Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

There’s been a lot of discussion about Klout and its new algorythm lately.  People were unsurprisingly a little miffed to wake up one morning to find their Klout score had dropped 20 points overnight.  I was a little upset about it myself, I have to admit.  Here’s a selection of views from around the blogoshere which illustrates a range of views:

1. In a guest post on Neville Hobson’s blog, Tammy Kahn Fennel of MarketMeSuite says that Klout is getting a bum rap and is spitefully pilloried.  She writes, “…from where I’m standing, influence (specifically Klout) is being given a bad name not because of what it measures, but because how the company profits from it. I thought it was time to think long and hard about whether we want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”  She has a point.
2. Forrester’s Ari Osur says that services like Klout do offer value, but cautions that they are not the last word in influence.  He wrote, “Influencer marketing is complicated and requires collaboration with different roles within your organization.  Don’t rely solely on off-the-shelf scores as a short-cut for identifying and segmenting influencers.  Instead, work closely with your customer intelligence, PR, and other colleagues to discover and target influencers.”
3. KD Paine recently wrote about Klout too. She says, “Does any of this matter? No, because if someone is making a decision to hire or not hire a PR agency, or a measurement partner based on Klout scores alone, I’m not sure I’d want them as a client anyway.”
4. Bob Ledrew talks about what he calls Klout Kraziness.  In a guest post on Danny Brown’s blog, Bob wrote, “Right now, Klout represents something that we all should be concerned about. A fun little statistic is one thing; a valid and credible measure of influence is another; but a fun little statistic that’s being treated like a business tool is akin to the correlation between storks and fertility rates.  Except nobody I know of is making policy decisions based on stork density…”
5. I’ve recently seen a lot of people announce on Twitter that they’ve deleted their Klout account.  Pam Moore blogged on Social Media Today about her reasons for opting out.  She wrote, “I was retweeted by @Alyssa_Milano with 1.8 million followers. Within a couple hours of her sending the retweet I had over 950 retweets. You’d think this would possibly increase my score? Wrong, from this day forward my score continuously dropped. When I asked Klout the reason they said I must not be getting engagement from as many influential followers as I did before.”

My view?  Well I’m tending towards the ‘baby and bathwater’ view.  Klout is only one measure of influence. Yes, it’s flawed, but taken in context along with other indicators, Klout is a helpful measure.  But then again, I still use Technorati from time to time to understand blogger influence better

Related posts:

• SL’s PR top 5
• Finding value in Klout-like sites
• Measuring influence online 

Click here to start to receive my newsletter.

VISIT MY FACEBOOK PAGE