (and “influence”) as high as possible.
On the other hand, how much of an expert would I really be as I neglect the more important work of running a cutting edge eCommerce operation?
Fake Reviews, Fake Likes, Fake Klout?
I have seen several folks post recently that their Klout score has dropped significantly in the last week, and I wonder if Klout has put in a new process to try and identify folks that are gaming their score, similar to what Google did recently to remove all of the bogus reviews that many dealerships were buying, and also similar to Facebook removing Facebook Likes that dealerships were buying. If this is indeed the case, then perhaps Klout is working hard to make their tool more effective and less susceptible to being manipulated.
Somebody get a rope!
Most of you know me for being outspoken, and I am sure that some feathers will be ruffled by this as well. I do write in good concern that most of us could better spend our time focusing on the actual work in front of us rather than inflating an online score to show up on a top performing list in the industry.
I would also hope that folks don’t measure their own self-worth based on an online score…
Undecided voters – who ARE these people?
If I haven’t aggravated enough people already, perhaps I could discuss the political posts and tweets of many of us in the industry.
Should one consider their political posts if they are trying to sell products and services to other folks in the industry that might have a differing opinion? Oh boy – now folks are really getting stirred up, another article for another day…
Narcissist Narcissist Narcissist!
On a closing note, if you like this article, please Google+1, tweet, re-tweet, like on Facebook, comment on Linked in, and give me lots of “Klout” on my account. Just sayin…
