It was the summer of 2013. I was browsing through a few open positions, when I came across a very interesting marketing job opening. What caught my attention was the section on qualifications required. “Looking for a young ambitious rock star with a Klout score of over 50” it said. Intrigued by the new term, I did a google search, read up a few articles and figured it to be a kind of ranking system for online influence. As curiosity got the better of me, I registered and connected my twitter account. Being the cautious person that I am, I didn’t allow access to LinkedIn or Facebook. At last I had my very own Klout score, it must have been a terrible one,. for I just cannot remember it now. Needless to say I never applied for the role. That was my first run in with Klout.
As a Business to Business (B2B) marketer, LinkedIn, Twitter and Slide Share are my go to social media channels, primarily because those are the places frequented by my target audience. My brief encounter with Klout was long forgotten, until last week when I found a mention of it in an article on Influencer Marketing. I was surprised by the popularity it had gained in the last two years. I was even more surprised, although pleasantly by its usefulness in Influencer marketing. Business to Consumer (B2C) companies are flocking to it lock stock and barrel because of it’s ability to identify the hyper connected Influencers relevant to their business. This article got me interested in Klout for the second time and I decided to give it another shot.
What is a Klout Score?
A Klout score is a number between 1 and 100, that represents your influence in the online world. The higher your influence the greater your score. Influence is tricky to define and trickier still to measure. Influence is the ability to move people, to get them to act on your word or advice. In the online world it translates into followers, likes, retweets and most importantly conversions or actions.
Importance of Influencers
Just as in the physical world, influencers in the online world can move people and nudge them to act in certain ways. Celebrities have influence in the physical world, people look up to them and follow their cues. A single celebrity endorsement can set the sales charts on fire. Influence is a powerful tool in the hands of the marketer.
Finding celebrities and influencers in the physical world is easy, but in the crowded messy online world it is like finding a needle in the hay stack . Social media has empowered ordinary people. They blog, tweet , review and engage in conversations with family, friends, acquaintances and even strangers. They offer advice, help and opinions on topics they care about. They are not celebrities, they are ordinary people with many engaged followers, engaged being the operative word here.
Finding such hyper connected individuals who can amplify your marketing messages is the holy grail of modern influencer marketing. Identifying these people and convincing them to try your product or tweet about it has a huge multiplier effect. Until now the challenge was to identify these people in the very cluttered world of social media. Klout is fast becoming the answer to that challenge.
A high Klout score implies influence, it can get you noticed by brands that might pamper you with gifts, invite you to new product launches, offer you tickets to an exclusive movie screening and many such perks. Klout has even moved beyond the advertising world, into the job markets, where it has become a badge of honour for some social media roles.
Klout’s popularity and success is very recent, its initial years were plagued with problems arising from faulty algorithms that couldn’t differentiate between a human and a bot trying to game the system. Even today, marketing professionals cannot agree on the accuracy of the scores. I believe the algorithms are getting better, the days of ranking Justin Bieber ahead of Obama are a behind us. Today as I write this blog Obama leads with a score of 99 but Justin is not far behind at 92. The debate on the validity and correctness of the scores will take a few more years to settle. However, the one thing that we can all agree on is the need for a system that tracks and identifies online Influencers. Today Klout and PeerIndex are perhaps the only two reasonably accurate systems.
My Klout Score
Getting back to my Klout story. This time around armed with more knowledge and more trust, I connected my accounts; LinkedIn, Facebook and even my personal blog in the hope of seeing a spectacular number. The Klout algorithm didn’t share my optimism though. I was awarded a measly 45 out of a 100. Back in my school days such a score in academics would have warranted a gentle rebuke from my father.
The Experiment
Unlike some celebrities and some marketing folks I am not desperate to improve my score, but I do want to run an experiment of sorts to see where I end up. I hear stories of people who tweet every few minutes, retweet and repost content relentlessly in the hope of getting a higher score. There are some unscrupulous ones too who try to game the system by buying followers.
My life is delicate balance between a demanding job, supportive wife and two lovely kids who are a handful. Hence my quest to improve the score will be under these constraints..
- I will curate content. tweet and post on LinkedIn / Facebook only in the mornings before work or in the nights after my kids have gone to sleep
- I will write 1 – 2 blogs over the weekend and post it the following week
- I will focus on creating good quality original content in the hope that I get retweeted or reposted. And start conversations.
My intention is to learn and understand Klout, the new kid on the block. This personal experiment will help me do that in a hands on practical way. I plan to share the results in a month or two. Along the way I also intend to figure uses for Klout in B2B influencer marketing programs. Expect a follow up blog with my learnings from both these journeys.
If you have already undertaken this journey or plan to do so, write to me, we can exchange notes and tips. If klout is not your thing, still write to me and wish me luck.
