If you've browsed Social Media Today in the past month, you've no doubt seen at least one post about Klout and its claim to be the state-of-the-art measuring tool for how much influence people carry on the social Web. In fact, there have been a flood of posts by a variety of authors, most of them lambasting Klout with a sprinkling of more Klout-supportive opinion.
Influence on the Web has long been acknowledged and appreciated by those of us open to being influenced. The Web enabled us to find and follow people whose practices carried experience, knowledge, wisdom and success. What we once called "word-of-mouse" marketing led us to these influential people either deliberately or by accident. In my world, I mostly chose my own influencers, but often what influenced me was not a person, but an event or a news story. We are all influenced by people and events in our lives; that's how we learn and mature.
This is a far different definition of influence than what Klout claims to provide. Say I follow 200 people on Twitter and have 400 friends on Facebook. I'm in groups with thousands of people on LinkedIn. How many of those people have the least bit of influence on me, really? No, I don't have a way to measure that, but I do know who I deliberately "listen to."
And say I have 5,000 Twitter followers. Sure, I'd love to think that my tweets have an impact on all of them, but if I rarely tweet and tweet only about my non-professional life, can I really claim to have the influence that Klout attributes to me for having thousands of followers? If my followers in turn follow more people than they can keep up with (sound familiar?), how do those numbers translate into life-changing influence?
All I'm saying is that anyone seeking to be truly influential of other people can more legitimately reach that goal by providing honest and helpful information - based on experience, knowledge and wisdom - to whomever you find in your attentive audience. Nothing replaces real connections - connections that identify you as someone worth listening to. Building numbers does not represent influence, but in this phase of the Internet's social development, metrics and analytics are coming to the fore. And well they should. But making assumptions about what those numbers mean is in most cases premature.
Klout claims to have millions of registered members, some of whom are actively trying to raise their Klout scores, thinking that those high scores will reap meaningful benefits. And, indeed, some may have realized some benefits. But for most of us trying to make a living using social media, influence is something that comes back to you socially, through people you have truly influenced - people you have helped to change.
I'm curious - what and who influences you in your life and work? Does it have a score?