When we last left off, I was telling you all that I had been introduced to Klout, and was scoring a 42 (either a “42” or a “10”, there seemed to be a little confusion that night).
I have been watching Klout since November, and, without doing anything really differently except using Twitter a bit more, I am now 46. I am Klouting my age!
I think the only real difference is that Klout is maybe picking up more of my WordPress followers? That is the piece I haven’t been able to reconcile with this whole thing. I know that there are about 400 or 500 people in the world who are regular readers of me: more than once a month, but less than 30 [times a month]. (There are another number, no more than 20, who visit every day.)
In case you think it’s bragging, it’s not. Because I would write anyway, I appreciate the readership. But I would probably write on a number of topics anyhow, and a lot of what gets read is read by passers-by—who only are interested in one topic or issue on a search.
What surprises me, though, is that there are people who Facebook or blog or twitter their ass off, all day, and they don’t seem to be rating. Some of this must be “well, sign up for Klout and we’ll tell you!”, but Klout has also been insinuating that they can measure the online influence–particularly of Twitter–and still, these people are not really rating.
[More later.]
In my break, I thought about this some more.
Klout’s own material says that some of the linked sites–like WordPress–aren’t feeding in to numbers yet.
Other networks that we’re working to measure are Facebook Pages, Youtube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, Last.fm and Flickr. You can already link these accounts with your Klout profile, and we look forward to incorporating your activity from these networks to our score soon.
The concern I have, though, is how I end up “influencing” 200 something people, if no one counts my site on WordPress. It can’t simply be “add up the number of Facebook friends, apply a factor, then add up the number of retweets on Twitter.” There’s got to be more to it.
Let’s just ignore the other component, like if you influence just one person, and, “look! It’s Barack Obama!”, then I’d say you’d have more influence than being a Klout 22.
One of the reasons I stay off Twitter quite a bit is because it jams up. Most of the Tweeting—and I’m only following 325 or so Tweeters—seems to be coming from a handful of the 325. It can get boring very quickly. I have a hard time seeing how these people are influencing anybody. They just seem to be spouting off.
For example, I used to follow a young Twitter by the name of Denise Taylor, whose handle is Dentay. Taylor has, let me check: 248,401 tweets. Good Christ! So I look up the Klout score: 46. Same as me.
So then, I even look over the last 30 days, and I see that she is basically stuck at the “46” level, even though the suggestion is that she just sends out Tweets the entire waking day.
Let’s compare: Denise Taylor has done almost a quarter million Tweets. If each were one mile, she would be to the moon already. I have done about 665 tweets—less than 1/3000th of hers. You would think that she would be leaving me in the dust in terms of her getting her message out. And that seems to make sense. But Klout is saying, “no no”. And this makes sense to. Because at some point, I can see that people shut off. There are only so many waking hours. At some point, all this stuff flowing at you just makes your brain, well, shut off. Inevitably, I splittered from her Tweets or whatever the jargon term is (de-followed maybe).
You can see where Klout is going to be really good, sometime in the near future. All these billions of back and forths do represent some sort of “contact” in the same way that the Nielsens allowed there to be a commercial market on TV. If you are going to use the internet to put ideas or messages out, there is probably a better crowd to talk to, and, if you know who, you have saved yourself a lot of grief.
It is a work in progress, though. Clearly, you do not do 250,000 Tweets. At some point, the marginal Tweet is probably sending your Klout score down . . .
Hoofin 