Klout hosted their November KloutChat yesterday at 3PM PST (6AM SGT). Expectedly, the flurry of tweets (as seen from the search of #KloutChat) came in fast and furious, with many blasting Klout for their lowered Klout scores and the seeming lack of transparency over the changes in the Klout algorithm. However, to their credit, they were gracious with their replies.
Besides tweeting certain facts officially about their latest changes and outlining future changes that are already in the pipeline, Klout had posed 3 questions on #KloutChat, which were-
- What more information & insights would users like to see about their Klout Scores on the Klout Dashboard
- How do users use Klout and their Klout Score
- What users would like to see from Klout in the future
After reading the responses from users, here's the general summary from users in response to these questions:
Insights from #KloutChat
1. Users wanted more information on how influential they are on different networks. Klout had pledged that they would be improving score insights in the future to make Klout Insights more granular and actionable.
- There have been criticisms in the past the Klout was too skewed to users who were active on Twitter- again, not without valid groundings, considering that Klout first started its measurements with a more concentrated network of social media platforms at the start. Now that Klout is tracking more networks, such as Last.fm, Foursquare, Google+, and even Blogger and WordPress, individual scorings could be helpful to allow users to gain additional insights on their social media activity.
- Klout had also re-emphasised that they measured all networks you influence equally.
2. Clarifications from Klout, in response to tweets, on how +Ks on Klout affects the topics your influence and topic pages, but will NOT affect your overall score. Klout also has plans in the pipeline for users to add topics to their pages- as long as others in the community vouch for your influence.
- I've always found giving +Ks to other users within the community as a very interesting experience- in a way, it is our way of thanking others for the great content they publish based on the topics they are influential about.
- Conversely, giving +Ks could have also functioned as an indication by the community at large on the real topics you are influential about which could impact your score- seeing that this is a "metric" driven by communities responding to your content.
- Nevertheless, it is heartening to hear that +Ks will not affect your overall score especially when there could be potential misuse if people started gifting +Ks in exchange for higher scores.
3. User feedback on identification of how influential certain tweets/postings are. Klout has said that they are working on this as well.
- As a feedback mechanism, if Klout is able to deliver on their promise, this will be extremely helpful to users to assess content which strikes a chord with their community, and improve upon their own engagement and content curation across different social media platforms. I would certainly welcome this improvement as well.
4. Klout tweeted a very interesting fact- a Klout score of 50+ and higher is an indication that you are in the 95th Percentile.
- Is this signaling a potential shift in how future Klout scores could be represented? It would be interesting to see your score not just as a numerical number , but how your score is relative to everyone's. Numbers would not have a meaning if they are not contextualised and pegged to a certain benchmark.
- Klout users could have been irate initially when they saw a measured numerical drop in their scores-what if they had access to not just a numerical score, but also their percentile on a whole?
5. As I have suspected in my earlier blog post, Klout has admitted that engaging with more influential users does help your Klout score more.
- Again, my stand is clear- engaging with the community as a whole is certainly more important than just engaging with a "targeted" group of "more influential" users on social media platforms.
- Personally, I have never set myself to continually get a higher Klout score. If I am able to add value to my community, and engage with different people around the world irregardless of their Klout score, I would have considered myself to achieve what I have set out to do by being active on different social media platforms.
And one more thing...
Reading the different tweets from so many users on the Twitter community highlighted commonalities- most are interested in transparency and improving upon their current experience with Klout's recent changes. Klout themselves have recognised this by acknowledging that many users do depend on Klout to be an accurate indicator of influence- and this itself constant change and evolution so that they can improve. Here's hoping that Klout can deliver upon that promise!