The Measured Life: What’s Your Klout Score? (Check again probably less than yesterday if you use Twitter)
Haven’t been “+K”’d lately? Klout.com, a site which ranks and scores social media users based on their online influence, is making some changes to its algorithm to more accurately reflect users’ online sway.
The three-year-old company is unveiling an updated system this week that makes more refined scores across the 2.5 billion connections, status updates and Tweets it crunches from 13 social networks every day.
Klout’s CEO Joe Fernandez says the update will make it easier for social media users to understand specifically why their Klout scores have changed.
The new Klout dashboard will highlight, for example, when highly influential people are liking and acting upon a particular user’s status updates and social content, and how that directly affects a score.
Klout boasts relationships with over 3500 companies, including Audi, Disney, Nike and Starbucks who use the Klout score to reach influencers to whom they can target their advertising.
To social media users, the “advertising” comes as a perk or a freebie, and is often offered exclusively to high Klout influencers in particular topics relevant to a specific advertiser.
“A majority of users will see their Scores stay the same or go up but some users will see a drop,” Fernandez says in a blog post announcing the changes.
“Some of our scores here at the Klout HQ will drop (including mine) — our goal is accuracy above all else,” he says.
I recently spent some time with Fernandez, a Klout client and some perk recipients, including a guy who got a free Chevy Volt for a weekend, just for having a high Klout score. Watch the video to see what he did with it.
