A Little More on Klout and My Magical Gift

The graphic above shows my Klout score as of today. Not only did my number jump dramatically, I also shifted from being an Explorer to being a Specialist. That corresponds to a two column jump in the Klout 4×4 graph of social influence. I don't know how that is measured, though, so I can't exactly tear that apart.

This graphic shows my Klout score as of yesterday. A balmy 49, or a 6 point jump from my 42 from one week ago. You'll notice both graphics indicate a jump of 2 points in the last thirty days, though without clarification of whether that's measured from my score on day 0, or my change from my last score. So I revisited my Score Analysis:

As you can see in this chart, the lowest point of my last thirty days is still above 50 (the tooltip in the image represents the point at the lowest part of the graph, coming in at 50.39). If you look at my score from yesterday, I was below 50, and yet according to this chart not only have I not been below 50 in thirty days, yesterday my score was 53.08. And to push this point again, precisely one week ago, my score was 42, as I proudly displayed in this image:

I have jumped 11 points in seven days. I have done it magically since it's not even tracked on the chart. I have apparently developed magical powers over time, space, and social influence.

This demonstrates precisely why I am suspect of any social influence scoring model that is used by any organization to deliver any level of different service or benefit.

Related

• Klout. Nail. Coffin. Who cares?, November 25, 2010 by Martijn Linssen.
• Why your Klout score is meaningless, June 1, 2011 by Alex Braunstein.
• Why your Klout score is meaningless, June 6, 2011 by Andrew Gelman.
• Does Your Klout Score Mean Anything?, June 21, 2011 by me.
• Social Scoring As the New SEO, June 27, 2011 by me.

Social Scoring As the New SEO

Lately I have noticed that Klout is getting a lot of traction in discussions about social media. It may be that there is just more coverage, or the name has started to penetrate to more users, or the idea of social scoring is becoming more interesting to marketers. It's also possible that I am keyed into it because I don't really believe the scoring model is truly accurate. On this last point, you can see my blog post from Tuesday, Does Your Klout Score Mean Anything? to understand my skepticism.

My skepticism was not assuaged when I noticed that my Klout dashboard (yes, I finally signed up) claims that my score has gone up 2 points in the last 30 days, justified by the handy plot Klout provides of that same period, even though I know 30 days ago my score was 7 points lower (I took a screen capture). It appears that after I added my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles to Klout, it retroactively adjusted my score. Which sounds very much like revisionist history and further erodes my confidence in Klout's platform.

Despite this clearly math-free scoring model, Mashable opened an article (with the technically accurate, but still unfortunate page address of klout-gate) last week with this unsurprising statement:

Your Facebook influence, as measured by Klout, will determine your access level to select brand pages on Facebook — and it could net you perks.

This weekend The New York Times published Got Twitter? You've Been Scored where it examines the scoring trend and what it means for consumers.

Companies with names like Klout, PeerIndex and Twitter Grader are in the process of scoring millions, eventually billions, of people on their level of influence [...] [T]hey are beginning to measure influence in more nuanced ways, and posting their judgments — in the form of a score — online.

The New York Times article takes it a bit further and outlines specific examples in the real world where a Klout score can have an impact on the perks, benefits and discounts a consumer might receive from brands:

More than 2,500 companies are using Klout's data. Last week, Klout revealed that Audi would begin offering promotions to Facebook users based on their Klout score. Last year, Virgin America used the company to offer highly rated influencers in Toronto free round-trip flights to San Francisco or Los Angeles. In Las Vegas, the Palms Hotel and Casino is using Klout data to give highly rated guests an upgrade or tickets to Cirque du Soleil.

While I believe this has significant parallels to SEO in its early days, the key difference is that this impacts individual consumers, not organizations trying to promote their web sites. The direct correlation with a tangible cost (whether by discount or freebie) also appeals to an individual more readily, since you don't need an accountant and a balance sheet to figure out the benefits.

Since Klout score is partly driven by your Twitter follower count, Twitter replies, Twitter retweets, Facebook friends and comments, and now LinkedIn activity (with the promise of Foursquare in the future), we can expect to see the recent scourge of Twitter follower guarantees (among others) make a comeback. Within a company, you might have an individual tasked with wading through these detrimental sales pitches, but the average consumer who wants a discount at a hotel might not understand that a promise of thousands of Twitter followers may ultimately guarantee a significant reduction in one's "score."

If you read this blog, then you are either technically capable, fancy yourself a social media expert, or think you know something about SEO (or you're my mom — Hi Mom!). Now would be a good time to take those skills and try to help your friends and family. Look for the same trends we saw in SEO spam ("Submit your site to hundreds of search engines!") and social media spam ("Twitter followers guaranteed!"), only with promises tweaked to the new target market (consumers).

Just as some companies wear their Google Page Rank with pride (or shame), we may start to see individual people do the same with the per-person analogue — their social influence score.

Does Your Klout Score Mean Anything?

I tend to be wary of anything that reviews what I write and offers to spit out a score of how valuable it is. Just as I have mistrust for web sites that claim to be "Bobby Validated" for accessibility (I'm dating myself a bit there), or personality tests that tell plot me on a chart based on answers to a small set of questions (which has been co-opted by eHarmony), or guaranteed Google/SEO ranking offers (insert any spam you have gotten through your web site's contact form).

I've commented before on how, in social media, the number of Facebook likes you have or Twitter followers (Lots of Twitter Followers Guarantees... Nothing) you've amassed really doesn't say a lot about your ability (having the word "guru" in your Twitter bio is an automatic disqualification).

Of course it should come as no surprise to those who know me that I don't consider a service like Klout ("The Standard for Influence") to really do a good job of quantifying how good or bad, influential or not I am at social media. I have no illusions about my influence #8212; I have less than 400 followers on Twitter, I don't use Facebook for anything other than crazy talk, I hardly check my LinkedIn account, and I'm not exactly breaking new ground on this blog. My Klout score should be low. But I'd also like to know how it's generated and if it translates to anything tangible.

Cue an interesting article earlier this month, Why your Klout score is meaningless. The author claims to have a PhD in statistics, which admittedly makes no sense to me (I get natural math, not the invented math of economics or statistics), but puts him well above me to evaluate whether or not Klout has any merit. His conclusions:

It often does not correctly order individuals in terms of how influential they are, is easy to game higher simply by adding a Facebook account, and does not respect some very basic monotonicity rules. Put simply, it acts like a derived measurement.

Earlier in the post he offers research has repeatedly shown derived measurements to be inconsistent and not trustworthy individually.

The Director of Ranking (interesting title) from Klout responded in the comments provides some context for how Klout works, but doesn't explicitly challenge the core assertions of the article.

A professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University weighs in on the previous discussion with his own blog post, also titled Why your Klout score is meaningless. He doesn't dispute points from the original post, instead taking issue with the application of the term "derived measurement." He does have this to say about Klout:

The problem with the Klout score is not that it's subjective but that it's cloudy: we don't know what it is. To understand a cloudy measurement, one has to poke it from the outside. [...] Which makes sense given that Klout itself seems like a tool for ... selling itself! Sort of [like] other notorious rating schemes such as the Places Rated Almanac and the U.S. News college ratings.

For a bit more vitriol wrapped around a play-by-play between Klout and others, you can catch up in this post from November, Klout. Nail. Coffin. Who cares?.

Since these posts were written Klout has moved to add two more features that will likely further affect a person's Klout score, and further confuse (or confound) those trying to measure it. Klout introduced a "+K" button, which is a take-off of Google's own derivative "+1" button, allowing people to indicate that a particular person has influenced them on a topic (Introducing +K: Your Influence is Topical). In addition, Klout will now allow you to associate your LinkedIn account and factor that into your overall Klout score (Measure Your LinkedIn Klout)

If you aren't concerned about how Klout and other arbitrary measurements (such as your number of Twitter followers) can affect you and others, consider these examples (from Get ready. Social scoring will change your life.):

• The Palms Hotel in Las Vegas is providing perks to guests based on their Klout score (an assessment of social media influence)**
• By the end of the year, Twitter said their new analytics will provide influence scores for every user.
• People are now curating lists of the most influential bloggers by Klout score.
• Virgin Airlines offered free flights on a new route to people with high influence scores on Twitter.
• Hoot Suite allows you to sort Twitter results by the influence of the people in the list.

There are already people and organizations who perform triage (at best) or just selectively respond to others based on their Klout score. Apply the same motivation for spammers to game the Google algorithm to Klout scores, and you may face the risk that your former ability to reach out to a brand using social media is hampered because you haven't paid for enough tweets in mainland China to artificially boost your ranking (or that those getting the responses did).

I think my next career might lie in goldfarming followers, likes and re-tweets.