How Influential Are You? Klout's New Formula Alters Your Score
See your Klout score http://klout.com/?i=878854&v=dashboard_opt_in&n=gn
Attention ambitious people, insecure people and curious people! The master formula for everyone’s Klout score — a popular and controversial measure of who is influential online — has just been altered.
San Francisco-based Klout, founded in 2008, rates vast numbers of people on a 0-to-100 scale, chiefly by looking at how much activity they stir up on Twitter, Facebook and other online sites. Barack Obama has the highest score of all: a 99. Pop star Justin Bieber is a 91. Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, rates a 79. Most of the rest of us are, um, a bit lower.
Klout’s latest revisions, announced today, create a wider range of ways that people can be perceived as influential. Having a Wikipedia entry now helps, particularly if many other websites link to that entry. Activity on LinkedIn, Google+ and Foursquare is being tracked to a greater degree than it was a year ago.
Rather than simply tallying up who has the most friends or followers online, Klout says it uses more sophisticated methods to track “your ability to drive action in social networks.” For example, Facebook posts that attract lots of “Likes” and shares count for more than a barrage of updates that no one notices. Similarly, Twitter users with modest followings but high retweet frequencies will score higher than celebrities with swarms of followers but little active traffic.
Klout’s revisions — not surprisingly — touched off a busy mix of boastful, ironic and mocking posts on Twitter. Seth Porges declared: “Now that updated @Klout algorithm has bumped up my score by 15 pts, I officially believe that Klout is now a very important metric.”
@JennHoffman countered with the declaration: “If I ever check my Klout score you have permission to KILL ME.” And Ian Lurie, posting as @portentint, lamented: “It seems like the more negative stuff I say about @Klout, the lower my score goes.”
Overall, it seems as if Klout’s new algorithm amounts to the online equivalent of campus grading on a much more generous curve. Lots of people were celebrating – or doing their best to be self-deprecating — about double-digit increases in their Klout score.
One prominent setback: Justin Bieber’s new score of 91 represents a falloff from his previous 100. Klout executives may not mind the inevitable sputtering from the pop star’s fans. Trying to explain why Bieber had more influence than President Obama was becoming an increasingly difficult part of the official Klout story.
