What is Klout?

Klout bills itself as the “Standard for Influence”.  The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage you influence others. The Klout Score uses data from social networks in order to measure three areas:

1. True Reach: How many people you influence
2. Amplification: How much you influence them
3. Network Impact: The influence of your network

I like the ambitiousness and big-thinking of Klout’s founders:  declare that you are a standard of influence and then actually build a company that is viewed as the standard for influence.

What happened last week?

Klout changed it scoring system to try to produce a more accurate and transparent result.  In its own words:

Today we’re releasing a new scoring model with insights to help you understand changes in your influence. This project represents the biggest step forward in accuracy, transparency and our technology in Klout’s history. Joe shared the full vision behind these changes in his post last week.

One result of the changes was a dramatic and sudden drop in the Klout scores, without acknowledge from the service of the drop.  For instance, my Klout score dropped from 53 to 43 while at the same time the site tells me may number has been holding steady.

Does Klout have value?

Klout is an ambitious project which offers rankings for people through social media.  Usually, Kout scores are close to how I would rank people based on just eye-balling their followers and connections.  To the extent that Klout diverges from the eyeball test, its value is harder to determine.  One blogger, Marshall  Kirkpatrick believes Klout’s value is definable and substantial.  You can check out his piece “Why Klout is Really and Truly Valuable” here.

What value do you think Klout has?