Klout has really taken some stick this week and the company's reputation has been severely damaged. Beleaguered founder Joe Fernandez likened the consumer response to his company's retooling of their influence metric to being punched in the face by the internet. If Klout was a publicly quoted company the events of last week would have sent the stock price crashing through the floor. The reaction has been so intense that there is even a question over whether Klout can retain its position as the leading provider of influence ratings on the web. If Klout cannot regain the trust of internet users it could be a very costly blunder indeed.
Klout claims the adjustments to its scoring model represented the 'biggest step forward in accuracy, transparency and our technology' in the company's history (all three years of it). That sounds so good, so positive - where did it all go wrong - why did Klout klunk?
Firstly the obvious, many people's scores went down so there is going was always going to be a fair bit of aggrieved disgruntlement from the losers. Personally although my score saw an 8 point drop I did not feel overly aggrieved - Klout is after all a rather arbitrary measure of real influence and not something to lose much sleep over.
However concerns centred on company claims that the majority of scores would either remain the same or go up. Not so says the internet and in my small corner of the web it does appear that the losers outnumber the gainers. Many of the accounts I follow on Twitter were reporting drops; some saw their rating slashed from low to mid 40s down to the low 20s, in some cases of representing a fall of over 50% - ouch!
Similarly some of the top influencers I follow dropped to decidedly middle rankings. One account was slashed from a rating of 74 down to 54 - that's painful, especially if you make your money from demonstrating to customers that you have influence online and have spent much of the past year assiduously trying to improve your score.
The subjective anecdotal evidence I have seen is that Klout are being economical with the truth when with the claim that most people would not be negatively affected. However we will never know because Klout wiped all the history of the old scores. Every single account was recalculated from the beginning of Klout time on the new metric.
For me personally this was their biggest sin. I would have much preferred to see my account drop the 8 points on my graph after the changes were made on October 26th. What I object to is recalculating my history by the new metric as if it the past had never happened. This is neither accurate nor transparent; it is in fact fundamentally dishonest and I, like many others, expected better from a company that proclaims it sets the standard for influence.
To compound the ldishonesty every time I visit my Klout account I am greeted by one of those infuriatingly, annoying pop up boxes happily proclaiming, 'Congrats your Klout score has increase by +1 in the last week', when I know damn well it hasn't. Did no one at Klout consider that this was ethically questionable or does a lie cease becoming a lie if you tell it tens of thousands of times a day?
In an ideal world Klout would have changed their metric calculations slowly by increments and lessen the A-bomb effect of doing it all in one go. This would also have had the benefit of retaining the historical scores and allow those that care about Klout to alter their online behaviour accordingly. There may be very good technical reasons (on which I am not remotely qualified to comment) on why this did not take place. In which case Klout should have foreseen the storm the changes would unleash, fronted up and taken it on the chin.
However other than the basic statements put out on the company's blog the company and Joe Fernandez's moan about the internet punching him in the face the company's strategy seemed to be to head for the bunkers and wait for the storm to pass. This was very naïve behaviour; one of the golden rules of public relations and marketing is to respond quickly to concerns about your product. This should especially be the case when some of the people who take most notice of your product are people highly adept at getting their message out on the internet.
So where does Klout go from here and can they remain at the top of the influence measuring tree?