Klout and Clout. They are NOT The Same Thing!
In this humorous and revealing short article (The Klout Death Spiral) on Social Media Today, Leigh Dow explores the weird and wacky world of Klout.
Klout is a web site that purports to track your social influence on sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Here are some of my thoughts on Klout:
- It doesn’t measure clout in any way that means anything to most independent professionals. What matters most to us is how engaged and valuable we are with and to our clients and potential clients. Case in point: in June, I was over the top supporting and acquiring clients. I didn’t have as much time to dedicate to social media, and guess what? My Klout score dropped from the mid-50’s to the mid-40’s! The more engaged I got in the real world, the less ‘Klout’ I apparently had. Leigh makes the same point (but more humorously) in her article.
- So you could argue, “Yes, but Klout doesn’t claim to measure ‘real world clout’ (that’s another conversation), only Social Networking clout.” Well here’s the other strange thing, I keep pretty close tabs on my rate of engagement on Twitter, Facebook, and on my blog. Of the three, my blog matters the most. And I have yet to see a relationship between readership & engagement on my blog (with very frequent conversations about my blog articles on various LinkedIn groups) and my Klout score. In fact it seems that not only does my Klout score drop when I focus my time on flesh-and-blood engagements, it also drops when I focus my time on my blog (as my Analytics and Jetpack scores are going up). So the problem is that not only does Klout not reflect real clout in the professional world, it doesn’t even give an accurate picture online. I’m no programmer/SEO specialist, but it continues to be my sense that Klout’s algorithms seriously over-value Twitter activity at the cost of other social platforms.
- From my perspective Klout is actually somewhat dangerous. It feeds our obsessive need to count and score. The trouble with that is that we forget that the scores are just measurements of what we value, not the values themselves. I addressed this issue in Tweeple or People? Get Twitter Followers That Matter. We are here to make a difference in the lives of our customers. If doing that successfully results in the change in some score (revenues, profit, market-share, Google Analytics, or Klout…), wonderful. But if we start changing our behaviours just to get a higher score, that is a serious mistake. Focus is critical, and we end up taking our eyes off what and who really matters, and in the process risk losing everything.
Leigh’s article is light, but conveys a very serious message. As she says, let’s “get back to real work because I think that’s what actually helps me be a voice in my field.”
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