You May Not Care About Your Klout Score, But I Do

In recent months, Klout has come under fire for the score it publishes to measure social media influence. If you read its detractors, you quickly find some puzzling patterns for what’s wrong with Klout:

• The old score sucked, but the company also shouldn’t have changed it.
• Klout violates your privacy by tracking posts that you yourself publicize.
• It’s too easy to game, yet not transparent enough.
• Nobody cares about it, but it screws with peoples’ lives when Klout tweaks the algorithm.

In other words, its critics hate everything about it, even to the point of contradicting one another and occasionally themselves.

While CEO Joe Fernandez has done a great job of being diplomatic in his responses to these grievances, I’m allowed to say what he’s probably really thinking: if you don’t want your social media posts to be publicized, don’t make them public, and if you think Klout is stupid, don’t pay attention to it. The ultimate consumers of the score — and I include myself in that group — see a ton of value in the service, even if our voices aren’t quite as loud as the detractors.

Still, it’s interesting to understand where the complaints are coming from and why there are so many of them.

Klout, like many other scoring or ratings systems, faces a very difficult task: take a hodgepodge of different variables, many of them completely subjective, and roll them into a ranking system that most people roughly agree with. In Klout’s case, it’s especially difficult to pin down a single definition for influence, with each person’s personal definition involving an impossibly complex combination of relevancy (itself very subjective), how many people see your content, who sees it, and how they engage with it.

The problem is similar to the one college admissions offices face: how do you rank thousands of applicants against each other in an objective, economical way? Most of the people who take the SAT hate the test because it’s such a crude approximation of intelligence. But for the end consumers of the score—the admissions officers—it’s  a godsend. The alternative isn’t a complete understanding of each student’s intelligence, it’s an even cruder and more biased approximation than the SAT.

You try to do it better

Quite frankly, any time you boil down someone’s ability or success to a single number, it’s going to make some people pretty mad who think theirs deserves to be higher. Some people do fall through the cracks, and others game the system to their undeserved advantage. No matter how many times Klout tweaks its score, some people will still hate it. The important thing is that the people consuming the score find it more accurate than whatever they could come up with on their own. And that’s why I don’t just like Klout, I need it. It may be crude, but the score gives me a subjective basis for ranking influence that’s far more accurate and harder to game than anything I could generate on my own.

It works for us

Having used Klout as an important input in two separate consulting projects for OpenView’s portfolio of tech companies, I feel my positive experience needs to be shared. In one project, Klout proved useful as a way to quickly evaluate the reach and influence of online experts for one of our company’s marketing teams to target. In the other, we found that one of our B2B client’s best customers typically had very high Klout scores on their corporate Twitter accounts. In either case, we weren’t worried about a couple of points here or there, we just needed an approximation of influence that we roughly agreed with, didn’t take a ton of time to collect, and couldn’t be easily gamed. Klout did a much better job of that than I could’ve done on my own.

So while you may not care about your Klout score, I definitely do.

And in case you’re interested, I’m a walloping 28.