To Klout or not!!!

"Klout just did a Netflix"

Read one of the tweet on my timeline & that prompted me to go & look back at my score. Aghast!!! Mine had dropped drastically.

One of the most buzz all over the social network in last couple of week has been about Klout scores either dropping significantly or in some case improving. The buzz was good enough to have an hashtag #OccupyKlout at one point of time. That picked up my interest & have a closer look at the issue. And I found the Klout announcement saying it had changed its algorithms measuring your social engagement & influence. Which truly meant that it was trying to have a close look at the traversal of your content across the network.

According to this post at Klout site, the changes shall cover:

True Reach - How many people you influence

Amplification - How much you influence them

Network Impact - The influence of your network

While they promised accuracy, transparency and scores either remaining same or going up, but from the reactions that I see, the number of people disgruntled with the lower scores is far more than the ones having an improved score. But then the real question was:

Should I really care about my Klout Score??

Yes, I have to say a big emphatic yes to it. Regardless of how you view it, the score helps you to understand if the group of people you have been interacting or have as your followers are truly influential. Having a network of influence does matter as at end of the day you are marketing your brand or services. The score also gives you an enormous recognition + reputation as "influencer" or otherwise. 

But then, what went wrong??

As I gather the dust around it, I read that Klout applied the algorithms on historic data too, and the re-calculated the old scores too. This was probably the biggest mistake it did. Having wiped out the previous scores certainly hit users in the wrong place.

The other place where it wronged seems to be the lack of transparency. It is highly impossible to tell why you score is falling down as the company has kept its algorithms secret.

And neither did the following tweet help:

While the jury on whether the change in algorithm effects the clout of Klout is still not ascertained, but the fact remains that there are now fewer individuals who really trust Klout and it might have to lost the ground a bit to PeerIndex and Kred.

Thanks for reading through. Appreciate your comments.

 

Check out my about.me profile!