Klout is a company which measures your online influence and collects social media analytics, on all its user’s across their social networking tools, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or even LinkedIn to name a few. Klout embodies Users-Generated Content, with the general idea being when you share, like, dislike, create content, or even just engage you influence others. The collection of this kind of information is considered to be as good as gold to various companies around the world. Companies such as Disney, Audi and Turner give away gifts known as ‘Klout Perks’ to the most influential people on Klout; gifts such as laptops, a rented car for the weekend and gift-cards just to name a few. To judge who the most influential people online are, Klout operates on a scoring system known as the ‘Klout Score’ ranging from 1 to 100, with focus surrounding three elements: 1) Your network size i.e. number of followers you have, 2) The User-Generated Content in which you create and 3) How other people connect with that content i.e. @messages or retweets. The higher these elements are the higher your ‘Klout Score’ will be. Just to put some perspective on this scoring system Justin Bieber has a 100% ‘Klout score’ with over 11 million followers. But, please don’t get too disheartened by this fact if you were thinking of joining..., as even with a 10% ‘Klout Score’ you will still get some ‘Klout Perks!’
Klout, which started in 2008 is based in San Francisco, America and wants to be considered as the official scoring mechanism of social web, with its slogan being “The Standard for Influence”. It currently has over 3,000 applications and partners who use the ‘Klout data’ collected from users. The reason why this is considered to be a gold mine for companies is because; they can measure their own success as a social media presence. So giving away a couple of freebie ‘Klout Perks’ is not going to harm their budgets, as the companies have confidence in their products and know you have the power to influence your friends and your wider network, in addition to you bringing interest to their product, they also promote positive publicity through you. E.g. if one of the companies is Hewlett-Packard (HP) and they gave you their latest laptop 'Pavilion dm1' for free; the next time your friend would ask you for a recommendation on which laptop to buy, you would most likely say “Get the HP 'Pavilion dm1' laptop its really cool!”. This will then create a domino effect causing greater sales success for HP. I guess you could argue that you are indirectly working for the companies.
Although companies have confidence in their products, you are encouraged to share your own opinion stating whether you liked or disliked their product. This will give the companies a chance to see what they can do to change their products, or their marketing strategy.
In contrast to all the good points about Klout, there are some negative aspects to Klout when it comes to how 'Klout Scores' are judged and the biasness of results. According to Alyson Shontell (Business insider columnist) she cannot understand how President Obama has a lower influence score than Robert Scoble (a Blogger).
Furthermore, Wikipedia states some of the criticisms of Klout as “Klout score devalues authentic online communication and promotes social ranking and stratification by trying to quantify human interaction. The site has also been criticized for violating the privacy of minors, and for exploiting users for their own profit.”
What do you guys think? Is Klout the future for businesses? Do you think Klout is doing anything wrong? What impacts to do you think this will have on social networking sites? Would you join Klout? Do you have any problems with Klout recording your data for free 'Klout Perks'?
References: Want more info on Klout? Then click on the links below:
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