A young woman who wanted to know my Klout score contacted me yesterday. She was making a list of important people to follow on Twitter. It made me smile. When I answered that my Klout score is on klout.com (like everyone else’s) and that it hovers between roughly 55 and seventy-something, depending on my mood and the temperature of the seawater in Belgium, she got upset. Klout was important, and I was not taking her seriously.
I explained that the temperature of the seawater does have a determining effect on my Klout score. If it gets too cold, I migrate South, and stop tweeting for a while. My Klout thingy sinks accordingly like a stone with respiratory difficulties. If the temperature is ok, my mood gets better, I twitter chat with friends, spread some blog posts around, and my Klout score sours up. That did not make her happy either.
Now, how can you determine if someone is important based on a yo-yo Klout score? Try walking up to somebody and ask how important he is. Can you picture that? How do you define ‘important’? Is that a figure in two digits? Will he be more important tomorrow? Is he important because he has money? To whom is he important?
What does my Klout score tell you? Does it show you what people think about what I write? What impact my tweets/posts/musings have? Does it give a value on quality? Even on quantity? If so, in relation to what exactly? To my goals? Did the woman mean with ‘important,’ influential? Influential on what topic? To what audience?
I have nothing against Klout.com. It is a rating system amongst many. I do have something against conclusions hastily drawn from a two-digit number that gets influenced by the temperature of seawater.
If you want to determine if someone is important, relevant, influential, you’ll have to rely on more than just an automated tool. You’ll have to analyze all kinds of data, you’ll have to sift through criteria and you’ll have to put stuff in context. Content might be King, but contextual information is Queen.
There is no number that can tell you whether I am important or not. Only you can determine that.
Thank you for sharing this, it will benefit my Klout score.