I’ve been reading a bit about Klout lately — where you are given a ‘score’ that is to be a representation of your overall social media influence. My Klout score is a whopping 18 (out of 100 and down from 40 something!), and Klout says I’m a “dabbler.” Approximately 2500 companies use Klout scores for various reasons, but when I read that “the enterprise-software giant Salesforce.com introduced a service that lets companies monitor the Klout scores of customers who tweet compliments and complaints” and “a number of major companies—airlines, big-box retailers, hospitality brands—are discussing how best to use Klout scores“, I wanted to know more. An upgraded hotel room and swifter/better service isn’t going to be coming my way with a big 18 Klout score. That’s for sure.
There are problems… Klout doesn’t yet measure self-hosted blogs — only FREE blogs through wordpress.com (like you have more ‘influence’ if you don’t pay domain & hosting fees). And, there are other problems too. Significant ones in my opinion. And bad things can happen to those who are foolish online. Anything that encourages people who can’t think past 15 seconds in the future to Tweet more for a higher score is scary.
By now we should all realize the consequences of blabbing about personal stuff online, and I’m not sure exactly why some people don’t “get it.” You read about home robberies and much worse being attributed to over-exposure on social media.
For example, a recent incident I read about comes to mind… Without utilizing common sense (obviously) someone made mean & snarky tweets about someone else & their family. It just so happened the person referenced saw the comments. Regardless of Klout or social media influence, and because of an unknown close business relationship with the spouse’s employer, a job was lost.
I started writing this post yesterday, but because I already had already posted for the day it went into my drafts directory. When I looked at Klout today to finish it up before publishing, I find that I’m no longer kloutless! Today my score is 49!