Clout \ˈklau̇t\

Definition of CLOUT

It used to be that the folks with the broadcast medium (TV, print, etc. traditional media) and high connections (socialites) used to be considered 'influential' because they could either make an opinion popular and thus gain clout or they could make decision makers sway towards their view point. Hollywood (or their Indian counterparts), sports & other celebrities would ride on their popularity and they would be considered 'influential' too.

However, now with the proliferation of social media where everybody has access to broadcast media, the influence of hetherto unknown people has gained attention of brand marketers and PR agencies; and to some extent the customer service/suppot groups manning the social channels.

These people are popular because of their huge fan followings - be they be twitter follower count, facebook fan page count, youtube/blog subscriptions, slideshare views/downloads or linkedin connections - they could be anyone from a moonlighting agency person creating extremely viral youtube ads in response to contests from brands to a teenager writing vampire romance in episodes & self publishing on sites like Wattpad.

And the need to figure out the influence of a person on social media has been addressed (how adequately/accurately is a different matter) by some of the new startups like Klout.com and PeerIndex.com which have debatable (and indeed debated) algorithms for measuring the 'influence' score of people on twitter, facebook, etc.

I am as yet undecided on the accuracy/adequacy of these scores. However I think there might be a need for such services, albeit peculiar in approach to each industry. And also that the algorithms might have to be treated differently.

What are your thoughts regarding such 'influence' metrics? Have you tried these new scores for your business? How do these scores impact your business? Would you be interested to mix them with the traditional customer metrics?